So I played the game a little.

[megazver]

Start menu: I like it. The trees are a nice touch.

Starting a new game: I actually had to click several times to start a new game because it wouldn't get initialized by the server. I do hope server authorization being required to launch a single-player game is just you protecting the beta, rather than a feature of the game, because that's an instant no-buy right there.

As a side-note: Let's be frank with one another here: this is pretty much an Alpha Centauri remake. I am going to compare this game to how Alpha Centauri (and other 4x games) did things because, y'know, that's obviously what you’re going for here. So if you’re going to be all “we have no idea why you’re comparing the mechanic to the similar mechanic in Alpha Centauri, weird internet person, we’re doing our own thing here!” I am going to roll my eyes so hard the Internet will explode. So don’t.

Anyway, let's talk lore first. From the very start, the factions are problematic. You're trying to copy what Brian Reynolds did with them and yet do your own thing at the same time and you're kind of, well, clumsily failing. By changing the backstory from them arriving on one last ship from Earth and splitting into survivor groups along the ideological lines to them all arriving on their own ships as colonists after a heckload of human space exploration and system exploitation you’re basically undermining the entire premise of the story and opening a whole can of unintended story consequence worms.

Is Earth is already split between these factions? So, like, the University holds Australia and Greenpeace rules South America and Imperium HAS ALL THE ARMIES COME ON? If yes, that strains my credulity somewhat. If no, then why does Imperium that, quote, owns legions of starships across solar systems even let any of the other schlubs get anywhere near the new planet? Why are these factions starting out on equal terms? If we’re flying around the galaxy like it’s no big deal, why do they start out with a single colony module and no contact with the rest of humanity? Surely if there were legions of starships flying around nearby, that would factor in somehow? Resource drops, military support from up above, huge battles for the planet before colonization even began? And what are all the faction leaders doing slumming it down there anyway? Are they so bored that they’re having an elaborate "Well I can colonize and conquer a planet with nothing but a spoon!"-peen measuring contest or something?

My advice to you – change the backstory back to what it was in AC, change the faction names/descriptions to something a little less ostentatious and don’t fiddle with it anymore.

Now, the faction quotes. I would like to preface this by saying I am not trying to be a jerk here. I’ve spent an evening writing this to help you out. But the writing in the faction blurbs is _bad_. Yes, the "it was Tuesday" joke was pretty funny when Raoul Julia said it in Street Fighter, but using it verbatim in a quote doesn't make your not-Corazon-Santiago badass, just cliché. And the rest of the writing is similarly bleh. It has no personality whatsoever and its attempts at philosophy are super-clumsy and awkward. No quotes would honestly be better than this. (Which you seem to have already subconsciously realized, since there don’t seem to be any in the game proper.)

Okay, now look, so I'm sure that whoever named the factions and wrote up the quotes is a lovely person and deserves kitten hugs on daily basis and I am sorry I am being mean here, but this lovely person should not be in charge of the writing for the game. Hire someone else. Writers, thankfully, are pretty cheap. I'm pretty sure that in this economy you can find someone decent to write this stuff for you for a few cans of cat food. And you’ll get some quotes for the technology/buildings, too!

Anyway, let's press Ready.

Oh hey, my character's portait! Ahem. Okay, I can see what you’re trying to do here but when I see the portraits what I think of is the state-of-the-art CGI from the seminal 1997 strategy game Constructor. Just… just hire someone to paint some static replacements. (Sorry, dude who modelled them.)

The main screen UI seems a little on the ascetic side but functional. Disband unit has no confirmation dialog when you click it, but that's not a biggie.

The city screen is where I start to get a little grumpy. The bits that the player will fiddle with the most, the citizen and the resources windows, are confined to small boxes in the lower right, comprising about 10% total of my 1920x1080 screen. Not to be Captain Obvious here, but the elements of the UI that get used more should be larger, the elements that are rarely used should be smaller. You don't even let us place citizens on tiles anymore, why is the city view taking up most of the screen?

The build queue needs more functionality. Swapping places, putting something in front of the queue while keeping a half-built unit still in the queue and so forth.

I can't tell if there's any science/production overrun. Seems that it just uses up the minerals it would take to finish the construction and lets the rest of the potential research/production go to waste? Okay.

The map doesn't wrap horizontally. Come on, guys. Come on. And put some water and decorative ice caps on the poles instead of just cutting off the map on the vertical ends.

The starting unit being unable to fight any aliens is a curious choice. I suppose it makes sense when you consider that the aliens work like barbarians from the Civ games, but more easily wipe-able, rather than the aliens from AC. Doesn’t seem like an improvement to me, though.

The pre-battle comparison needs combat odds. You can see the strengths, sure, but still, combat odds would be nice.

There are no rivers on the map. You know, scientifically speaking, if a planet has liquid-y substances and non-liquid-y substances at all, there’s going to be rivers, even if it’s rivers of molten lead flowing over titanium rocks. So, uh, yeah.

Units can move over mountains like over all the other terrain types. In combination with being able to embark on their own, what chokepoints are forts supposed to be defending?

Roads only giving +1 extra movement feels too slow. There should be *some* reason to take the road over nearby water. (Leviathan doesn’t quite do the trick.)

