First impressions for a few hours of play.
Posted: Tue Mar 05, 2013 9:30 pm
I started the game and went to the new-game setup screen. It provided enough information on the different factions to make a meaningful decision even without playing the game, which was great(actually, the factions had far bigger differences than I would have imagined, which is excellent, I like diverse factions).
First five minutes are a mixed bag. If you've played any fairly recent 4x game(Civ, Warlock, etc) you'll pretty much get the gist of how the game works, but I can imagine it being somewhat confusing as it is for a total newbie. The city screen especially doesn't explain anything. Since the "tile placement" is automatic, it was a bit confusing at first, since it's a mix of Master of Orion 2 and Civilization as it is. You control the populace like in MOO2, yet the actual productivity is based on tiles Civ-style. Getting a grasp of how it works wasn't instantaneous.
After a few hours I might say the AI is a bit weak. Although I'm playing on the average/medium difficulty, it's been a breeze so far. The AIs seem to be behind me in everything, and their military decisions are incompetent. One faction declared war on me and sent a single jet fighter to shoot down my units. It worked well since most of my units were formers and buggies and such, so easily destroyed. But once I made my own jets, it was apparent the AI had very poor military units, only a few of them and the only defence in their capital was a basic infantry unit. And since you can capture cities with jets(Possibly weak design, jets are mostly far superior to anything else for a while when you get them, once you get the mechs it changes, but seems to me you shouldn't let jets capture cities, it makes things too easy to raid with them over seas and mountains and such), the war was over in a few turns. But the game is quite good even now, I was quite surprised at the size of the tech tree, I've discovered a fair amount of them and I'm still at less than 10%. Are there actually that many techs or does it display it incorrectly? I suppose I'll find out once I play more.
My biggest problem was that I couldn't find a way to set formers to only remove pollution automatically. I assumed that they'd trash the forests I planted and build farms and such in their place, so I didn't dare to put them to "improve nearest city". Would be nice if I could set them to just clean pollution.
Also, a possible oversight, you can't build roads on top of forests, but you can plant forests on top of roads. So, absurdly, I cleaned to forests away, made a road, then planted a forest on top of it to cancel the pollution it caused.
Seems to me that the taxation system is a bit strange as well. I see no reason to put the taxes above 0% at any times, since at 0% you get plenty of bonuses to resource gathering of the other kinds, which are far more important than money. If I do need money, I'll just print it in a colony with the 50% production increase flowers, so the morale of other colonies won't suffer(if I raised taxes).
First five minutes are a mixed bag. If you've played any fairly recent 4x game(Civ, Warlock, etc) you'll pretty much get the gist of how the game works, but I can imagine it being somewhat confusing as it is for a total newbie. The city screen especially doesn't explain anything. Since the "tile placement" is automatic, it was a bit confusing at first, since it's a mix of Master of Orion 2 and Civilization as it is. You control the populace like in MOO2, yet the actual productivity is based on tiles Civ-style. Getting a grasp of how it works wasn't instantaneous.
After a few hours I might say the AI is a bit weak. Although I'm playing on the average/medium difficulty, it's been a breeze so far. The AIs seem to be behind me in everything, and their military decisions are incompetent. One faction declared war on me and sent a single jet fighter to shoot down my units. It worked well since most of my units were formers and buggies and such, so easily destroyed. But once I made my own jets, it was apparent the AI had very poor military units, only a few of them and the only defence in their capital was a basic infantry unit. And since you can capture cities with jets(Possibly weak design, jets are mostly far superior to anything else for a while when you get them, once you get the mechs it changes, but seems to me you shouldn't let jets capture cities, it makes things too easy to raid with them over seas and mountains and such), the war was over in a few turns. But the game is quite good even now, I was quite surprised at the size of the tech tree, I've discovered a fair amount of them and I'm still at less than 10%. Are there actually that many techs or does it display it incorrectly? I suppose I'll find out once I play more.
My biggest problem was that I couldn't find a way to set formers to only remove pollution automatically. I assumed that they'd trash the forests I planted and build farms and such in their place, so I didn't dare to put them to "improve nearest city". Would be nice if I could set them to just clean pollution.
Also, a possible oversight, you can't build roads on top of forests, but you can plant forests on top of roads. So, absurdly, I cleaned to forests away, made a road, then planted a forest on top of it to cancel the pollution it caused.
Seems to me that the taxation system is a bit strange as well. I see no reason to put the taxes above 0% at any times, since at 0% you get plenty of bonuses to resource gathering of the other kinds, which are far more important than money. If I do need money, I'll just print it in a colony with the 50% production increase flowers, so the morale of other colonies won't suffer(if I raised taxes).