I bought this game in a Moo bundle. The only game I play is Moo2, but I am curious about Moo3. I have only heard bad things about it.

Has anyone played it all the way through?

Does it have any redeeming qualities?

Is it as bad as everyone says it is?

No, no, and yes.

It's a combination of some good ideas and a lot of horrible execution, coupled with an interface that is painful to work with, painful to look at, and throws a bunch of misleading or incomprehensible information at you. That the creative lead hated everything that gave the first two games their character (considering it all goofy) and systematically stripped those elements out adds "sterile" to that list.

It becomes reasonable with heavy modding, and there's some information about that on the MoO forum, but it isn't worth the bother otherwise.

Look, I won't lie to you. The out of the box experience for MoO3 loses its appeal really fast for me. Once you have your first few planets going, it feels remarkably like playing a spreadsheet with graphics (but hey, that's a successful game model too - look at the success of the Football Manager series). I don't know if that'll appeal to you, but after the glory of MoO2 (probably the game I've sunk the most hours of my life into), MoO3 just feels shallow.

However, there used to be a very vibrant modding community for the game (there probably still is, but I haven't checked recently), and some of them give the game more of a classic MoO feel. I'd look into that if I were you.

Hard to say, i got it cheap from a local store and played it for like 3 days straight and loved it but after that i enjoyed it less and less.

If you do try it make sure you get the unofficial patches and try and make sure everything is as automated as you can make it until you get used to the game.

Stick to number 2 the third game is bad makes spreadsheets look like fun and since i work in accounts it is no fun.

MoO3 is actually a pretty good game with a few minor bugs.

There are patches to fix most of the bug issues, the others are more of a missing text variety and certainly aren't game breaking.

MoO3 is a fairly deep and complex game, this is probably where it draws it's bad rap from.

There are Mods to change various aspects of the game that are worth checking into, though I played mostly the generic unmodded version.

I used to play MoO3 for months at a time with breaks in between.
I still think about firing it up from time to time, but the last few years I've been heavily invested in Distant Worlds

Yes, several times.

Yes, but it depends a lot on what you are looking for. MOO3 allows for a lot of micro-management and is quite detailed, so control freaks might enjoy it.

No, but it is highly flawed. The AI is terrible, navigating the menus can be really annoying (far too many sub-menus), some things don't work (or at least does not seem to work) and the amount of micro-management can get really tedious. You can automate things (there is even a built in way to "program" the AI to build things in the right order), but even then the AI can decide to do stupid things, like only building recreational centers all over the planet, so you need to keep constant check on it.

If you intend to play it, make sure to mod it. That way you'll at least alleviate some of the flaws.