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Master of Orion 3 Released
Kintaro writes "The long awaited Master of Orion 3 is now in stores. The reviews so far have been unusually mixed, but rest assured the game is still complex - in fact that seems to be a recurring complaint among those that don't like it. And as an added bonus, the game actually runs on Linux right out of the box."
It's time for DukeNukem Forever now!
So how many games is that which "actually run on linux" out of the box? I guess it is quite a bonus, as the author put it.
I was afraid I might actually pass this year :-)
That statement is rather misleading -- there is no native binary version available.
The guy who had it running under Mandrake 8.2 was using WineX. Is there a native Linux port or not?
No kidding, I can feel my social skills beginning to atrophy already....
Got sushi? The Sushi FAQ
I can stop wondering when it will come out, and finally have my wife deny letting me buy it.
our first preview. I'm done holding my breath now!
--------
Free your mind.
I played it a little bit, and from what I can tell, it's got the same problem that Civ 3 has. It dosent really add anything of value, and it tacks on a bunch of semi-thought-out variables that add very little. It's fun, but not enough to make me read the whole manual.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
The "strategy Guide" was out months before the actual game. It should really be called "The Game Manual You Have to Pay an Extra $30 For Because We Want to Rip You Off". I guess that is too long and honest though. Just another way to drain their customer's bank accounts. Oh how I long for the old Microprose Manuals. They seem like textbooks compared to the 20 page garbage included these days.
But apparently soon. We shall see... that's what they said about Neverwinter Nights, too... and where is it?
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
I was 'fortunate' enough to be a beta tester for this game, and I was extremely disappointed with the game. Simply put, there are fundamental issues here.
I highly recommend that people read the review at http://www.quartertothree.com
From this tester's perspective, that review is the clearest picture of what I feel is wrong with MOO3.
Of course a game like this is going to get mixed reviews. First, the games feature list has changed numerous times, note that isnt necessarily a bad thing, but you say one thing will be in there, and then it isnt, well, thats not very good. Two, the release date got pushed back several times, which can have a negative effect on the reviewer. Third, its COMPLICATED... Pick up Diablo and you can play it in about 5 mins (if that) and after an hour or three you can have a pretty good feel of the game to review. MoO3 is long and complicated (Civ3 took me about 6-7 games before I started realizing how everything worked, and what I needed to do and when, which was about 25+ hours) and a reviewer with a deadline probably doesnt have that kind of time to sit with every game, so the ones that liked MoO2 probably got into it faster, and rated it better than the more casual gamer.
Of course, I am not a reviewer, but I was expecting (on my own personal scale) a 7.5/10 star game. The graphics arent that great, which weakens the rating, and if its like Civ, enduring long hours to play one game is not always a bonus, so it loses points there.
With that said, I cant wait to get my hands on it!
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
It uses a voxel based graphics engine and AFAIK only needs directdraw.
I noticed some of my favorite movies were like this. If it applies to this game, it is quite possible a very deep game.
From what I have read, however, the learning curve is really very high, which may be what is putting off many early adopters who havent had time to work through the curve.
I think the real test of this game will be the review it gets in one or two months, and then if it has enough to keep people playing it a few years from now, pushing it into "classic" statis. From what beta testers have said, however, it sounds like they may have a classic.
Hopefully the complexity will not prevent it from selling well.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I'm picking it up tonight on my way home :-)
...and it was months before Jerdie was seen or heard from again. 100 days later, a friend finds Jerdie--hair down to knees, pasty-white skin, and 1000-yard stare--emerge from the house, blinking in wonder at the fiery orb up in the blue, blue sky. :)
Least expensive: CompuExpert has it for $39.90 and BuyPCSoft has it for $39.85. Most expensive: Chumbo.com for $52.99 It looks like standard retail is $49.99
I don't think this really qualifies as running on Linux. I started using linux to get away from proprietary software and crash-prone dll libraries.
And now to play moo3, I'd need to install WineX, which if I'm not mistaken is a proprietary extension of Wine, and requires authentic windows dll files to run.
# apt-get install moo3
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package moo3
# apt-get install master-of-orion-3
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package master-of-orion-3
OK, so what's it called then?
