First Impressions

[Delta66]

Pandora initial impressions:

Initially I had a number of problem with the installer both on Windows(download issues) and on Linux (Nvidia Optimus issue). Basically I struggled the first evening and was only able to play the next day.The first version I succesfully played was v 0.20.0

I had previously played Proxy Studio's Conquest, and watched preview videos about Pandora, so I wasn't completely surprised. Overall the gfx look clean and much more polished than in Conquest. The user interface also looks clean and modern, we don't have the feeling of playing a 20th century game. It reminded me of Endless Space.
The first thing I do when loading a game is to turn off the music volume (I keep the sound FX of course), if I want some music I rather listen to my stereo, or at least make my own playlist on the computer. So I cannot comment on the music.

Having played Civ4, Civ 5 Demo, GalCiv I & II and others 4X , I quickly felt at home despite the absence of manual. Of course I had no idea of the inner mechanisms details, but right from the first game, I was able to plan a little ahead, and start developing my faction. Here I find the UI did a good job of making the right informations quickly available.
The good point is that I was immediately focusing on discovering the universe and planning rather than struggling against the UI. Discovering the planet and the various aliens is very enjoyable on the first plays, especially when you first encounter the large sea creatures.

Second thoughts, now v 0.21.0:
I have played at least once with each faction, mostly on small and one on medium. Actually I was able to finish only one. I was unable to finish two, one on Windows and one on Linux of them because the save file format changed with the upgrades. I two other games, while I was well in the midgame I started to have more and more important lags, to the point where one game crashed because of “unknown server error”.
The game I finished was a military victory with the Imperium (thanks Artillery). The game ended after I captured the cities of 2 opponents. At that point it was obvious I was leading and I appreciate that the game finish without having to eradicate every opponents down to their last units.

What I like:
- The SF theme.
- The game is rather accessible for a civ game.
- There is rather less micromanagements than in other civ games, which is usually the bane of 4X games, this point is really important for me.
- You can complete a small map in an evening which is also very good, I understand that some players might like longer experiences, but for me it is important to be able to finish a game in a reasonable amount of time. I play a lot of strategy boardgames, and except for hardcore wargames the play time is usually tightly calibrated, and you can have challenging games with enough strategy in 2 hours. Many computer strategy games offers longer playtime, but the gameplay often becomes repetitive over the length, and the ratio of meaningful decisions/ time fall too low.
- The global pool of resources, this helps reduce micromanagement, moreover it also allows to specialize cities dynamically during the game, as opposed to Civ IV for example where you should rather specialize your cities right from the start and more or less stick to it as the buildings are more important than the allocation of manpower.
- Many production building give a small fixed value, in addition to a % bonus.
- The ability to expand your cities in your own direction, rather than in fixed “fat cross” pattern. It gives you more options to bias the development of your cities in a specific direction, either to balance an average city initial position (i.e. you can build your city next to a promising spot rather than right on it), or for interesting blocking strategies. I also liked the possibility to expand over waters and maybe connect to land hexs on the other side of the water.
So far it seems that you can extend 2 hexs in any directions from your starting 7 hexs. I think it could be even better if we could extend 3 hexs in any directions. It could lead to balance issues but it would allows for even more cities development strategies.
- The variable tech tree, it adds to replayability and it forces you to adapt your tech strategy for each specific game, rather than always using the same techs development for the same factions.
- Units customization is simple and efficient, and fits well within the overall moderate complexity of the game to allow for various armies building strategies.
Multi platforms support.
- Operations, either one shot or with cooldown, offer interesting options.

What I don't like:

Edit: I was able to solve the technical issue which caused my Gfx card not to be used as its best. Now the game run very smoothly. I'd like to make it clear that it was not related to Pandora 3D engine. See below down the thread for more detail.

- The single most negative thing is for me the 3D engine. Not that it is particularly bad, but because 3D engines in general use a lot of resources and often for a little gain in game play, in particular for strategy games.
Indeed the game isn't multitask friendly and I find that I should rather close the game even to type a simple mail, otherwise the keyboard is slow to respond. Even within the game the UI is sometime a bit slow, it is ok for a turn by turn game, but it would be a problem for an RTS. You'd better be careful to release the mouse button while still over the various small widgets, and not to make too quick moves with the mouse. From times to times, I thing I clicked something or pressed a key, but I have to repeat my input.I only use a laptop Core i5 430m, 4GB, Nvidia GT325M, but I can play a number of RTS, or first person RPG without any trouble.

In particular the 3D view doesn't add much to the gameplay. If the 3D gfx where prerendered and displayed in a fake 3D way, with all hexs having the same size whatever the distance, it would tax the system less, and don't reduce the play experience. For strategy games, 2D engines with clean gfx, like PzCorps for example, works very well.

Things that could be improved:
- The game is still in beta, but there may be balance issues, concerning the various factions special powers, the combat units, and the starting positions.
- More in game events, or things to discover, discovering the aliens the first time is great but the novelty quickly fade away, with repeated plays. Maybe minor factions or alternative alien races.
- More scenarios to change from the free for all on random map. Maybe some non random maps, for example factions start in low ressources areas and there are resources rich areas in the middle of the map. A maps editor woud be great, and maybe a units editor as well.
- The Diplomacy still feels quite basic. I'm not sure you can make an alliance with alayer to attak another one.


