Master of Orion III

The main planetary control screen of Master of Orion III with six submenus.

Victory conditions, set at the beginning of the game, include domination of the galaxy, leadership of the Senate, and discovery of the five Antaran X's. The easiest to achieve is leadership of the Senate where the periodic vote for leadership is based on the power of each voting member. The victory method with moderate difficulty is the discovery of the five Antaran X's through exploration and sending out of special high-priced exploration fleets. The most difficult method is galactic domination where you must completely subjugate all other races in the galaxy.

Colonization is of individual planets located in the numerous star systems randomly generated at the beginning of each game. Each star system will have from one to eight planets and each planet is rated on a scale of habitability related to your race's physical requirements. Red 2 and Red 1 planets are the least habitable to your species, with Yellow 2 and 1 and Green 2 and 1 designating increasingly friendly environments up to the so-called 'Sweet Spot', which is a planet perfectly suited to your race or the conquered race(s) you are using to colonize. The factors that can affect habitability include temperature, toxicity, atmospheric density and composition, and gravity level. The various races of the game each have preferred planet types, from terrestrial races preferring the variations of the Earth/Mars-type terrestrial worlds, to the etherian races that prefer Jupiter-type gas giants. Worlds of any type can be colonized, however, as technological advancements will allow the terraforming of worlds to suit your race's requirements, with the most hostile planets requiring more initial settlers and the population's growth rate being greatly reduced. Planets are discovered through exploration and trade. By sending a starship to a given system the player discovers the basic information on and an assessment of the habitability of each planet in that system. Extras such as pre-spaceflight magnate civilizations, stranded leaders, rare resources, and other unusual and unique attributes can add additional bonuses or penalties to each world. Information on star systems and their worlds can also be gained through trade negotiations with the other races resulting in an exchange of intelligence.

In the Orion Senate, laws, treaties, and resolutions are voted upon and periodically the president is chosen. Declarations of war and peace, alliances, trade relationships, technological trade and outright blackmail are performed in the Senate. Votes are also periodically proposed on various laws that will be binding to all races in the galaxy (although you can opt out for a small penalty in race-relations). These can be rules of war, labor laws, taxes, and other regulations.

The key to success over the other races is through technological development where knowledge in six fields of research can be advanced. The six fields are Biological Sciences, Economics, Energy, Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Social sciences. Development in these fields will result in advancements in technology that can benefit all other aspects of gameplay, which may include the ability to terraform your worlds to better suit your race, the ability to create larger and more powerful space fleets, the ability to better equip ground troops, and the ability to develop stronger economic development tools and more capable spies.

Espionage is broken into espionage and counter-espionage through the recruitment of spies. In order to spy on other empires, the players must have made contact with them. In order for them to spy on players, they must have made contact with them.

In Master of Orion 3, the players utilize own spies in several different ways. They can send in 6 different Types of Spies, who have different objectives:

• Military Spies: These spies will sabotage building fleets, shipyard buildings and ground troop support buildings.
• Diplomatic Spies: These spies will sabotage diplomatic efforts.
• Scientific Spies: These spies will either steal tech or sabotage research efforts.
• Political Spies: These spies will try to assassinate any leaders the enemy has.
• Social Spies: These spies will create unrest in colonies to slow down production, and attempt to incite rebellion.
• Government Spies: These spies will blow up government buildings of the enemy.

If the players do not deploy own spies, they will perform counter-espionage duties within the player's empire. Enemy spies who are caught or killed will be displayed in the situation report at the beginning of each turn.

When the forces of two or more factions occupy the same star system, and at least one of the factions control spaceships in the system (battles between planets within a system will not occur), combat occurs and a combat management screen will be shown to the player with information on the enemy strength, own strength and where the fight will take place. This screen also gives the player the option to command his ships to intercept the enemy fleet if one is active in the system, attack the enemy planet if the enemy holds one in the system, or defend the player's planets in the system.

