Master of Orion III was developed by Quicksilver Software and published by Infogrames Interactive on February 25, 2003.

Anticipating rebellion, they arrogantly declared themselves the "New Orions" (as opposed to the true ancient ones), and allowed a new Senate to be convened, made up of younger races.

One of their scientists brought a shipment of these sentient parasites to the Orion sector, where they were released upon a Human outpost, wreaking terrible damage.

However, being sentient, the Harvesters began to pursue their own agenda, spreading and forming colonies like other races, and giving themselves a new name, the "Ithkul".

Master of Orion III is a turn-based strategy game with the goal of defeating the artificial intelligence (AI), or other players, in one of three ways.

Victory conditions, set at the beginning of the game, include domination of the galaxy, leadership of the Senate, and discovery of the five Antaran X's.

Colonization is of individual planets located in the numerous star systems randomly generated at the beginning of each game.

The factors that can affect habitability include temperature, toxicity, atmospheric density and composition, and gravity level.

Extras such as pre-spaceflight magnate civilizations, stranded leaders, rare resources, and other unusual and unique attributes can add additional bonuses or penalties to each world.

Information on star systems and their worlds can also be gained through trade negotiations with the other races resulting in an exchange of intelligence.

Votes are also periodically proposed on various laws that will be binding to all races in the galaxy (although you can opt out for a small penalty in race-relations).

The player is not even required to watch the battle, but can let the game decide the outcome and display the resulting winner and the number of remaining ships.

The one specific thing a player can plan for is to invade a planet that is preferable to the species that makes up the invasion force.

Not the least of their concerns were that it gave away some parts of the game they were hoping to keep secret, and showed things that weren't going to be in the final version.

Many reviewers cited the cumbersome interface, poor AI, and launch bugs as serious faults in the game, although it did receive some praise for its massive depth.

This is described as "a maddening exercise in battling your own empire's broken AI for hours, only to discover that you've already overcome your only real opposition... you can just click 'end turn' a few hundred times and win without doing anything".

This is generally attributed to an unwieldy and cumbersome user interface, poor space battle AI, a number of software bugs that caused the game to crash and were never fixed (save for the two patches that addressed a few of the worst bugs, Infogrames provided no support following the game's release), the suppression of many popular features of the previous games (such as genocide and refitting of obsolete space ships) combined with the absence of many of the promised new features (such as racial ethos systems and colonization of moons and asteroids, as opposed to the player being limited to planets), and lack of micromanagement or the general character and charm of the predecessors.

One significant problem was poor enemy AI (although subsequent community-created unofficial patches made small improvements).