i remember MOO3 being broken... is it fixed?

[BoydofZINJ]

It had its moments. Is the game broken and the AI useless are PDs useless still? Or has the AI been tweaked and has it been fixed?

[Hardin]

Go here for Moo3 related mods. http://www.moo3.at/ The unofficial patches like strawberry and tropical add a lot to the game and fix the bugged point defense ships. It also fixes the ai troop transport disbanding bug. So the ai can actually invade your planets now.

You'll want the Unofficial patch. I use the "tropical" version {LINK REMOVED}http://www.mediafire.com/download/tmmdmyzykbm/UOP_Tropical_V1.3.10.zip

A lot of people remember moo3 for being very buggy at release, but they never stayed long enough to see what it is now.

[Dray Prescot]

I only ever had the original CDs for the game. Unfortunately, I lost one of them and the hard drive MOO 3 was on got wiped clean in an upgrade to a newer version of Windows over 10 years ago. I played quite a bit of MOO 3. In fact I got far enough in to have gotten 4 or 5 of the 5 special items that needed to be found and/or researched and had some rather large empires with fairly high tech. I even still have the trade paperback for the strategy guide for MOO 3, which was not the same as the release version of the game in several areas.

I remember several things:

1) some Techs that I got by trade did not work, but if I stole them by espionage, they did work.
2) I was not sure that the Space Port income was working properly.
3) It was hard to control what actually got built on your planets. Particularly, once you had a lot of the infrastrcture techs, your new colonies would spend so much time buildong infrastructure that is was hard to get actual production buildings built.
4) Most of the guides to the colony governors for controlling production would not be chooseable for any one colony.
5) When you had a space battle you usually did not know where any planet with their defending structures were relative to your fleet at the start of the battle, and it was sometimes hard to even know where enemy ships were so that you could move towards them in order to fight a battle.

I have only been playing MOO 4 for a short while, but it looks closer to MOO 2 than MOO3 in some ways.

I think that I still have the original MOO 1 and MOO 2 disks somehere, which I played a lot of back in the 1990s.

Is the MOO3 that we got today, the original release version, or does it have any fixes or revisions?

By the way MOO 1 was inspired by an old 1980s computer game called Reach for the Stars, which which inspired by the Avalon Hill boardgame Stellar Conquest which was derived from the Metagaming boardgame (plastic map) Stellar Conquest dating back to about 1975 which I had and played 40 years ago. I graduated from college in 1975.

[Siddha]

Properly patched the game is now quite good
Get the Bhruic patches
http://www.lcs-hamburg.de/Bhruic/bhruic.dyndns.org/patcher/index.php.htm

[Anguille]

The link is still working. These patchers are required for the real Moo3 experience.

[lyravega]

In my opinion, don't use Vanilla/Strawberry/Tropical collections. The provided .dll file for Bhruic patches is outdated, and the provided .exe file that contains some executable patches won't work with the Steam version. Which is a shame, as the website that housed those .exe patches no longer exists.

Get the Bhruic patches (from the link provided by another player above), and apply them as you wish. Aside from those, the Gofur UI, 1024x768 support mod, along with latest encyclopedia mods make the game golden.