My little Empire

[Haggis]

Hey Guys,
so since I am always thankful to be invited to a beta test - especially if it consens a 4x game like Pandora - and not so much feedback seems to be arriving here yet, in the following my two cents on the game. One thing first, I am a second language speaker (German) so excuse a few lapses into akward english . On the structure I'll keep it in two parts, the first is a bullet point summary of bugs or not working/existent features. The second is a more narrative description based on the three rounds I have played so far on different difficulty levels (furthest about 250 rounds in). That way i can concentrate in the second on the good sides (and there are many in my book) of the beta without endlessly going on about whats not there (after all its a beta).

Bugs/Missing Features/Critique
- "Connection to server lost" problem (seen another tread about this, only thing i could add is that it apparently happened the same time I finished building the first nukes)
- Updating old Units: Don't know if i overlooked it but there seems no possibility to update outdated units to new designs, thats just a basic flaw given the huge bonus experience is in battles
- Social policies: I really wish you would try to get at least some social policies into the vanilla version, it just feels necessary for a game like this (even civ 5 had a (very rudimentary) version of this in the vanilla) and also it is an easy way to give the factions more diversity (saw it being discussed as being introduced with addons/dlcs).
- More economic technologies: most of the tech tree seems to be very heavy on the military stuff with few "breakthrough" technologies. You get new buildings etc. which have pecentage effects but it would also be nice to have a more direct feel for the futurisitc technologies (besides weapons). I mean we have 3D printers now, whats 2100 going to be like? I could imagine for example upgrades for building units of formers (faster/more sturdy modernizations etc), or even just some more diverse improvements (space elevator comes to mind)
- Balancing btw. resources (as pointed out in other threads already)
- smarter Battle AI (at least in my encounters so far they didn't really use stacked units, and even if, it seemd more by accident than foresight)
- More Diplomacy Options: at least Map Trade would be nice
- More Information: I like tables and graphs and love to follow the different indicators of mine and other empires. Although i like your approach to the GUI (keeping it simple and without to many layers) it would be nice to get more and better presented informations about the economy (and troops, technologies etc) (even if it is just for the sake of looking at your empires line outracing all others at the end of the game).
- Victory Conditions: Probably have opverlooked these, but there is afaik no summary of them nor an ingame progress review, that would be helpfull at least
- Technology Tree: I am still not sure about the approach you chose on this (never have been sure since AC), therefore just a remark for you guys to think about. If you end up making a decent game players will replay it a lot (I know I would), and they will either learn which technology cover hides which technology after a while anyway, or just look up the tech tree somewhere in the internet. So why try to cover it in the first place and thereby make decision making only harder if you also could have a nice clean tree? That is, of course, a different story if there is some randomness in which technologies are researched (determinded cover, random (to an extend) specific technology as an outcome), then the system would increas replayability a lot.
- Random Events: as far as i can see something like that is planned anyway
- Space level: I know it is a long shot but i hav to ask. Are you going to include kind of a space level? Kind of a second plane to play above the landmass? Could be awsome if we consider the premise of the game and think of space stations, pods and elevators (or even asteroid mining)
- Animations: Some battle animations seem not to be working quite right.
- Planes: Not necessarily a ciritque but a remark. I liked the air warfare systems with necessary airports and points of no return of the civ series better than the approach you guys picked for planes in which they baisically behave like helicopters or tanks. Yeah, I know its the future, VOLT technology etc, but having ranges and strategically placed cities just for air warfare adds a certain level to warfare which I am missing right now.

- thats it i think, as I said i know its a beta and you can't expect everything, see it as a "my to do list" for you if you wanted to make a game just for me. Now for some short summary of my game experience:

First Game:
Settings: Everything unchanged from start (medium size and difficulty i think)

