First impressions

[richmcd]

Surprisingly, I managed to get the game running on my old laptop. It runs very smoothly, considering, so kudos there. I played for about ten minutes before restarting (I was hemmed in on a weird isthmus, and hadn't really clocked how to play). In my new game I played for about fifty minutes before losing a city to the AI. So this is my feedback after the first hour of play.

I enjoyed it well enough, but I can't say I was grabbed. As I was worrying in the backstory/dialogue thread, there seems to be a serious disconnect between the flavour of the factions, which is basically parody, and the gameplay and the rest of the setting, which is serious sci-fi that doesn't really deviate from well-established genre conventions. (In another thread SephiRok described the style as "dark sci-fi". If that's the aim, then I'm afraid I think you've fallen quite far of the mark. The bits that weren't generic were goofy rather than dark.)

I liked the fact that there was plenty of flavour text, but I think it all needs to be looked at again. It's not bad, but it is quite loose and sloppy, and while I only saw a very small proportion of it, I assume it's going to get worse rather than better (the early tech entries and events presumably have been seen and edited a lot more than the later ones). There wasn't a single entry I saw that I wouldn't want to edit, although I accept I have very high standards in this regard.

It wouldn't take too much work to tighten it up to professional standard, but at the moment it has a distinct first draft feel to it, like it's the work of a single overworked guy who's doing a great job under the circumstances but needs someone else on the team to give it a look over with a strong critical eye. There are lots of extra words, mistaken homophones, repetitive sentences, and phrases that crop up again and again in quite a distracting way. I'll put specific examples in a separate thread.

I'm torn about the research tree. Randomizing it has great gameplay advantages, because you have to plot your route through it each time. The downside is it makes no narrative sense whatsoever, because techs are linked arbitrarily. So my already bruised immersion took another battering. My suggestion would be to have a "canonical" tech tree which people play the first time, and then allow randomization afterwards. That might also help first time players. (I think the tech arrangement I got on my second game was much kinder than in my first.)

I love the operations. They're by far the strongest feature of the ones I've found.

The graphics are very nice, I think. The music has been good so far. It's unobtrusive, which is want you want if you're going to be listening to it for 40 hours+

There don't seem to be any economic/political options other than a simple tax slider? That's a little disappointing.

I was very disappointed in the lack of wonders/special projects. In a different thread I saw SephiRok say that they were removed because they don't add much to the game and take a lot of work. I can see that (although I don't see why they shouldn't add a lot to the game, with a little ingenuity), but what they do add is a ton of narrative context. Sorry to harp on about this, but I think it really is vital. Sci-fi versions of farms and mines and barracks go some way to building up the setting, it's true, but they're hard to make interesting because of their limitations. Insane building projects are a quick and easy way to separate your setting from other games. They're memorable, unique, and much easier to write flavour text about than mineral processing facilities! While I appreciate the budgetary concern over the videos, I think that's a red herring. A simple splash screen would be fine. What they do is give the player something to aim for, something to want to capture, something to be notified about in the events log, something to race over, etc. etc. I think for most people a playthrough of a 4X game is, in retrospect, largely a blur but with a dozen or so distinct moments. Wonders often provide those distinct moments, as do the events surrounding the victory conditions. Without either of those, I worry that the game isn't going to be very memorable. Part of this will be because I don't find the military aspects of these games very engaging (I happily play Civ V building only a handful of units). But I can't be alone in this, and the absence of both wonders AND an analogue for social policies is going to severely lessen the appeal for that kind of player, I think.

Anyway, that's just my initial thoughts. I'm going to start again. I expect I'll have a much better time now I know what I'm doing.

[SephiRok]

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts, richmcd!

We can only do so much 14 days before release, but we'll keep it in mind for after.

Cheers,
Rok

[richmcd]

Thanks for the reply. Sorry, in my excitement to play the game and help I didn't realise just how long the beta test has already running. (I only recently heard about it, and stupidly thought it was just beginning)

If I'd known how soon the release date was, I'd have kept my thoughts to things that can practically be fixed/changed.

I'm afraid I can't really give much input on the gameplay side of things. It did seem like buildings were very slow compared with research, but that's really just a narrative thing again (does it make sense to discover 3 new techs in the time it takes to make a mineral processing plant). If you're not overly bothered by that aspect, then it seems fine. I enjoyed getting techs so quickly.

I didn't notice any graphical or audio bugs, but I didn't fiddle with the settings too much on my ancient laptop.

I think the flavour text is a big thing that CAN easily be perfected in time. At the moment it's all very lumpen and waffly, but that's usual for first draft stuff. I think a lot of it must have been written once and never looked at again, except maybe to check for typos.

I've been talking to Dan a bit, but I get the impression that he's only proofing/editing the sections that he wrote, which means the timeline/dialogue and some small parts of the flavour text. Maybe I've misunderstood. I think it would be helpful to have someone go over the rest of the text and just prune out all the extra adverbs, waffle etc. And maybe rearrange the longer sentences into a more natural word order. Someone with a good eye for language will be able to sort it all out within two weeks, easy, unless I'm completely underestimating how many words there are. (I'd guess 40k? As an example, I'd expect to turn around a 100k novel in a fortnight if it was in as good a shape as all the flavour text I saw, and I think I work fairly slowly.)