Comments after 0.12.4 play

[azpops]

I like the world wrap. Much better than the old world ends at the edge. So far I like all the changes. Makes play more enjoyable.

I have noticed that when all hives on a continent are destroyed the aliens simply go away except for Leviathan. Is that intended? I think that we should have to worry about alien life forms throughout the game. Maybe even have some type of event which causes a massive swarm of them to appear in retaliation to mankind invading their world. Now aliens give you a hard time for a while and then they simply go away. In SMAC the aliens never went away and you always had to worry about them.

Still a few issues I'd like to see addressed:

1) Why can't we build roads in forest? I can build a road in Gaia Forest, Garden of Eden, Natural Plantation, Xenite Flower, but not forest!! Doesn't make sense. Could you explain the reason behind this as it makes no sense that you can build roads in these other forests and mountains, but not a regular forest. Part of keeping pollution down is having forest, but you can't build a road in it to link your cities.

2) Pollution. You indicated in an earlier post that you could add an event for when pollution occurs. Any idea when that will happen. Being color blind it is very difficult for me to find the pollution without knowing it has happened.

3) Load a saved game. You still default to the auto saved game folder when loading a saved game. Would be nice to go to the folder where my saved games are without having to go look for it.

4) Really frustrating having another faction build a city right in the middle of your territory. In order to prevent that now, one needs to build cities as close as possible which limits the ability of the city to grow in later stages of the game. Need a mechanism which prevents another faction from building cities in your territory or building a city in your territory is cause for declaring war without any adverse penalties.

[Soheil]

thanx for the feedback, initially the reasoning behind not being able to build roads in forests was that you couldnt see the road but i definitely see your point and we will try to find a good solution. As for the pollution, we feel like were just putting bandaides on a dead horse (i hope that analogy isnt too abstract, english is my third langague) so we have decided to overhaul the whole pollution mechanic and we will let you know the details in the near future.

[azpops]

As for the pollution, we feel like were just putting bandaides on a dead horse (i hope that analogy isnt too abstract, english is my third langague) so we have decided to overhaul the whole pollution mechanic and we will let you know the details in the near future.

My vote would be to get rid of it completely. It doesn't add anything to the game. It detracts from the other aspects of the game. I'm not interested in playing a game to clean pollution, I'm interested in a game to explore and build on a new planet.

[void]

While keeping the concept of pollution, we will change it so it's a pure morale modifier. The current effect feature "Pollution" (which zeroes the resource output of a tile) will be renamed to "Wasteland" and is only caused by WMDs like nuclear missiles and black hole generators. So former units no longer have to clean up regularly near your cities, but only on tiles affected by super weapons. We also have planned to visualize the pollution level of a city, e.g. with smog above the buildings.

[azpops]

Sounds like a much better system. I'll wait until I see the new one before passing judgment, but I like the idea of not having to worry about cleaning up pollution all the time.