Installed the game right after i read the e-mail with the invite to the beta (thanks again), no problems there, everything smooth. Started, runs fine, a bit long on the loading side of things but it is a beta. Started the game without changing anything and was randomly selected leader of the Scholars of Eden (always wanted an academic career).
After being welcomed by a rather unpersonal welcome screen (don't know how to do it better, but somehow it lacked in imersion) and a lot of tool tip/tutorial pop ups which i larely ignored, the SCholars and I set out to conquer a new world. Having founded the capital on the spot and taken apart our spaceship (keeps dissidents from having ideas and going back crying home to Earth), i sent out the colonial troopers for exploring. Well, baisically that is where I started to get in trouble. Playing an early expansion strategy and having not yet realized that resources (even food) are gathered locally but distributed globally I had a hard time defending my three cities at this point (guess about 30-50 rounds in) against the hordes of alien xenomorphs (how Alien is this reference anyway?) and baisically collapsed economically within a few rounds (ending up with two cities with 0 population and a capital with four, coming from a high of 18).
As at this point even bigger aliens showed up in stacks i decided to call it an empire and rethink my approach. Over all I enjoyed this round, was more of a trial and error learning approach to learn the game (my standard approach) so failure was an option. How much i enjoied the game, you can see by me not posting as i planned to do right after the first 5 minutes (and as the devs would have liked it) but now after probably 8hrs of playing. The alien planet and the graphic design took me right away and even now i am thinking of playing another round althoug it is just a beta. The GUI is comfortable (although with a resolution of 1920*1080 the font is slightly too small), overall easy to understand, does include all thats necessary while avoiding cluttering the FOV. Althugh as mentioned i personally wished for a bit more cluttering. The units and monsters seemed pretty well designed and animated (on CIV IV level), same goes for the environment. With regards to looks the game is on the standard SF side, nothing stunningly new in idea or appearance, units as well as aliens look a bit generic and could be from any SF movie and game (but with this, it is quite close to AC anyway). A bit more creativity could do wonders here (there are tons of SF books for more original inspiration). The same goes true for the technologies... Carbon Nanotubes? Dude we are producing those on preliminary industrial scale already.

Second Game:
Settings: Huge, difficulty easy
This is the game I played longest, normaly i choose the higher /highest difficulty in 4x games but I wanted to explore the mechanics of the game in depth and didn't want to be bothered by having to be the late Ottomand Empire and barely cling to live all the time so I went the easy way. Randomly picked the Empire, first big dissapointment here no individual unit design. Having learned from the failed game before I took close watch of my population distribution, resource reserves and aliens this time, and i must say, the game as it is is quite enjoyable. Obviously a lot of features seem to be lacking and I hope they make it in the vanilla or at least early (free;) patches and DLCs, but on balance the game does the job. After minutes i found myself contemplating the structure of my empire. Balanced cities or agricultural small centers and a few mega cities they support? Do i need to shift the production from one side of the empire to the other because suddenly there are a lot more aliens coming from there? And what the hell, suddenly there are other humans. Long story short, i love the micromanagement, i am not remembering how it was handeled in Alpha Centauri but it is good that you chose to ignore the tile dependant path of civ and went an allocation of labour style, somehow the empire under my rule feels much more liquid and my management decisions are actually reflected much faster on a global scale. It is surprisingly fun to conquer a neighbouring empire just to realize half way through their cities that your food resources are running low and you have to restructure the labour over the empire very fast or take the consequences - and since you can balance the reserves against each other this is actually necessary quite often on long campaigns. Also I could imagine it to make a specialization of empires and therefore play styles much more diverse.
In summary this campaign showed me that the game as it is is very much centered on conquest, most technologies and the rudimentary diplomacy and non-existend social policies point that way. Not necessarily bad, since the unit editor and the balancing of different items actually make even stacked battles fun. I haven't tested it very much yet but it seems that in this game there is not just going to be stacks of tanks and nothing else, the different updates to the units seem to make it actually sensible to have mixed armies. However, to make it a great game a lot of features are missing, and i am sorry if i can't build an utopian (or dystopian) society in the future it is just a round based "Panzer General" with base building, also it would greatly improve diversity of factions and there are so many awsome ideas for future societies (COllectives, Networked, Trancendend etc. just read a SF book).

Third Game
Settings: Huge, Hard
This is the game i am on now and after which i will give you a more detailed and extensive review. In summary so far: Good Game, solid basics, be more creative!

[Soheil]

Thanx a lot for the great feedback man! the programmers might have other questions and remarks but as the graphics artist i would especially want to know which battle animations werent working correctly exactly?

