First impressions
Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2013 11:21 pm
I'm very excited to see a new planet colonization game coming. Here are some of my first impressions and some thoughts. It's obviously a beta, so I'm not sure what is in the works and what isn't. These are a collection of my thoughts in a rambling order. I haven't actually finished a game yet, but I've started a few different games.
First off, installation worked fine. I alt tabbed to look up my serial number and immediately crashed out. Not good... Any time I alt tab or lose focus for any reason in full screen mode the game crashes. That's a pretty critical bug. I had to switch to windowed mode, which doesn't suffer that problem. However, if the window size is set to my screen resolution, when the game starts it crashes. I have to manually edit the configuration file, set it to a size smaller than my screen, restart, and then in-game go back and reset it to my desired screen size. I'm guessing this is related to the alt-tab bug. I'm running in windows 7 and have 2 monitors.
The main title screen looks good. It's a little strange that the first button on top is grayed out, I guess quick play isn't implemented yet? So I go to new game, where it puts me in a pretty standard game lobby and lets me pick a faction. Seems functional.
I picked a faction at random and hit start. I was sort of expecting an intro or explanation of what I'm doing. Apparently it's just assumed that we've played alpha centauri already and know that we've all crashed and formed militant factions on a strange planet for some reason. I was given the tree hugging hippy faction, who seem to get some minor advantage in pollution for a disadvantage in combat. I'm not sure how the alien aggression reduction works, because I was immediately surrounded by swarms of zerglings and flying mutalisks. Some of them would ignore me completely for a while, and then they would attack at random. Its totally unclear to me what their logic is. I started in some frigid wasteland, and just decided to place my first city there. My guess is that there isn't really any attempt to balance starting locations.
The graphics and interface look good, although it's pretty hard to tell what weapons a unit is equipped with when you aren't zoomed all the way in on it. The interface was responsive and worked well technically.
My impression of the gam eplay is that it is a standard civilization clone. The limited city radius seems like it makes city placement very important, but the fact that resources are shared between all cities sort of cancels that out. It appears from my extremely limited early game play, that spamming cities to cover as much surface as possible is what is important. Aliens attack seemingly at random, but having a few roving units stopped that from being a problem. It's like barbarians in civ, but ones who sometimes leave your undefended cities alone for no reason.
The biggest change that I can see from the standard civilization format is the uncoupling of food and mineral production and there consumption. This is something that I haven't seen in many of this sort of game. It's interesting to me that you can produce a lot of minerals in one place, and then use them somewhere else. It is strange though that there isn't any sort of transportation network required though. It seems like this is the perfect place to make roads and connections important, but in fact there isn't any sort of trade network and resources all just pass directly to and from an abstract bank.
Research is fairly blind, and doesn't really give you a good sense of what a technology is going to do for you. Maybe that is a good thing in the first play through, it makes discovery more exciting. I think that once you have discovered something once it should stay permanently in the civilipedia though. It doesn't look like the tech tree varies between games, so there really isn't a point in making it a secret after the first time.
Special map tiles are incredibly valuable, and terrain improvements are pretty dull, just the standard +1 to whatever. Since they all seem to work the same no matter what the underlying terrain is, there isn't really any need to think about how to place them. Thankfully there is an automated former option.
For some reason attacks on me between my turns don't always seem to show up in the alerts. I wish there was an option to have it zoom to the attacks as they happen so I don't miss something important. For example: I had an undefended city, the zerglings that I was ignoring because they were wandering around it for a number of turns without bothering anything decided to attack and destroy it. I didn't get any notification that I lost a city, but I did get a note that my former had been attacked a few squares over.
It seems like there should be a notion of territory control that is more than just the city radius, like culture, or expanding city radii.
Ruins are awfully boring right now, they're just goody huts, and not even particularly useful ones.
Special map features are WAY more valuable than regular squares, but not particularly interesting.
Pollution is a strange fundamental mechanic, it seems to just mean I need to occasionally waste former time on cleanup, and former time isn't exactly a rare resource. Its unclear if it ties into alien attacks at all. I'm assuming it does, but that's just because I've already played alpha centauri.
I like that you used the embarkation mechanic from civ V to let units cross water on their own.
I was VERY surprised to run into the left side of the map and not wrap around to the right...
My overall first impression is that the engine seems sound, but the actual game needs serious work. It currently seems like a fairly undifferentiated alpha centuari cover, but one which misses a lot of the essential things that made alpha centauri exciting. Somehow the feel seems off. It doesn't feel like I'm colonizing a terrifying alien world, it's more like I'm trying to efficiently lay out an even grid of hex cities while being annoyed by erratic nuisance creatures.
