Slitherine

Had a chance to have a little play with the latest version and hope the following feedback is useful.

1. The new world graphics are fantastic and really help give Pandora its own personality. You've struck a great balance between a world that looks habitable and full of terrestrial greenery, whilst introducing just enough odd colours to make it obvious that this isn't Earth. Great work.

2. Still no auto-explore button!

3. The new former controls are appreciated, however when you hover over improvements such as mine or farm the tooltip shows +1 food/minerals etc, but does not show the pollution increase. You have to go into the help section to find out that building these improvements increases pollution. This should be a bit more obvious!

4. Whilst you seem to have increased production times to give a more civ-like balance, research times still seem tremendously fast. I can research 3-4 techs in the time it takes to build a single unit, by which time I've discovered so many upgrades the unit is already obsolete. Surely it can't be intentional that we're popping techs every other turn right at the beginning? It also removes any thought or consequence when choosing what to research. Whilst I'm now giving a bit more consideration about what units to build and when, I'm prettymuch just clicking on random techs as it really doesn't matter with the research time being so short. It doesn't help that I've no idea what research options get me where, but I know you're adding a research tree so at least this will be fixed.

5. Are there any plans for former upgrades? SMAC had loads. Being able to create a pollution-busting former would be nice, especially if you added a "clear pollution" automate order.

6. The addition of the "best armour" option in the workshop is much easier, and changing "copy" to "new" is much clearer

7. Need a combat odds prediction!

8. The little story 'report' popups are a great addition

9. Do units get a defence bonus for holding position? There's nothing on the "hold position" tooltip, but the fact that the icon is a shield would suggest they do.

Thanks for the feedback, Soheil will be happy you like what he's done with the graphics.

Other:
3. I'll add it to the hints.

4. We are going to rework the tech tree costs and progression so it should be better then.

5. No plans for former-specific devices at the moment, I think it's not the best use of our time.

9. No defense bonus for holding position.

Regards,
Rok

Cheers.

Encountered a strange situation where I founded a new city when my food stock was at zero with negative production. The city went from 1 pop to 0 pop, but still stayed on the map (albeit unable to produce anything). I reassigned workers in my HQ to get +ive food again and after a few turns the new city gained pop again.

I suppose it vaguely makes sense if you think of people travelling between cities... but it just seemed a bit odd. Save attached.

Couple more things:

1) When playing the game in a window you can close the window by clicking on the x at the top right as normal in Windows; I just think it might be an idea to have a confirmation dialogue when quitting this way to make sure the player doesn't want to save their game. Just thought it might be a quick easy addition.

2) Being able to drag-and-drop build queues in the city screen would be very handy.

3) When killing the last unit in a hive I feel the victorious unit should then move onto the hive tile right away and not have to wait an extra turn. Just used to this in other 4x games.

4) I'm starting to work out the food/minerals mechanics.Seems to make more sense and be working ok now.

5) Missing a zoom-to-combat when other players move. Makes it too easy to miss what's going on when combat happens offscreen after ending a turn.

Not a great deal wrong though, game is shaping up very well. Looking forward to the much needed research additions!