[Haggis]

Ah, that happened with regards to the unit combination of Avenger Tank with the M20 Serenity Cannon and if i remember correctly the Long Tom Cannon. What i had as a result in battles was often a glitch in which the opponents weapons animation was visible but not the shot from the tanks (don't know about units further up the tech ladder haven't had a large scale war on that level yet). Instead of the animation the screen seemed to freeze for a second followed by a slight (one hex field) repositioning of the FOV and then i just got a pop up for the veterans status/a dying unit and the health bar with regards to the damage taken.
I will post a DxDiag and gam log tomorrow (and see if i can reproduce) - quiet late here already.

Btw. great overall job on the design, as for "near-future" design. And as far as i can see the animations seem to work pretty well over all. They have a nice balance between visiual interesting and time efficient (for example no needlessly slow movement animations, who looks at them after five rounds anyway).
My critique was more an expression for my love for high SF concepts - you know biological engineering, terraforming and all the other awsome things one could technology imagine being in the future, and we talk 90+ years from now. Doesn't sound that long, but as Obama was elected the first time the IPhone didn't exist... this year we get Google Glass. So to extrapolate that, the technology of the year 2100 would be a bit more mindblowing in my mind than just sleek tanks, planes and mechs etc. most of that stuff the military is using already. Even if we consider sub light speed travel and a reasonable distance they would have at least the technology of the 2050ties to start from (and the top notch available at this point).
Since you guys obviously oriented yourselves at alpha centauri this also reflects in your design. Problem is, this means it also is based on designs extrapolated from a late 90s technology level - and as a look at SF shows in 9 out of 10 cases actual technological development (if physicaly feasible) has beaten prediction. (Does not count for space travel, there we are just too f***ng lazy to get our collective arses up.)
You already have the aliens, why not for example for some hybrid technology, some bio engineering, nano warfare etc. - also would alow you to diverge much more from the usual forms expected from units. Just think what a tank grown like a tree would look like, or how an attack with nano bots would effect a tile. Also you simply don't have Drones in the game yet - at least as far as i have played - and that seems to me a slight oversight considering their occasional use by some militaries nowadays... Hard to imagine humans actually would stop using them.

Also some environment animations besides the aliens would be nice

Good work so far! Going to give your programmers more to think after my third round, want to really test the game mechanics this time.

[SephiRok]

Hey Haggis,

Thanks for your concern. While it is true that the early technologies don't all fit the year 2100, you can imagine they've been traveling for a long time and Earth was in a pretty bad shape when they left. The aim was nevertheless nowadays Earth or reasonable near-future tech as the starting point. For some techs we've done a better job than others. Sometimes it's also more a gameplay limitation, as it can be pretty hard to explain that you wouldn't know about tanks when you arrive on Pandora. So the first, Colonization era, is more about rediscovering, or reimplementing, their current technology for the new world and the new resources available. Sometimes with nice spins to it. After that, in the Mechanization era, things start picking up, with outright human cloning, nano bots and the whole shebang. In the Transcendence era you have the man-machine interface, and bio starts merging with mech. I think some of the later techs have come out pretty cool too, but you have to understand we've got a really small team and this is a big project, so we do what we can.

Cheers for the feedback,
Rok

[Haggis]

Haha, no worries i can see that and as i said it is very solid work so far! Just dreaming of my perfect game. As it is it is definetly a solid "colony" 4x.
As for explaining the loss of technology maybe one could take an loss of knowledge through a long journey (generation ships for example), would also explain why they arrive and have split up in fully developed factions (i think aplha centauri went somwhat that way). Maybe they lost contact to earth (catastrophy or they simply forgot about them) so they couldn't be updated on developments at home wich would give the acces to (delayed) but more advanced technologies and means also a loss of the shared cultural background so they developed their own. If they decided to pick up the planetary date after landing where they left it after launch the travel time in between could be relatievely long.

[SephiRok]

Oh yeah, we do have an intro cinematic that still needs a few more tweaks before we show it, but Earth is so far away that they have no communication with it. They have no idea what happened on Earth by now.