First off, installation worked fine. I alt tabbed to look up my serial number and immediately crashed out. Not good... Any time I alt tab or lose focus for any reason in full screen mode the game crashes. That's a pretty critical bug. I had to switch to windowed mode, which doesn't suffer that problem. However, if the window size is set to my screen resolution, when the game starts it crashes. I have to manually edit the configuration file, set it to a size smaller than my screen, restart, and then in-game go back and reset it to my desired screen size. I'm guessing this is related to the alt-tab bug. I'm running in windows 7 and have 2 monitors.
The main title screen looks good. It's a little strange that the first button on top is grayed out, I guess quick play isn't implemented yet? So I go to new game, where it puts me in a pretty standard game lobby and lets me pick a faction. Seems functional.
I picked a faction at random and hit start. I was sort of expecting an intro or explanation of what I'm doing. Apparently it's just assumed that we've played alpha centauri already and know that we've all crashed and formed militant factions on a strange planet for some reason. I was given the tree hugging hippy faction, who seem to get some minor advantage in pollution for a disadvantage in combat. I'm not sure how the alien aggression reduction works, because I was immediately surrounded by swarms of zerglings and flying mutalisks. Some of them would ignore me completely for a while, and then they would attack at random. Its totally unclear to me what their logic is. I started in some frigid wasteland, and just decided to place my first city there. My guess is that there isn't really any attempt to balance starting locations.
The graphics and interface look good, although it's pretty hard to tell what weapons a unit is equipped with when you aren't zoomed all the way in on it. The interface was responsive and worked well technically.
My impression of the gam eplay is that it is a standard civilization clone. The limited city radius seems like it makes city placement very important, but the fact that resources are shared between all cities sort of cancels that out. It appears from my extremely limited early game play, that spamming cities to cover as much surface as possible is what is important. Aliens attack seemingly at random, but having a few roving units stopped that from being a problem. It's like barbarians in civ, but ones who sometimes leave your undefended cities alone for no reason.
The biggest change that I can see from the standard civilization format is the uncoupling of food and mineral production and there consumption. This is something that I haven't seen in many of this sort of game. It's interesting to me that you can produce a lot of minerals in one place, and then use them somewhere else. It is strange though that there isn't any sort of transportation network required though. It seems like this is the perfect place to make roads and connections important, but in fact there isn't any sort of trade network and resources all just pass directly to and from an abstract bank.
Research is fairly blind, and doesn't really give you a good sense of what a technology is going to do for you. Maybe that is a good thing in the first play through, it makes discovery more exciting. I think that once you have discovered something once it should stay permanently in the civilipedia though. It doesn't look like the tech tree varies between games, so there really isn't a point in making it a secret after the first time.
Special map tiles are incredibly valuable, and terrain improvements are pretty dull, just the standard +1 to whatever. Since they all seem to work the same no matter what the underlying terrain is, there isn't really any need to think about how to place them. Thankfully there is an automated former option.
For some reason attacks on me between my turns don't always seem to show up in the alerts. I wish there was an option to have it zoom to the attacks as they happen so I don't miss something important. For example: I had an undefended city, the zerglings that I was ignoring because they were wandering around it for a number of turns without bothering anything decided to attack and destroy it. I didn't get any notification that I lost a city, but I did get a note that my former had been attacked a few squares over.
It seems like there should be a notion of territory control that is more than just the city radius, like culture, or expanding city radii.
Ruins are awfully boring right now, they're just goody huts, and not even particularly useful ones.
Special map features are WAY more valuable than regular squares, but not particularly interesting.
Pollution is a strange fundamental mechanic, it seems to just mean I need to occasionally waste former time on cleanup, and former time isn't exactly a rare resource. Its unclear if it ties into alien attacks at all. I'm assuming it does, but that's just because I've already played alpha centauri.
I like that you used the embarkation mechanic from civ V to let units cross water on their own.
I was VERY surprised to run into the left side of the map and not wrap around to the right...
My overall first impression is that the engine seems sound, but the actual game needs serious work. It currently seems like a fairly undifferentiated alpha centuari cover, but one which misses a lot of the essential things that made alpha centauri exciting. Somehow the feel seems off. It doesn't feel like I'm colonizing a terrifying alien world, it's more like I'm trying to efficiently lay out an even grid of hex cities while being annoyed by erratic nuisance creatures.