Never tried MOO3 - does it have similar gameplay to MOO2? All the fun stuff like designing your spaceships and tactical combat? Stayed away from it because of the bad press but I hear the MODs have improved it tremendously.
Gog.com has it for $9.95 iirc. But I can not say for sure if all the Mods mentioned will work with Gog's version.
If you can get the 2 CD box set of Amazon or Ebay, etc. for $10 it's worth it.
MoO3 was 3 victory conditions: Senate Win, Antaran X, and Sole Survivor.
Senate Win is the shortest/fastest type of game, Antaran X (find all 5 Antaran X's) and research them 1st is middle length. And of course Sole Survivor speaks for it's self. The more AI you put into the game will affect the length of time it takes to eliminate them. Of course you might get eliminated too.
It's as different to MoO2 as MoO2 was to MoO. A lot of ppl wanted MoO2.5 and then got p***ed off because it wasn't (rather shortsighted of them imho).
Yes you can desigh your own ships or use auto design if your in a hurry for a new ship(s). In MoO2 you got 5 starting hull class designs and then later thru techs get Cruisers (iirc) and Doomstars. MoO3 you also get 5 plus light cruiser. But you must build bigger ship yards to get bigger hull sizes and designs. But you will end up with adv. tech and adv. yards 7 more hull sizes.
Of the UOPs Vanilla is more basic to game design with tons of Bug fixes and includes Bhruic's MoO3 Patcher and basic set of patches.
Strawberry starts to add new content. And Tropical is a revamped and extended tech tree plus a whole lot more. It's much much different than playing stock MoO3 even with Bhruic's Patcher.
Too Bad the old forum is gone. So much info and discoveries were lost when Atari shut it down.
MoO3 is a fun game no matter what it was Billed or Put out to be by Developer or Fan expectations. But it is one you have to dig into to get the gold it has in it. If you are a FPS or RTS type player.....well........ you probably won't like it. Then again you won't ever know till you try and try again.
JosEPh