Overall I rather enjoyed the game. In particular the fairly compact experience, the ratio between playing time, meaningful decisions to make, and micromanagement feel good to me. Right now I will rather play it than Civ IV, Civ certainly has more depth, but there is much more micromanagement and the late game is not so exciting. So far Pandora offers a solid game experience, although therer is some tuning to do for a final release. Yet, as it is now in Beta, in the long run Pandora may lack some diversity.

[Gorb]

The recent Civ games have all featured 3D-rendered graphics. As has Sword of the Stars and other comparable 4x games.

Any performance issues with Pandora are likely to be either running the game on too-high settings, or the game itself not being well-optimised. That said, bear in mind your laptop hardware is relatively low spec for gaming (the 325M is both a low-generation card and the Mobile marker means that it's about half as powerful as the desktop equivalent). Your CPU is likely to have a low clock speed as well, which will affect Pandora if it isn't optimised for multi-core performance.

I have absolutely no issues running the game on my desktop computer, which has an nVidia 250GTS (which is a very old card). i5-3550k CPU and 8GB of DDR3 RAM.

For gameplay comparisons, I recommend both Civilisation 2 and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

[Delta66]

I know that my hardware specs are 3 years old and not top of the range, that's precisely why I mentioned them. my screen is only 1366*768 though which balance a bit the low hardware compared to larger destop screen. I probably change my hardware soon anyway.

I tried to player either on medium or on low gfx details, and didn't notice any significant changes. Several of my games ended up in severe lags, but it could be a bug rather than a pure performance issue.

However I have played Civ 5, Sots, Sins of a Solar Empire, Torchlight II, Defense Grid, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, HoMM V, all use 3D and some have a non fixed camera which make computations more intensive. In neither of those game I had significant issues, even on medium gfx settings.
It was just a comparison on how Pandora fares on my hardware compared to other 3D game on my hardware. I have no problem playing the game, but the UI feels slightly less responsive than the in aforementioned games. And were Pandora is clearly behind is about multitasking. I can play SoSE which is real time 3D with several apps running in the background and even while compressing large data files.

[SephiRok]

I would recommend you make sure you have the latest 2013 graphics drivers. OpenGL support has not been great in the past.

[Delta66]

I updated my Nvidia driver last month on Windows, and on Linux last week.

[void]

Thanks for the feedback Delta66!

How do your FPS change (FPS can be displayed with Alt+F1) when enabling/disabling anti-aliasing or lowering the resolution via the game's video settings? When checking the process monitor while your FPS are low / it is lagging, what is the CPU consumption of Pandora.exe and PandoraServer.exe?

[Delta66]

I'm glad to report that I was able to solve my lag problems on Windows 7, For Linux it doesn't work well yet.

Apparently the issue comes from Nvidia Optimus , technology, my GT 325M is from the first generation of Optimus technology.
As I use my laptop plugged into the mains 99% of the time, I set my system preferences to use the Gfx accelerator by default.
Nevertheless I realized that for Pandora the Gfx Card wasn't using my hardaware to its full extent.
So I manually forced the settings for 'Pandora.exe' to use the the Gfx card maximal possibility. However it seems that my custom settings were not saved properly.
Now it works well I have no lag issues and the UI and 3D are similar in speed to the other 3D games I mentioned previously.

I remember allready having this problem once, in three and a half years, it was with Legend of Grimrock, another indie game that use a custom 3D engine. I don't know if they use Open GL though. Every other times the Gfx card properly switch automatically to full speed as the need arise.

Anyway for some reasons, it seems that the Optimus driver don't detect properly the need for accelerated Gfx for Pandora. I don't know if the programmer should add a flag in his software, or if the hardware should detect this alone (I think it should work that way). Maybe it is worth mentioning in your manual.

For Linux, it is more complex as the Optimus technology isn't supported by the official Nvidia driver. I installed Bumblebee, which is an open source attempt to use the Optimus tech, I can accelerate some applications to max writing 'optirun' before the executable name, but so far I was not able to make it works at full speed. I haven't dive in all the subtlety of the Bumblebee config options yet.

[SephiRok]

That's interesting. A quick search seems to reveal it's an issue with OpenGL: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1807 ... der-opengl

I'll take a look at available solutions and let you know of any changes.

Thanks a lot for letting us know! <3

[Delta66]

Now with proper Gfx acceleration,

medium map in the late game.
Process CPU usage: Basic Pandora.exe 20- 25

Low,Low, No AA -> Basic 5-20 FPS, Accelerated 35-47 FPS
Med,Med,AA -> Basic 3-10 FPS, Accelerated FPS25-30 FPS
High,High, AA ->Basic -, Accelerated 20-22FPS


medium map new game begining

Low,Low, No AA -> Basic 11-12FPS CPU 20-22
High,High, AA ->Basic -> 13 FPS CPU 23

[Delta66]

Interesting link, officially I think Nvidia support OpenGL, however there's big difference with OpenGL v 4+ over the previous ones.

[SephiRok]

I've made a change that NVIDIA says should direct the Optimus driver to use high performance graphics.

With the next update it would be awesome if you can remove the manual override and see if still uses the dedicated graphics.

Cheers,
Rok

[Delta66]

I will certainly try, but I may report only in 20-24h.

[SephiRok]

Update won't be for some days still.

Also, it won't change anything for Linux.

Thanks again!