Quarter To Three Slams MOO3

i was lurking on moo3.com and came across the review. they are all saying that the reviewer just doesn't like complicated games and didn't know what he was doing.

but they ignore a key fact: THE REVIEWER WAS ABLE TO WIN MULTIPLE TIMES.

if you can win a game by just cranking on the turn button long enough there's something seriously wrong with the "strategy game".

I have to ask what dificulty level he was playing on. In all of the previous MOO titles, it was almost impossible to lose at the easiest setting.

Well, just read the review and I must say, very interesting indeed.

To me, it sounds a bit like he knows what he is talking about in regard to game play. It seems he must have played the other MOO Games and so can judge fairly competently on this title.

If he is right though, it looks like MOO3 will be a great seller but people will get tired of it quickly. If he is right that is!

I only hope he was not playing the latest build of the game and it is better then he is writing about.

I still plan on getting it but wonder if I should get it where I can bring it back if it is no good, or buy it where I have a rain check already for $39.99?

Toothy

I am STILL going to wait until I hear what you guys say about the game. I am never happy just "pressing the turn button" like the reviewer says. I have to have control, or the game is no fun.

What an unhappy reviewer! Maybe its because he hasn't done a review since last July. Although his points about a lack of information about how features work (morale) can make a strategy game (morale) much less enjoyable (morale) to play. Maybe the AI was building those transports to de-populate planets and so make everybody happy! :notsure:

Tom Chick is a very well known reviewer. I have found his reviews to be very fair and honest.

And I say that even though the lowest rated review of Entrepreneur was done by him. But he was fair and his critiques justified.

Does that mean MOO3 is bad? Not necessarily. It depends on the player. But the things he does point out are almost certainly true. But whether that is a problem to a given gamer depends on the gamer.

For me, for instance, in Warcraft III, the fact that the goodies that the creeps had wasn't random killed multiplayer for me. It meant that the player who has memorized a given map the best will be at a real advantage. But given Warcraft III's success, I'm in the minority in that (and I stil think WC3 is a good game overall, I just won't play it multiplayer).

The fans of MOO3 should really be thankful that at least anyone reviewing MOO3 will be under pressure to seriously play it fully as Tom Chick clearly did.

Indie games tend to get drive-by reviews. I remember one reviewer of The Corporate Machine gave it a pretty luke warm review and by reading the review it was clear he hadn't played it for more than a few minutes (he hadn't even built marketing units, nor did he mention that marketing in the game even exists and is a major part. He summed up the game as being about moving sales guys around and playing direct action cards until you lose -- and it was pretty obvious why he lost ).

I was saying to a friend of mine, you can almost see a drive-by review of GalCiv "GalCiv with its dated graphics and lack of multiplayer represent a by-gone era of strategy games, a game that is trapped in its 1994 OS/2 past. Let it stay there."

Whereas a fair review would reocgnize that GalCiv has 1024x768x32bit graphics and that we chose not to use a 3D engine because of market research -- GalCiv would ahve required a P2-1Ghz machine minimum if it had a 3D engine. And recognize that by not having multiplayer the single player experience is much richer. Plus a fair reviewer would know that GalCiv is the FIRST Windows strategy game we've made that isn't multiplayer so we clearly had a reason to make it single player only.

What will GalCiv's reviews be like? I don't know. At the risk of being politically incorrect I think they'll be in two categories. Let me be frank, GalCiv is the best game I've ever worked on. Not only was it not rushed out the door but it got an additional month of work (thanks to MOO3) which allowed us to polish things more. Not that it'll be perfect mind you, but we're very pleased with how things have gone. The beta testers and their ideas have made the game a much richer, more full experience.

And so you'll have reviewers who will play the game and judge it purely on its merits (for good or ill). And then you'll have reviewers who will see it's from an relatively unknown developer, see that it doesn't ahve a 3D engine and no multiplayer and give it a luke warm review.