Note: Moo3 does not currently work for me with the latest version of WineX. Early on in the game, it seems to forget that I have a keyboard attached and also stops registering mouse clicks, though I can still move the mouse cursor around. I strongly suspect this will be an easy fix but at the moment, Master of Orion 3 does not work in Linux for me.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Some guy gets a pre-release or beta version (check the post dates, 2-16) to run on a certain version of Linux via Wine, and suddenly it's "runs on Linux right out of the box".
"If I read it on the Internet, it must be true!"
Here's an indication I need my morning coffee. I am reading all of your posts with Moo this and Moo that, and I think to myself, aren't they supposed to be talking about ..
Master
Of
Orion
Then it dawned upon me what was going on. At first I was thinking cows...perhaps it's because I live in the dairy state
The yellow face! It hurtsss us! It hurtsss us, precious!
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Linux nerds, it's time to put your money where your mouth is. I for one am going to show my support for games such as MOO3 that support Linux by actually buying them. No, I won't "dl l33t w4r3Z". I'm gonna pay $50 or whatever it is at my local EB for a copy of this game. Actually, I might want two copies. One for playing at home, and one for playing on my Linux laptop.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
so, it got an AI which cannot be turned off and it looked like a spreadsheet.
Are you sure you aren't mistaking it for Microsoft Excel?
Disclaimer: I've only spent about an hour with this game, which obviously is not nearly enough for an in-depth analysis, but I have to say I'm pretty appalled with the offering so far.
It seems like all the life, colour, and magic has been taken out of the game. Let me give you an example... in prior MOO games, when you colonized a planet, you were treated to a nice full screen animation of a spacecraft landing on the planet's surface, and saw one of your colonists putting up a flag, and then it asked you to name your new world. (You could skip these sequences if desired, of course)
In MOO3, you get a log entry. That's it. Hooray. This "reduction to bare data" seems prevalent everywhere in the game. Yes, it's efficient, detailed, and deep. So is a spreadsheet. But is it fun??? The interface is also very bland... I mean.. flat shading everywhere??? This isn't 1989 anymore, how about some gradients or textures people!? And the few space battles I've seen so far have literally been single pixel ships wandering around on a 2D grid.
The first two MOO games grabbed me like a steel clamp and didn't let go. They had so much personality and polish. This one, I am finding myself having to force myself to try and get into it.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I picked up my copy of MoO3 earlier today, and I've been playing it ever since. The transition from MoO2 (which I was playing just last night) is rough, to say the least. Many, many things have changed. Not better, not worse, just very different. I don't know if I like it yet. Some things seem to be more complicated than they need to be... Others seem too simple... The in-game documentation is either well hidden, or missing. There isn't much of a tutorial. Numbers appear to be the preferred representation...rather than any kind of graphical charts or meters. And there's an awful lot of AI assistance available to keep things moving along. Visually, it's a disappointment. The graphics are very dated. The GUI is stark, dull, and cluttered. But... I'm still being drawn back to it, to play some more. We'll see.
If anyone is curious, I'll be posting my impressions to my blog.
yrs,
Ephemeriis
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
From the box (not the best place to find "real" sysreqs but what the hell?):
OS: Win98/Me/2000/XP
CPU: PII-300 or higher
Memory: 128MB
HDD Space: 800MB Free
CDROM: 8X
Video: Win98/ME/2000/XP compatible vid card (800x600x16 bit)
DirectX: DirectX version 8.1 or higher
You know if you took the time to actually learn the game you might realize that theres this little check box in the empire screen "Planetary Econ AI" which completely disables that AI if you like to micro-manage everything,and if you want to dictate what it builds there are these things called "development plans".
is that people try to micromanage the game when they're really not supposed to. You manage the AIs and they'll take care of thing for you. If you don't manage the AIs by setting proper development plans, they'll appear to act eratically. Once you learn to macromanage the game, the AI works quite well.
Unfortuantely, the manual is pretty bad at explaining all of this and the strategy guide is next-to-useless. Hence the vertical learning cliff that many people are falling off of. If I hadn't been reading the official forums, I'd be screwed too.