Downloaded and installed flawlessly, a rare feat for a linux 64 bit beta! Congrats. Pleasantly surprised to see a nice, glossy modern splash screen. Feeling happy and excited to see what this game has to offer. Looking through the factions and seeing plenty of opportunity for a very well developed storyline with plenty of twists and turns. Great! First things first, turn all graphics settings to high and test performance. On an i5 with 6GB Ram and an Nvidia GT220 Gfx card with the Nvidia proprietary drivers, the game is veeeery clunky on high settings, nigh unplayable, which seems strange because there does not appear to be that much happening onscreen. Anyway, bump GFX quality down to medium and continue, game now runs smoothly... Noticing something strange with the window settings.
My monitor is 1280 x 1050.. The settings for fullscreen are not native to my monitor, and when I run in fullscreen it is still 'windowed' but the window is overlapping the edge of my monitor. when I switch to windowed it acts normally. If I change to a lower resolution and enter fullscreen, it still looks windowed. I am unsure how to explain this any better, I will post a screenshot. here> oh I can't add links because apparently it's 'spamy'
Anyway, so set it to windowed mode and continue into the game. Enjoyed the intro movie, nicely done. Build a city. Send my troopers off to investigate a nearby patch of goo, ooh look xenomorphs.. all my guys are dead. hmm how do I build more? hmm the counter in the build cue does not appear to be progressing. I'm lost. I'm using turns, and can't do anything and not sure really what I'm supposed to be doing. My city is growing and I have some civilians taking up positions, and I'm researching stuff, but can't seem to build anything or do anything. Time to quit and try and find a manual/tutorial...
First impression: This game needs an in-depth tutorial for the basics, because after half an hour I'm lost and wanting to engage the game but unable.
OK, after another couple of hours of really giving it a crack, I have worked out how the build queues work, kinda, although the build-times seem to grow and shrink inexplicably. I have had a few successful battles, I have formers working on my land and building stuff and roads. I'm pretty much guessing whats going on there or what the advantages are. My morale is in the red, due to no food, pollution and overpopulation, but I don't know what to do about this. I've got armies from all kinds of other factions running around the place and all being very polite and not attacking me.
I have multiple cities, but all my secondary cities have MASSIVE build times, as in 99 turns for whatever I want to build. No explanation of how to lower this time, and yes, 99 turns is excessive to the point where I felt like switching the game off.
First impression update: After 3 hours, I still feel like I'm muddling around.