If neither of the forces are ordered to attack by the factions commanding them, combat will not occur, if one of the forces is ordered to attack, combat will occur in three phases: Space Combat, Planetary Bombardment, and Ground Combat.

Space Combat is fought in open space or near one of the star system's planets, which is determined by the attacker and defender at the beginning of combat. If the attacker's goal is the conquest of a planet in the system then the space combat will be fought near a planet with that planet's defenses included in the battle. If the attacker's goal is merely the destruction of the enemy space fleet or occupation of the star system then the battle can be fought in open space between the fleets only. If the "defender" commands his fleet to defend a planet within the system, the "attacker" will be unable to intercept the enemy fleet in open space, and can only attack the defending fleet by attacking the planet it protects.

The player can either manually control the fleet or allow the AI to take command. The player is not even required to watch the battle, but can let the game decide the outcome and display the resulting winner and the number of remaining ships. If the attacker is victorious in space with the goal of attacking one of the system's inhabited planets then the second phase of combat will follow.

Planetary Bombardment is what it sounds like, the attacker throws as much explosives on the attacked planet as he wants, and may then decide to attack with ground forces if he brought any. The Planetary Bombardment screen is only shown to the player when he is the one attacking. The screen shows what is on the planet in terms of civilian population, military units and buildings, as well as what's left on the planet when the bombardment is over. If the attacker decided to attack with his ground forces, Ground Combat will follow.

Ground Combat involves the confrontation of the attacker's landing ground forces against any of the enemy's ground forces that were previously assigned to that planet as well as a portion of the planet's population. Ground Combat can be fought over multiple game turns and is concluded when either of the forces are defeated. As in Space Combat the player can control the attack by designating an overall plan or allow the AI to take command, and the battle can be watched or allowed to play out with only the final results reported. Victory means gaining control of the planet, its surviving population, and all surviving planetary improvements.

Player-controlled Ground Combat is largely determined by a number of factors beyond the player's control; for example, terrain, gravity at the battlefield (not necessarily the gravity displayed on the planet overview—sometimes a high-gravity planet will inexplicably produce a zero-G battlefield), and weather. While the army creation screens do display the preferred ambient conditions of each type of unit, the Ground Combat screen fails to display the battle conditions that will be affecting the battle until after its conclusion. Subsequent battles on the same planet do not necessarily have the same battle conditions, making any attempt to prepare for certain conditions with a specialized ground unit impossible.

The one specific thing a player can plan for is to invade a planet that is preferable to the species that makes up the invasion force. This means, for instance, using troops composed of aquatic species rather than, say, humanoids to invade an aquatic planet. However, an aquatic planet doesn't guarantee the battlefield will be in an aquatic part of the planet; for all the player knows, the battle could take place in a desert. This is because this version of the game models planets in more detail than previous versions did; a planet's designation (e.g., "aquatic") reflects the dominant or most common type of terrain, whereas previous versions treated planets monolithically: water worlds are treated as all ocean, and so forth.

The overall battle plans available to the player (flank, trap, surprise, mass assault, etc.) are presented in the manual, although no game information about the battle plans themselves is made available.

Although highly anticipated and much lauded by some gaming publications, Master of Orion III was only a moderate seller and not the breakout hit that the previous games had been. This is generally attributed to an unwieldy and cumbersome user interface, poor space battle AI, a number of software bugs that caused the game to crash and were never fixed (save for the two patches that addressed a few of the worst bugs, Infogrames provided no support following the game's release), the suppression of many popular features of the previous games (such as genocide and refitting of obsolete space ships) combined with the absence of many of the promised new features (such as racial ethos systems and colonization of moons and asteroids, as opposed to the player being limited to planets), and lack of micromanagement or the general character and charm of the predecessors. One significant problem was poor enemy AI (although subsequent community-created unofficial patches made small improvements).

None of the original development team was involved in the production.