So, recently I tried getting into Aurora. I love its depth and complexity, but to me it wasnt fun to play and a little joyless as everything was so much effort. This pushed me in the direction of 10 Min Space Strategy Game, which is as you might expect, fun for 10 mins but lacks enough detal to grab you for long periods. Then I remembered...
Back in the day Moo3 was released basically unfinished. It was a complete dog - useless AI, rubbish interface, inpenetrable gameplay, and over half the features didnt work. Well, I bought it anyway and got heavily involved in the community that sprung up defending it and modding it. Over the years a number of us devoted ourselves to fixing it as much as we could, and until last year had got pretty far in turing it into a very playabe 4X. This effort died when Atari locked the Moo3 forum and deleted the vast amount of work done up until that point - the community still exists in some form, but work has pretty much stopped on modding.
Which brings us up to now. Yesterday I started playing it again. The version I play bears little resemblance to the original, and the details for those that are interested are spoilered below. If you are interested in seeing a working Moo3 played, post here. If intrest is shown, I will do my best to produce a good LP of a dog thathas been taught new tricks. You could even get involved by being a fleet commander, planetary or system govener, spy, heck, pretty much anything.
Big list of things that were borked but now fixed:
Ship designing now allows for designs that work well in thier intended role instead of all ships being very similar despite having different roles.
You can actually see what race ships belong to on the galaxy map instead of having to geuss
You can contact rival empires without having to have a colony on thier doorstep
In combat, you can now see what damage has occured to shileds, armour and ship systems, instead of just the deepest layer
Diplomacy now makes sence instead of being totally random - rival empires now have goals and motivations
Fighters now actually work like fighters instead of charging down the gun barrels of enemy fleets
The game no longer crashes due to a memory wrap around bug when your empire generates a large amount of wealth (or interpretates that wealth as a negative number)...
Ground combat is made possible by preventing the enemy disbanding all its transports constantly, and ground combat strategies actually work now instead of it being a clickfest
Hull size affects ship and missile velocity, giving smaller hulls a point
Huge number of galaxy configurations added
Queue multiplying is possible - x10 of units can be produced if you have the capacity instead of a 10bn pop planet stupidly only producing one unit per turn.
Races are limited to one per game (so no galaxy with 32 human races), and each race has race specific tech trees
Planetary specials and random events have been totally re written to be worth having
The sitrep screen now has links that work as originally intended
Spying has been changed from a non event into a viable strategy
In combat, none of the sensor related techs worked which led to ships circling for ages shoting an nothing. This has ben rectified so all sensor and stealth techs work properly.
Massive graphical and UI overhaul
Made the AI produce dangerous ships with weapons, instead of empty trash cans simply as they were cheap
Colony pods is a medium level tech that wont fit on smaller hulls - prevents mass spamming of pods to all planets
Migration - citizens will more onto uninhabited planets that are appealing of thier own accord
Double the amount of techs, and reorganisation of the 6 schools of tech.
Massive re-writing of the race customisation allowing for very flexible combinations of traits for your empire.
5 new fighter classess with different roles.
AI now actually uses PD weapons instead of the odd flying gun
Tweaks to maintenance values and military AI to make the game less of a walkover
Many others that are of a tehnical nature and probably irrelevant at this stage...
So yea, if interested, let me know.