Slitherine

I haven't had a chance to play much, just my initial observations.

1. The new terrain color scheme looks really good to me. It's makes it look far more alien while still being completely readable. The hives don't stick out and look off now. Good work Soheil!

2. I noticed that there are now pollution modifiers on terrain. I like that forests reduce pollution. I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that that building a mine increases pollution even when it's not worked. It makes using auto formers to improve things a little dangerous, especially since it is much more costly to rush build formers. It's also weird that isogen fields increase pollution. Aren't they naturally occurring? Working them should cause pollution due to mining, but not just owning one.

3. Unit costs are way higher now, completely alters my starting strategy of buy everything. That's probably a good thing, but I have to play for a while to see how it works out.

4. I like that there is a popup about alien activity, but I couldn't tell what it was associate with. I had started wiping out hives and then I got the popup. It didn't seem to trigger any attack or anything though. Maybe it meant the aliens were shifting from neutral into attacking me? The big galeth didn't seem to care either way though.

5. Hooray for a button to automate formers around your city.

6. I noticed that there are new techs with unit devices. I haven't actually used any yet but that seems promising. Maybe the devices could be added to existing techs though? The tech tree is already very large without numerous additional techs.

Bugs:

A. I had a non reproducible crash when selecting research right after building a city. I've attached the save and logs. It didn't cleanly kill pandora and I had to manually shut down the process.

Bugs continued ( I wanted to upload a screenshot, but it's too large anyway, so I'm just uploading it to imgur instead.)

B. I had pollution occur, I noticed that the tool tip over the space showed that it added a pollution to the tile yield. Instead it actually reduced my pollution from the tile. Notice the square with the observatory. It has a mine on it, for a total of 2 mines around the city and no forests. The total contribution to pollution from territories is now only 1 after polluting the territory, but the tooltip for that terrain tile shows it as 2 pollutions. I like that having the pollution there stops the tile from polluting more, but either the tooltip or pollution total is wrong. (The image gets cuttoff in the forum, if you open it in a new tab you can see the full thing.)


I'm not sure which is intended. I think it's a very bad plan to have pollution tiles create more pollution. That could potentially end up with runaway pollution traps. In general, I still just don't like the pollution mechanic at all. It's a weird punishment that punishes you for doing anything positive in the game. It's not an interesting punishment, and there aren't really any interesting trade offs or choices to make about it.

The inconsistency should be fixed. The crash is trickier.

Random non-reoccurring crashes have to be difficult to debug. I figure that if you get enough crash reports than you'll eventually be able to see a pattern.