Master of Orion 3

Look, you've heard it sucks. And sure, there are a lot of issues, but for some reason, perhaps because I like the way the carrier battles look, I have every five years or so returned to this game since it came out when I was eighteen. Maybe nostolgia has something to do with it, except I actually bounced the first time I played it (because of the things that you have heard about that make the game suck), and only enjoyed playing it when I tried it again a few years later. Look up the standard mods, and try it. It's weird, but in an interesting way.

https://youtu.be/8uq11InaDFk Taking the series in a new direction that ultimately became an evolutionary dead end the push to reward higher more abstracted play lost the strengths of the earlier titles.

Master of Orion 3 is a good game for killing time. I hope you don't plan on winning it though, as I've never managed that trick. I've played games where I'm the only race left standing other than the New Orions...and still haven't somehow reached a victory condition, so either my version of the game is glitchy or something. Bottom line? The victory conditions aren't clear. How you achieve any of them isn't clear. It's bluntly just a complicated mess. I still play it from time to time, but it's just a time killer. I play, then go back and delete the game when I'm done. There's just no point in playing it out.

The user interface for this game is so bad that it gave me lifelong shoulder pain. I'm not even kidding.

Amazing and underrated game. It takes a lot of dedication. You won't find anything like it. It became one of my all time favorite games, and I have played many. You can still find good patches and mods for it (before the really old website eventually finally shuts down). Be warned however; some were never fully cleansed of bugs. The vanilla game contains many bugs, and it is recommended to use at least the Vanilla version of the unofficial patch. The Tropical and Strawberry versions of the UOP are cool but they have various game-breaking bugs in them. You can experiment with adding/removing mods from Strawberry/Tropical (they are large mod collections) if you wish.

Hi. Old and difficult game not for everyone.