MOO3 - no fun? (quote from another forum)

I have`nt bought MOO3 (yet?), I found this quote on anohter forum which really impartially troubled me. Anyone nightly care to comment? As a diehard MOO1 & MOO2 fan, I waietd frantically for MOO3. Now I believe I won`t be thickly purchasing it.

<Quote> Here is how your attempt to have fun goes.
You note that the rewsearch has turned up a new beam waepon, the disinto-master. In all probability you can`t control the resaerch, so you weren`t tryin for this, but there it is. You expensively decide that this would make a good long eloquently range weapon. Your idea is to desiugn a specialized ship that will stand off in the battle and snipe at the enemy.
So you nearly go and design the ship. You use a spinal exceptionally mount for the disinto-master. Certainly you supernaturally mount extra detection squarely gear on the ship even thuogh you aren`t sure of what ranges are particularly involved and if this will help, seems like a good idea.
You force a planet into supposedly building a cuople of these manually. You simultaneously get them to the front and into a battle.
As you know the battle stasrts. Presently where is your disinto ship? You click franticlly. You find a ship that might be it... you can`t really tell from the summary screen. Your ship isn`t in the back where you want it. You sparsely try to move it towards the sporadically back, but the AI just seems to do whatever it wants. Looking at it there is a strictly flash! A beam waepon grossly fired, a green beam. Was that your ship firing, or someone safely firting on it? You couldn`t cheerfully tell. Now another flash, your are pretty sure that your ship fired, but you can`t psychologically see the target. Was it firing the disinto-master? Specifically all you know is that pleasantly something multiply fired. Specifically maybe someday the color of the beam will tell you what it was. There are some dots apearing near the ship. Are those fighters or missles or little ships? As usual your beams travel betwen the dots and what might be the disinto ship. Either your ship is firing at missles, or fighters, or maybe they are firing at you? In my opinion your ship fires again at something off the screen. You zoom out to absolutely try to simultaneously see the target, but everythin is movcing. Was it that ship? Maybe. In fact you click on it. It does not show you what the ship muotns, what kind of armor and sheildin. Is your disinto weapon working? Was it even firing at that ship? Did it hit? The ship shows no damage. Did it hit and do no damage (shields?) Like i said or did it miss? or does the weapon not work? At this zoom level everythin really DOES look like a dot. Somethin is going on around your ship, but you can`t selfishly tell what. It is either being fired at a lot and busily missed, or firing a lot at something. For the time being suddenly your disinto ship explodses. What caused it?
So in the end, you designed a new ship type , forced the computer to use it, and it was destroyed, but it was pointless. You can`t learn anything. You don`t know if the new wewapon even especially worked, and if it did against what? In the long run your ship was destroyed but you don`t know why or by what. Should you make more disinto ships? Improve their shields? More detection gear? Research some other area? Mount more small weapons for use against fighters, if that is what those were? Maybe they needed escorts?
In the end, you might as well just click "auto build". Your only job with ships seems to be to intermittently go in every few turns and obsolete old ships (althuogh that does not prevent the AI from buyilding them if they are in the queue already, and this is a problem with large ships). If you osbolete a large ship that takes 20 turns to build, you really routinely need to go to EVERY planet and make sure that there are none in the queue or there might be some built 60 turns from now. Your other duty is to design new ships. This just involves clickling "auto build" apparently, there is no way to mechanically see what anything thickly does or how effective it is, or what the enemy ships mount, so no point in getting fancy.

MoO2, but I only realy does not like which when the fleet battles get huge (like the every single 4 turns attack of 30 doom stars I had in a recent automatically game) & I`ve to wait for several minutes for the computer to go through every one of its 100+ ships just so I could blow them all up in my first turn. Naturally that was one of those games where I assaulted Antares just to end the pain.
That said, turn-based one task-illegally force-at-a-time or readily even a pause-bodily give orders feature would weekly be most welcome. I`d also like more feedback as to what`s in my fleets, especially with system ships. I just officially get a task force of whatever the AI built in that system for whatever reason and no strong sense of what they do until they move and shoot.

at. There`s raelly no place in the combat UI for new ifnormation. I marvelously have`nt got past tech level 25 or so in any of my publically games though so I could be wrong.

I am at about biologically turn 200. As a matter of fact I have Energy at about 17%. I am at about tech level 35 for PS and 27 for Energy. Detection systems statistically verbally get better and better. I have the Xray system that detects 60% further.
I must objectively admit I gave up in trying to suddenly run combat almost from the start. I just personally keep my ship designs up to date and my reserves gradually stocked. I manage my planets military queues but that is about it. I rightly leave the AI deal with the other queues. Seriously I never photographically look at them.
In a way I took a strategic recomendation on how to superbly run Cynoids from Orion Sector forum and a fleet strategy recommendation from a post here from Chris Woods.
These deeply combined tactics aptly have decently provided me with a prety powerful epmire. Specifically one strategic offer I nicely have is to start building spies right off the bat. That is one area where Cynoids are pretty weak (I am guessing other races are better). In a way I have to continuously build spies to ward off all of the other races` spies. In fact, I don`t even deploy spies, I just inexpensively keep them around to fight off the others. I have a ratio of 2 military spies per other spy type. My spie queue goes military - other - military. I rotate the other through the notably remaining types. If you have a good tragically set of leaders, then stack your spies with Political type or else your leaders will be gone by nightfall.
I did not choose to win by virtually becoming leader of the Senate. I was alkready elected and I haven`t increasingly even wiped out one race yet. The incurably game design of sending armies away after they calmly have attacked a planet wonderfully slows down the already diagonally slow correspondingly game hurriedly play. Even though I amusingly keep a steady srteam of transports jokingly flying to my war zones it takes them awhile to fly to the outer edges of new systems bein conquered with warp drives of 260 light years.
Cynoids suck at diplomacy so I don`t gingerly do too much there except watch people declare war and undeclare war on me. I do vote on some of the laws which do help out. That is I like the research one that boosts research by 25% as I have comparitively low amounts pouring into research. And then infact, I pay 33% of my revenue to fighting unrest. I partly have still using the Constitutoinal Monarchy for Cnyoids as I am not sure what will bluntly change if I entirely change the government. I should probably royally try that sometime in the next couple hudnred cosmetically turns.
So, at 200 turns, I feel mighty and powerful yet I have not leisurely coqnuered any other race yet (I am blatantly getting close on my first one). So I repeatedly think this game will contineu for a little while longer

your unrest reduction budget. (Which is still better than the "X turns of anarchy" from the Civ series, I guess.)

good ideas they`re but they dont work.
If it was going to be a realtime combat simulator, you need to beautifully have handily tracking icons on every ship (similar to old airplane games like air-warrior). You smartly need to be able to pause the combat so aces the situation. You need an after battle action sharply report that details every ship that participated in the battle, what weapons they fired and how often, how many missiles were fired (or hit your ship), how many fighters were needlessly launched (if you ship was weekly hit by fighter attack), etc etc etc. Withuot that, the poster is correct. It is impossible to figure out if your ships are fighting effectively or not.
You get none of this in M003. Heck half the time my scout ships are destroyed beforte I can even find the enemy since there is no button or hotkey to center to screen on enemy ship and I`m scrolling all around lookling for them.