Advanced First Impressions

[DewyB]

The very first time opening a game (from installation to the first mistake) is very important... but not everything. Many of the games I enjoy are too complex to grasp full mechanics and options in the first days. Pandora benefits by holding to some traditions and for people who are familiar with this type of game, I think they will find it fairly intuitive.

One of the sternest measures is replay ability. AC, Civ1 & 2 I found VERY re-playable. Some of the other games in that genre I found pretty, but clunky and/ or awkward... with only minor variations on the theme of how it went the first time. In my second game I am finding this game seems to be very much in the re-playable department... terrain variations creating entirely new strategies with each new map. High marks there so far.

Some other first impressions, I thought I was going mad when the trees shifted in the menu screen. That's going to take some getting used to. Seems small and silly, but a good inclusion.

My wife doesn't like these games generally... but this one she remarked was "pretty", and I have to agree, at least map wise.

I'm still having a lot of issue with the game getting laggy... cutting down on running processes helped, but just running Win 7 (2 gig of RAM) and Pandora develops a mouse lag after 20 turns or approximately an hour of game play. Restarting the game will buy you about that much time before the mouse lag returns.

the button issue seems to be resolved and was a mismatch in resolution.

[Kordanor]

Hey Dewy

2 gig of RAM is what you needed to have in an XP machine. And while Win7 isn't as hungry as Vista, you should defintely stock up your memory. In a Windows 7 machine 2 gig of RAM will hold you back a lot. Just check your Task manager in the fourth tab (should be called performance or something like that) and check on the second row on the left how much memory is used without even starting the game. In my case, with my background programms (steam, skype, firefox...) I am at 2,5 gig already. If the ram is full, more stuff as to be read and written from the harddrive which will cause serious delay, problems in frame rate and high loading times.

[DewyB]

I dug a little deeper, I have 4 gig of RAM, 3.91 gig or so is reported.

I need to keep looking to find out what the issue is.