First Impressions from new Beta player

[SheBear]

So I just began the Pandora Beta a little earlier today, so here are some impressions about playing about 30 minutes. I played as the Imperium with a medium sized world, with random world configuration, and on Easy.

I really like the way the world looks. The terrain is very pretty and both "generic" enough to know what everything is at first, and "alien" enough to be interesting. It definitely looks a lot like Civ5 (though I haven't played more than the demo of that, so I don't know how it plays in relation). The interface seems very smooth and useful. The battle animations between units and xenomorphs was fun to watch, and it was pretty easy to tell what was going on (though I sort of wish that there was more of a visual indicator of damage to a unit, but that is a minor nitpick).

The research tree seemed a bit confusing to me at first, as I didn't understand exactly how it worked at first. Though I think I now have a handle on it.

I think I might have wanted a tiny bit more in terms of tooltip/help bubble pop ups at the beginning. It seemed to be pretty good, but there wasn't a ton of individual detail on things like the city management panel.

Overall, it seems pretty great, and I really am enjoying the atmosphere. Once I play some more (specifically regarding more combat stuff--with other factions, not just the planet) I'll update with some more impressions.

Edit: some updated thoughts... So, I feel like there aren't enough outward visual clues to the status of cities. I can't tell if they their morale is increasing or decreasing without going into the city management screen. Which I often forget to do. Or when I am there I only am thinking about production and so don't even look at the left side of the screen. So that seems a bit of a problem for me. Other than that, I've been having fun fighting some of the other factions and haven't seem to run into any issues with that as of yet.

[Bookworm83]

Decided to post my first impressions here rather than make an entirely new thread just for that.

I just played through a full game on a medium sized map with some easy AIs to get a feel for things.

I think the game is pretty great. Great UI for the most, nice graphics, pretty good animations. Even at the end of the game with the whole map explored and units everywhere it had very smooth turn transitions. I liked the little descriptions for all the techs and terrains and stuff. That definitely added to the game. And the operations are a neat feature to have. I've never seen anything like that before. It's hard to really point out specific good points, because really I felt the whole thing was pretty good.

Anyway for the most part I was fairly impressed, but there were a few things I noticed that felt odd.

I started two different games and the way that the research tree was laid out seemed to be random. Not a problem in itself, but the research necessary to lead into another research didn't seem to make any sense. What's more it appears that you only need to research one prerequisite for a technology in order to research that technology. Even when there were multiple technologies which looked like they were prerequisites based on the lines. It just seemed somewhat unintuitive to me. Especially since I couldn't see very far ahead in the technology tree so I couldn't make any long term plans to increase something specific since where that thing would show up was random, or at least not obvious ahead of time. I ended up just researching everything in one column then researching the next column, and so on.

Diplomacy was just really sparse. There were the standard research and trade alliances. And I could declare war or go for an actual alliance but that was pretty much all I could do. And there wasn't much telling me what the AIs were reacting to. They would give me money as tribute pretty much every other turn for no reason at all. All of them, even ones I had just met. Even ones I was at war with. Really odd. And on the other hand sometimes they would just declare war. Even though we were on opposite sides of the map with pretty much no contact and even trade or research treaties they'd declare war. And then they wouldn't do anything. I spent pretty much the entire game at war with the Imperium and they never once sent any units to attack me.

Terraforming is the last oddity I saw. It seems like the formers do not know how to use the ecoregion improvement when they're automated. I had a bunch of formers just sitting around even though there were quite a few hexes in my territory that were deserts and could have used some improvement. Also once I researched all the fungus techs I noticed that it was more economical to surround my cities with fungus, but not only did the automated formers not do this, they also removed all the fungus I placed manually. That might actually be intended. I could see why having to manually micromanage your formers to get the absolute best out of them might be a design goal.

Are events in? I noticed an events tab down at the bottom of the screen, but it never activated through the whole game.

Edit: I should note that I didn't see any bugs of any kind. No glitches or crashes, everything ran smoothly.

[void]

Thanks for the feedback guys! Pretty much everything you pointed out will be worked on and improved/fixed.