The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I just uploaded a video showing all instances of stolen dialogs in SC3 I know of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrmSa4oxf50

Some of them are a bit of a stretch, namely the first Orz one and the Arilou one, but it seems obvious to me that they tried (badly) to copy these lines of dialog I compared them to.

It's actually kind of funny: it's almost like they knew their writing is bad, so they threw in good writing from SC2 hoping it would make it better.

This was the first big red flag I noticed when playing SC3 for the first time back in '96. The second big red flag was getting the "You lied to the Owa" non-standard game over. Both are hallmarks of remarkably poor design, which is reflected in a mediocre-at-best final product.

"You join the Ploxis. Then you die" was another disappointing gray-screen exit.

Star Control 2 also had a non-standard game over, but it was fairly obvious. You just have to talk to the Ur-Quan and surrender. I did that once.

So, wait, that was actually something that happened in that exact way? You lose for creating an alliance with some race called the Ploxis, and you get that text?

(Sorry, I've never played nor do I intend to play SC3.)

Yup. They're kind of the mastermind race on the opposing side and when you finally meet them they'll make a big case for combinating your abilities and fleets to stop the Ultimate enemy(TM). If you agree to working together with them, as far as I recall you literally just get those two rows on a black screen and then the game is over.

You'd have thought that a game where Hal 9000 is running your ship would have been better :p

That was classy, though. I think it made it abundantly clear what would happen, then it faded to white, and title screen (maybe without the fade to white). Similarly with the utwig bomb.

Has anyone ever pissed of the Dynari without the Talao Shield ? I have never checked to see what happens if you do that.

You haven't seen what happens if you talk to him without the Taalo shield?

I guess I just never bothered to go near Umgah space until I am nearing the end game.

I'll give this a try tonight.

I like this, and give it a pass, because it's obvious what will happen and it makes sense in context. Conversely, when you meet the Owa, there's a good possibility you don't really understand their importance, and the truth you have to tell them is pretty awful from a typical diplomatic perspective. So instead of being creative, they decided to railroad you away from it instead. I was annoyed.

Oh, it's worse than that. A reasonable (or finished?) game would at least send it to combat, rather than just ending the game for no good reason. Of course, SC3 being what it is, going to combat would result in the League firing you for daring to be attacked by an alien...

As if being attacked is your fault!  ;D

If memory serves, I got the instant gameover 3 or 4 times with the Owa because I could not for the life of me figure out what the hell I was supposed to correctly say to them because the dialog options were unclear.

They don't even copy the lines properly; the Arilou's words in SC3 have a completely different meaning to those in SC2.

Also, compare the SC2 Kohr-Ah music with the SC3. Huge difference in quality.

I haven't played SC3; is it even worth picking up?  I'm informed it's so bad it's not even considered canon.

I wonder if a starving SC2 fan would get any enjoyment out of it, if he were to go in with very low expectations.

If you go with low expectations it'll be mostly OK. The comparison hurts it the most, not the game itself. One advice though - do keep multiple saves spread apart, as sometimes the event system breaks and you are left wandering aimlessly with event not triggering.
The mellee has some nice new ships, pseudo3d can be nice if you like it.

You also may want to save before any alien encounters - there's various things that can cause an instant game over if you don't say all the right things, or sometimes even if you do. :P Even for all it's faults, SC3 is probably worth it (in my opinion) if you're desperate for an SC2-style space adventure. :) I do recommend the Starflight series to starving SC fans myself, although you need a rather high tolerance for '80s style interface/graphics to play the DOS versions.

Cool, thanks. I'll probably check it out then, as well as the Starflight series - both of which GOG.com seems to stock preconfigured to run on modern systems.   :)

What I didn't liked in SC3 was that economy aspect, that was added to the game, is completely pointless. You are never on defensive, so there is no reason what so ever to hoard resources, colonize planets or do anything, exempt go "adventuring" with your fleet. All pacing depends on player.

...Except the Doog quest, which comes out of nowhere and annoys the hell out of you since all of your colonies on prime worlds for harvesting are probably all tapped out by then. So then you have to go set up some colonies on okay (or substandard, if you went nuts like me) worlds and watch them like hawks so you can steal their RU before they start depleting them all building ships. That was another rather poor design element, now that I mention it.

But as stated, SC3 is a fairly mediocre game that had the misfortune of being associated with stellar predecessors, so it lost most of it points in the comparison. Taken by itself, it's probably not as horrible as a lot of us like to make it out to be. Definitely not worth playing more than once, though.

I don't think worlds actually ever did tap out - the resource score for a world influenced the rate at which it could produce resources, not a finite limit to the total resources the world could produce. However, on the default settings for a colony all the resources it produces instantly go into shipbuilding - you need to shut down the shipyards to get RUs. (You do also need to watch out that ships built at colonies draw crew from the colony, and from what I've seen the number of entities of any given race in your expedition never actually increases except for races with self-repairing ships, so a colony that's built a lot of high-crew ships might be running low on manpower. Or Syreenpower or Ur-Quanpower or whatever it happens to be.)

I actually came into the franchise through SC3 and backtracked. On its own merits, it's a good game. As a sequel to Star Control 2, story and ship design leave a lot to be desired, although I do have a preference to ships having more than 16 facings in melee. I also remember being disappointed in that the box for Star Control 3 implied there'd be more of a strategy aspect to it, but even when you're technically at war with the Crux the only thing that really matters is diplomacy - it makes a certain amount of sense since each side has only one ship capable of interstellar travel, but you can literally leave all of your colonies completely unguarded and it has no effect on what happens in the game.

The ability to upgrade your ships is a nice touch, though. Would have been better if there was the option to have upgraded ships in melee, though, for appropriately increased costs.

No, not really. It was already a good idea to have some colonies building up RU reserves so you could start up new colonies much faster. I just dropped by mine and grabbed enough to free the Doog in a few weeks.

I guess I managed my colonies poorly? Considering they seemed to do just fine on their own without me micromanaging them (and I actually was under the mistaken impression that ships to defend them actually mattered; the VUX fooled me into thinking bigger attacks were imminent), I never really played with the colony settings at all.

SC III's dialog screens are horrible!  I barely made it through the video, especially at the Orz screens.  The voice acting was horrible as well.  How did this game even make it past the first compile?  I've never played it, but just looking at the dialog screens, disgusting!  They say "don't just a book by it's cover," but I sure judge a movie by the quality of its actors!  The characters look half-dead, half old wrinkled human skin! 

I may be wrong, but I don't think there's any mechanism by which a ship in orbit can damage the colony, just ships around the colony. So, paradoxically enough, the best thing to do with the VUX raids on the Mycon is to make sure the Mycon colony has no ships in orbit for the VUX to attack.  ::)

Otherwise... the default colony settings will produce a functional colony, but puts too much manpower into the structures producing end products (ships and colony pods) and not enough into the refinery, and so you end up with a bottleneck in your manufacturing from the RUs available - which is why colonies start draining their supply of RUs rapidly once the shipyard goes up. The most efficient setting for a colony if you want that colony producing ships is probably one where there's a slight trickle of surplus RUs being produced - it's probably building ships no slower and possibly faster than the default setting, as you don't have manpower sitting around waiting for resources to come in. If you don't like that race's ships, on the other hand, you can shut down the shipyard entirely and just have the colony produce commodities instead.