Masters of Orion III wil be released. Birth of the Federation was loosely based on MoO II which was THE turn based space colonization game.

MoO2 is one of thsoe games that you could get a batchelors degree in. . its very good.

If MoO III lives up to the hype it will be a major step forward in tb gaming. It will be the fist game that combines tbs and rts. Combat will be in rt but they promise it will not be the click/rush feastival that you described.

I am not sure what you mean, Lords of the Realm2 was a turn based strategy game that had real time combat, in fact LoTR3 shoudl be coming out the same time MoO3 is. it also combined RTS with TBS. In effect once a turn starts your armies can move say, 15 spaces . . but they walk in real time during that turn. let me explain: say you are chasing an army and are five spaces away and a turn goes by. if you sit on your duff and do nothing then the AI or multiplayer oponent may move the army its fifteen spaces, thus when you move your fifteen spaces you will still be five spaces behind. If you hurry up and move really quick you may be able to advance on them before htey start moving. this makes the game interesting when enemies are advancing on a castle and you have an improper garrison to defend it.

the only problem with LoTR2 is that the AI was not all that great, they really hurried with the game and some thigns were a pain in the ass. they coudl have made gameplay a lot faster with some simple 'governor' tools for provinces.and some features seemd to be thrown in tehre with not much programming to make things efficient. . . and the AI was not that good. . . I have made things as impossible as I coud for me and still I have never been beaten at it. A month or two after they released LOTR2 they essentially rereleased the game in the form of "lotr seige pack' which was the game I had just bought plus LoTR1 plus a castle editor, better AI and a couple more maps. I was pissed cause I had just blown all my money on LoTR2, and now a month after the release, for the same price I can get the game in a non sucky state.

well heres hoping the third one will be good

-Justin Kelly