Impressions, yay!

[revokatt]

I have played half a dozen 4X games, beginning with Civ II in late 90's and going through e.g. Sid Meier series (Civilization/Alpha Centauri), Endless Space, Sins of a Solar Empire, Galactic Civilization II, Fallen Enchantress.

Launch:

Very smooth. Updater is pretty. Download speeds are slow (10% of full capacity) but only took a few minutes.

Main Menu is beautifully minimalistic, especially noticeable at 1920x1080.

Game set-up is good. Simple, clean, easy to understand. The UI is fantastic. Sleek is the word.


5 min:

I -love- being able to move with left mouse drag. So good.

When selecting an army I can tab down in the unit list with TAB, but not back up (1-2-stop vs 1-2-1-2 etc). Would be nice to be able to tab back to the top of the list.

Although I don't understand everything in the city screen, I'm appreciative of the minimalist UI and massive load of tooltips.

The tech tree is a bit confusing. It's not colour-coded in any way. Since it says "Colonization Era" at the top I'm guessing there's more to the tree later? Why can't I queue up advanced technologies (tier 2 or further) and have the game auto-plot research?

I set a territory to be acquired next with the green flag and now I can't un-flag it. : <

I like that I can click on most anything to pop up menus or tooltips (like clicking gold to make economy tab appear)

Refitting multiple units is a bit annoying. Once I click "Ok" to refit a unit, my army is de-selected and I have to re-select army, click unit #2, refit, etc.

30 min:

I really like the feeling you guys made of landing on a dangerous planet, with 8.0 aliens running around being generally dangerous and scary. They slaughtered my first attempts to expand.

The dialogue tree is cool, although a bit clumsy to navigate. Being able to expand the box would help a lot - I'm playing at 1920x1080 and it's needlessly small.

The tech tree remains pretty confusing. Some basic colour-coding for various groups of research would be cool - war/economy/industry/diplomacy (if that exists)/research etc. I have no idea how to get my people more food. I ran out of morale but I'm not really sure how I get it back - killing aliens?

Building your own vehicles is awesome.

Click and drag for production would be nice, particularly with Wealth. If I want to build Stuff, I have to click Wealth to cancel it, click Stuff, then click Wealth again to put it at the bottom.

Automated explore option would be really helpful.

I accidentally clicked space during a negotiation and now I don't know what happened.

A faction I had pretty much never met (no idea where they live, can't see their cities on map) declared war on me for what seems like no reason (I think my lacking army strength?) on the lowest difficulty. I was viciously defeated by a combination of tanks and aliens. Apparently everyone else expanded quickly. Hm.


1 hour, second try:

Massive sea monsters ate my boats.

Second time around went better. I cleared out some alien hives (feels pretty good, man) and set up a few cities and the rapid expansion kept my neighbours more peaceful. I'm really enjoying the struggle to stay alive, and the brutality of the world and the aliens. Clearing out roaming monsters and alien hives is awesome.

Research feels really fast compared to construction - I'm getting new buildings every 4-5 turns (on Standard speed) that take 10-20 to build. It also means I have to constantly re-fit, which gets a bit micro-intense.

Being able to purchase multiple buildings in one turn (even if they are produced sequentially) would help.

It's anoying having to cancel Wealth in every city to build a new building when you research it. Idle cities auto-Wealth, maybe? AI Governors?

Please let me shift+click Satellite Scan Operations to do multiple in a row, without having to re-click the icon every time. Click scan, shift, click 1-2-3-4-5, ez.

Being told someone else has nukes is nice - the first time. One faction built 3 nuke centers in one turn and I got three popups saying the exact same thing. Then another the next turn (for the same faction).


Final Impressions:

1 - The lack of strong aliens turned out to be a bit of a let-down. For me, the big hook to this game was "dangerous new planet, dangerous native creatures". This theme goes out the window after a few dozen turns. The beginnings felt tense and dangerous. My first city was smashed by aliens, and they almost ended up killing me. I was hunkering down in fear, trying to gather enough troops to take out a Hive. It was scary and felt punishing in a good way - as soon as I got stacks of soldiers with 10+ strength, less so. The sea was even more scary, with massive monsters that kept me land-locked - until I got a 20+ power ship and sailed the entire ocean without trouble, barely meeting any resistance.

More dangerous monsters for mid-late game would be great. I was definitely hoping to run into some Cthulhu-monsters w/ 100+ strength that would eat armies and threaten your civ. Running into a Levitathan the first time was really cool, but it felt like you acquired dominance over the aliens way, way too quickly. It was very dissapointing that the aliens went from being an existential threat to barely registerable in less than an an hour (standard speed). I was hoping they would continue to plague and threaten your survival for pretty much the entire game.

2 - The constant re-fitting of multiple armies became annoying. Perhaps some way to globally queue up soldier refitting is needed, like "Upgrade All X" from the workshop menu.

3 - On top of that, the AI even on Very Easy is extremely expansionistic. Dangerously so. The rate at which they expanded/teched and killed off eachother seems a bit inappropiate for the lowest difficulty. Someone who's brand new will have a hard time learning the game.

4 - The tech tree is needlessly difficult. Despite not having a lot of actual techs to research at once, with no classification at all it takes longer than it should identifying what I'm doing. Gal Civ 2-style colour coding or some general grouping together would be nice.

5 - Despite all that, I had troubles putting the game down. I love the colonization angle and how the game looks very clean and runs really smooth. I had no issues with crashes, noticeable bugs etc and the game started/loaded quick, turns were fast, UI is gorgeous.

Thanks for the time and opportunity.

[jdmillard]

Please let me shift+click Satellite Scan Operations to do multiple in a row, without having to re-click the icon every time. Click scan, shift, click 1-2-3-4-5, ez.

Yes. Apply this as well to field training and orbital bombardments.