There was a very similar pollution whack-a-mole system in Civ 3 and when they transferred it to the following Civ gam- oh wait, no, they didn't. They didn’t even bother trying to fix it, they just never ever touched it again. It was a crap system there and it’s a crap, unfun system here, except Firaxis had the decency to add the Auto-Remove Pollution command and make travel along roads faster. It adds nothing except extra micro as you move the formers around on cleaning duty and its effects are not impactful enough to actually try to avoid it. I do realize from reading other posts that you have an idea-boner for the planet slowly getting more polluted and everything becoming murkier and our eyes slowly failing in real life as punishment for our pretend vidya-game eco-sins, but, y’know, it’s just shit gameplay, dudes. It’s bad. Don’t leave it in the game. You can’t tune this into being good. Remove it.

You take over cities with boats and planes. Land units are pretty much useless after this.

The city names are generic enough that it’s impossible to tell, what faction they came from after they’ve been conquered. Speaking of which, I’d prefer a few unique fixed city models per faction over procedurally growing generic ones.

The AI is abominable across board, from enemy AI to worker management AI to diplomacy AI. To be expected from a beta, but still.

The performance is super-sluggish in the last third of the game.

The conquest victory condition feels like it kicks in waaaaaaaaay past when it should kick in.

The cities screen doesn’t have any way to sort the cities. And why is the tax rate slider is not directly underneath the resource counters on the main screen?

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Now let’s get to the meat of this post. That is to say, me being grumpy and dismissive of every change you’ve made to the way economy works in the Civ games.

Food and city growth are now split. I’m not sure what you were trying to achieve here – an attempt to control over-expansion, perhaps? – but what happens here is uncontrollable growth/starvation cycles, since you literally have no way of controlling your cities’ growth. You can control the number of your farmers to avoid a food deficit, sure, so you’re stuck having to endlessly micro them as your cities bloat whether you want them to or not. And when starvation does inevitably start, the AI doesn't bother adjusting the populations to replace the farmers that died. In fact, from what I can tell, farmers seem to die first. This is an overengineered, clunky mechanic, that feels like it has been changed from the original just to change something and it doesn’t actually bring any new strategic depth or fun to the table.

Likewise with the mineral/production split. Your cities don’t start exploding or anything when you’re out-producing your mineral supply, thankfully, but the system only added micro as you’re trying to rearrange new citizens to actually bring in some resources. Yes, you can store a mineral surplus and then switch some faraway city to all Workers to quick-build something but in practice this is tedious, fiddly micro that I’d rather not have it as an option at all than be forced to use on a regular basis. Hell, you could replicate the system’s sole new advantage by ditching it and replacing it with an “Infrastructure Boost” operation that you build in a high-hammer city and use on your new outposts.

(Speaking of operations. Eh, they’re okay, I guess? I have no strong feelings about them.)

Now, the jobs system, the replacement for worker placement. Sigh. Again, welcome to the world of neverending micro. Even if the city AI could be persuaded to actually place workers according to the resources that are in the city’s vicinity instead of just putting one in each category at the time, so that there’s five miners bringing in one mineral in a 20 pop coastal city unless you personally babysit them, the system is still not something I consider an improvement.

I mean, hell, this isn’t Master of Orion, we’re still placing workers on tiles, we’ve just been denied to do it by hand, instead being forced to wrangle with AI tasked with doing it for us. Speaking of which, that thing where the workers actually only work one resource per tile, so you need more than one to work a tile with more than one resource? That's... certainly a, uh, design decision. One that killed any potential thought one might give to what improvements should be placed where. Also, is this, coupled with being unable to build roads in the forests, here to make forests so crap you're tempted into wiping them off the map for other improvements resulting in more exciting pollution fog effects? Well, I guess it works.

Infinite City Spam. The classic Civ strategy of spamming cities with the minimum distance between them (every two tiles, in this case) with no attention paid to what the terrain is, is once again one of the best strategies for your empire’s development here. That’s not great, y’know? All the other Civ games since Civ 2 have tried to fight this one way or another but, as far as I can tell, there’s no such mechanic here. I’d recommend looking at Civ 4’s corruption to see how it’s done. Credits are oddly underused as they are right now.

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Finally, let’s talk about the tech.

No explicit tech tree is not good. Yes, I’ve read that you wanted to randomize them later. No, that’s still not an excuse. 4x games aren’t roguelikes, knowing the tech tree is an important part of playing a 4x game. Add the randomization as a starting option, if you want, but you need to add the tree by default.

Also, given that your game doesn’t have government policies, world wonders, resources, planetary council or culture and that the building list is kind of slim, the tech tree is pretty much 90% interchangeable military techno babble.

Which is a pity. 4x games rely on economics and politics as much as warfare and cutting them down like this leaves nothing but a shallow wargame. You guys will need to add at least of this stuff back before release or I don’t see a good future for your game.

[whaleberg]

Well, a little blunt, but pretty much spot on.

[whaleberg]

Things are moving in a positive direction. The current version of the game is way better than the original beta version. It needs major improvements to move from "worse than alpha centauri," to "worse at somethings with interesting changes worth looking at." It's difficult because AC is one of the greatest games ever made, and this is a very small team trying to compete with it directly.

[azpops]

Agree, not exactly the way I would have put it, but most of what was said I agree with.

The changes being made are definitely improvements and am looking forward to what is ahead. Right now, though, after a you've played a couple of times, it becomes pretty routine as to what works and interest in the game wanes.