Thoughts after 200 turns

[Theodotus]

I'm now a bit more than 200 turns into my playthrough, and I thought it might be time to stop and reflect on the experience:

The game definitely has the "one more turn" effect going on. It's held my attention quite well -- I've stayed up later than intended more than one night so far.

The tech tree has a good flavor to it. Intellectually I know that it really just boils down to sequential improvements to various game mechanics (food production, minerals production, etc.) but still something about it makes me feel like I'm progressing into future levels of technology. The flavor text is overall very nice.

I love the operations game mechanic. It's one of the things that makes Pandora feel like more than just a rehash of past designs. Some of the operations are just nice elaborations -- field training, for example -- but some of them are very much game changers, like cloning, which allowed my city development to basically explode. I love the fact that they can be used anywhere, not just in the city that builds them; this furthers the city specialization aspect of the game (which sets it apart for me from other 4x games I've played in the past), since operations can be churned out in a city specialized for production and then applied elsewhere. I can't praise this game mechanic highly enough; I just wish there were even more of these on the tech tree.

I like the combat system, and the unit design. (I do think tanks and mechs should have a movement of 2, and ATVs should move 3. And planes would make more sense if they had to operate out of a city, and could strike any hex out to a certain range -- their ability to just fly around without landing or refueling makes them seem like something other than planes.)

I am still wrapping my mind around the nuances of city development, but I like it very much. I like the worker assignment system as it is, because it differentiates the game from the Civ-style approach of just having workers harvest whatever is in a hex. I do, however, wish there were more ways to develop hexes then there are at present.

Diplomacy needs work. The actions of the AI players have seemed cryptic to me.

I wish it were possible to trade food and minerals, both as one-time transactions and as on-going trade agreements. A mechanism for transferring cities other than military conquest would be good also. So would one for allowing military access to claimed territory without the need for an alliance. Tech trading would be good as an option that could be turned on or off during game set up.

As discussed in other threads, it would be nice to be able to do something with the wildlife other than just exterminate it.

Beyond this, I'm thinking about going back and playing SMAC, just remind myself exactly how it differs from Pandora. (I haven't played SMAC in many years.) That game is what Pandora will be measured against, so I think it would be good to compare the two in detail.