Slitherine

I spent some time playing the game yesterday and here is my general feedback
* There is far too much alien activity at the beginning. It does not scale up. You have a few turns of peace and then wave after wave of attacks. It just never stops. I think you need a relationship with the aliens that you can manage by your actions to influence how much they attack you. Alien activity needs to grow over time so you only get weak creatures at the beginning and larger and more frequent ones spawn later.
* There are not enough options in a city. I very quickly run out of things to build. You end up building mostly military units. We need more building types and they need to be available sooner. They can provide a variety of bonuses - use AC and Civ as examples of the types of buildings we can have.
* I played for some time - had 6 cities and covered a fair part of the planet but never met an AI side. The level of Alien activity makes it very hard to explore in the early stages and this is exactly when you need exploring to be a big part of the game play as there is very little else to do.
* The pace of progress feels too slow. Each tech only releases one thing to me. In Civ you tend to get multiple things per tech which means there is more variety of stuff to build. By the time I get a new tech I have already built everything else in the city and just build the newly available item.
* My cities all feel the same and I always build the same stuff in them. There doesn't seem to be any specialization. There may be in what they produce but not in what you build there. E.g. the food and production bonuses are a fixed amount - making them a % or a fixed amount and % bonus would make it more relevant what you built where. E.g. in a city that has no food production I get the same food boost as a city that just produces food.
* There seems to be little incentive to space cities out and as there is no penalty to having lots of cities you just put them as close together as you can.
* Cities grow in a single big jump. I suggest that each population unit over X adds one additional hex to your borders.
* Can we have some way to expand your borders without building a city? Could forts "own" the tile they are on and act like an expanded border? It doesn't have to have any significant gameplay effect but it will make it feel like your area of influence is expanding. Can larger cities slowly push their borders out too?
* Can we show the expected loses when you target an enemy unit.
* I don't understand research at all and just randomly click. We need a research tree but it also needs to give a detailed list of what the benefits of each technology are. List the building/unit and what it does.
* If I tell my units to defend they should heal. The heal command should only differ from this in that when they are healed they should be activated again.
* When I end my turn I am attacked by multiple aliens - sometimes 4+ and I don't even have a large empire or any contact with an AI or a war going on. All the attacks resolve simultaneously making it impossible to see what is happening. It needs to cycle through each attack one at a time. Without this the later stages of the game will be pretty much unplayable as you will have no idea what is going on.
* A the moment all units that have orders to a route that will take multiple turns execute that move the moment you click end turn - at the start of the next turn. This doesn't work well and instead they should execute when you click end turn,. at the end of the previous turn. Otherwise the situation can have changed due to what the AI does and your units have already moved and you cannot react which is frustrating.
* All sides seem to move simultaneously which I think is very confusing - why not have real turns like all the other games of this genre? Each side moves one after the other. Currently if you have contact with multiple enemy sides all moves and combats will resolve together and you wont have any idea who attacked you, as everyone moves together. If it moved in turns, you'd see anyone combats while the green player moved were attacks by the Green player.

* There is far too much alien activity at the beginning. It does not scale up. You have a few turns of peace and then wave after wave of attacks. It just never stops. I think you need a relationship with the aliens that you can manage by your actions to influence how much they attack you. Alien activity needs to grow over time so you only get weak creatures at the beginning and larger and more frequent ones spawn later.

Iain, what level of alien activity are you playing with? I'm using the default, and in most of the starts I've seen I have had negligible alien activity.
Since it sounds like you're on your own continent, maybe you're getting the allotment for a whole continent. Aliens should really be proportional to the humans activity rather than evenly distributed across the map...

* There are not enough options in a city. I very quickly run out of things to build. You end up building mostly military units. We need more building types and they need to be available sooner. They can provide a variety of bonuses - use AC and Civ as examples of the types of buildings we can have.

* My cities all feel the same and I always build the same stuff in them. There doesn't seem to be any specialization. There may be in what they produce but not in what you build there. E.g. the food and production bonuses are a fixed amount - making them a % or a fixed amount and % bonus would make it more relevant what you built where. E.g. in a city that has no food production I get the same food boost as a city that just produces food.

I'm not sure it's just a lack of options to build things, it's a lack of meaningful choices. There's no wonders or mega projects, and it's relatively easy to build every building you want, so every city it's just a matter of building everything useful and ignoring the rest of the buildings. Some of the buildings fall into the definitely build everywhere category, and some fall into the never bother with. Very few, (unit training buildings are the only I can think of) are something that I need to think about. The early +4 production buildings are a clear example of things that you definitely build everywhere, and contribute to the usefulness of sprawling small cities everywhere. They should definitely be shifted to being % modifiers like you say.

* There seems to be little incentive to space cities out and as there is no penalty to having lots of cities you just put them as close together as you can.
* Cities grow in a single big jump. I suggest that each population unit over X adds one additional hex to your borders.
* Can we have some way to expand your borders without building a city? Could forts "own" the tile they are on and act like an expanded border? It doesn't have to have any significant gameplay effect but it will make it feel like your area of influence is expanding. Can larger cities slowly push their borders out too?

The city borders are strange right now, organically growing would be good, but the fact that each city owns it's own land rather than the empire owning land makes really weird. If I have 2 cities whose borders overlap the same tiles, I should be able to assign workers from either city to that tile. It shouldn't be arbitrarily captured forever by the first city that was next to it. It doesn't matter much, because the production from cities is shared anyway, but it's strange and uncomfortable behavior. I shouldn't have to remember hidden internal borders to make plans.

* A the moment all units that have orders to a route that will take multiple turns execute that move the moment you click end turn - at the start of the next turn. This doesn't work well and instead they should execute when you click end turn,. at the end of the previous turn. Otherwise the situation can have changed due to what the AI does and your units have already moved and you cannot react which is frustrating.

This has been mentioned a few times by different people, it definitely needs to change.

* If I tell my units to defend they should heal. The heal command should only differ from this in that when they are healed they should be activated again.

Is this really the behavior? I just assumed mine were healing while defending. Since there is no fortification bonus, not healing while defending is a bug.

* All sides seem to move simultaneously which I think is very confusing - why not have real turns like all the other games of this genre? Each side moves one after the other. Currently if you have contact with multiple enemy sides all moves and combats will resolve together and you wont have any idea who attacked you, as everyone moves together. If it moved in turns, you'd see anyone combats while the green player moved were attacks by the Green player.

An option to zoom to and replay attacks would be helpful here. Or even just more information when you mouse over the attack note, not just "a marine was attacked" but "A marine was attacked by a tank owned by the team x, it took 3 damage but survived and the attacker took 6 damage and was destroyed."
A way of replaying the attacks or a log that you can scroll back through after accidently clicking off the notifications would help too.