From my readings of his work in the past, Chick is a good and fair reviewer. That said, he also trashed Deus Ex, which is one of my favorite games ever, and was also a pretty popular game. So he can be wrong

But I have to say, the problems he sees are exactly the things I was expecting to see in reviews if the game was "screwed up" as I was suspecting. Yet you have to balance his one review against a number of other pretty positive reviews already out there. And in the end listen to what others say and decide yourself.

Grifman

Really the more I hear about it the less I am looking foreward to MOO3. And that includes much info that has been given on the offical web site as well. I really loved MOO1 and MOO2 and was hoping for a game that was similer in tpye and Moo3 so far doesn't seem like that game. That said I still plan to buy it but I get the feeling that I will be playing Gal Civ long after MOO3 gets retired to the reject box.

I think Frogboy has it right. One's previous experiences and biases are hard to ignore. If Mr. Chick was looking for an extension of MOO2, then MOO3 was totally unexpected. I prefer SP games myself because of time constraints but there many who thrive on the MP experience. It appears that playing MOO3 "right out of the box" without reading the manual, readme files etc., will lead to a negative initial response.
Bob

"It appears that playing MOO3 "right out of the box" without reading the manual, readme files etc., will lead to a negative initial response"

To me, it appears that playing MOO3 after reading the manual, readme files, etc, will also lead to a negative response (unless you are a die-hard MOO fan) because those documents are outdated, incorrect, and vague. I don't think that any review I've seen so far denied this. Most of them didn't care though. I decided not to by MOO3 after I read the Orion Sector review -- they still rated the game 9.6/10.

And I hope that the GalCiv documentation (at least the in-game "GalCivilopedia") will be accurate, comprehensive, and perfectly up-to-date.

I have been expecting MOO3 for 1 year and half...I have been playing MOO1 and MOO2 for years (still do) and these are the best space games i've played so far. I did have some doubts about MOO3 since the first cut list was announced and it's clear that i am not looking forward to it as i did back then. I still plan to buy it when it comes out, but i am not sure if i like it more than MOO2...Anyway, now more than ever, it's Galactic Civilizations that i am looking forward to. Better graphics, more depth in the correct place (story, not only economic figures) and a greater chance that i will be playing the game (not the computer). I will test MOO3 and tell you what i think.

The QTT review has stirred up quite a fuss on the IGMoo and OSMoo boards (as well as in the official chat room, and any other place MoO people gather), and the response is that of religious zealots, lashing out (violently at times) against anything that dares besmirch the reputation of the game. People attack the review saying he clearly didn't play the game or that he's smoking crack for daring to say anything negative about the coming of the christ in computer game form. While I find his review to be a bit biased, and just downright nasty in a few places, I think he has some VERY valid points.

What seperates him out from the other reviews (which have been ridiculously biased in their own right) is that he does not find the extremely steep learning curve to be acceptable. The other reviews say that once you get through the 15 or so hours it takes to figure out most of the game (read, not ALL of the game) it's simply amazing. Now, QTT does not think this is at all reasonable, even for a strategy game of such depth. They're expecting slightly more readable visuals (icons), and a better tutorial and help resource. Now, I'm partially inclined to agree with him about this, that if a game is that hard to learn, something just isn't quite right. However, that depends ENTIRELY on the playstyles of each gamer.

Will I still buy the game? Hells yeah, have had it on preorder for months. Do I expect this game to play more like a spreadsheet for a while than a typical game? Yeah. I've been looking for a galactic conquest game of truely epic proportions, one that is just so mind-bogglingly huge that it takes weeks to even explore all of one randomized galaxy, and the only way to offer a game that huge, I expect to be bogged down in numbers and data that doesn't have any readily apparant purpose.

I looked thru the review and though people seem to mention that Chick "won multiple times" or "won twice" by doing nothing, I can't find anywhere in the review where he specifically says that.
Perhaps MOO3 is moving too much towards a general target audience. Looks like GalCiv is trying to stick much closer to the standard set by Sid.

It says on the front page under the disclamer about how 60 minutes isn't how long he played.