Slitherine

Pandora Beta 0.14.5 - The Missing Manual

by Earthmichael

FORWARD

If Pandora had been any other game, the lack of any kind of beta documentation would have been a showstopper for me; I would have just uninstalled the game, and quit the beta test. However, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and Alien Crossfire (SMAC and SMAX) have been my favorite games for years. No Civ games before or since have had the level of strategic richness, and I was hoping that Pandora would evolve to be a worthy successor to these great games. I would not be able to have any influence in the direction of the game if I quit because the developers refused to provide any documentation.

I am writing this manual in text only at first to make it easy to import into whatever program is to be used for the final manual. The most important things do not need formatting to convey.

Furthermore, I could see that I was not the only beta tester who was frustrated by this. So I decided to write a first cut at the documentation that the development team should have written before the Beta test was launched. My sincere desire is for Pandora to succeed, evolve, and become a great game that is a worthy successor to SMAX. So, on with the manual!

GETTING STARTED

There are hot keys listed in the Pandora readme file for some things, and I will not reproduce that list here. The most important lack is a hot key for movement, or even any explanation of how to move a unit.

To move a unit, select the unit by left-clicking on the hexagon (abbreviated hex) containing the unit, then right-click on the hex that is the destination. The game will automatically pick the most efficient route to get there. But that does not mean it is the safest route, so double check the route to make sure that it is the one you want your unit to follow. If there are multiple units in a hex, use the selection box to the left to pick the unit you want to move.

Some units, particularly Formers, have an expanded set of command they can perform. This can be reached by clicking on the arrow symbol on the far right of the selection box when the unit is selected, which will then pop up the list of commands.

Your first decision is which faction to play. Each faction has certain strengths, and will affect the starting units. From what I have seen, all of the factions are playable, but some are definitely easier that others. Unlike SMAX, where combat oriented factions like Spartans and Believers will lose against builder factions like University in almost every case, the more aggressive native life in Pandora give the combat oriented factions an edge in initial expansion, and allows combat factions to keep pace with builder factions.

You start with a colonizer unit, with which you can build your first city. In several test games I have started, the initial starting location is usually adequate. Since the starting city will initially have access to the six surrounding hexes, you should make sure the starting location includes any special terrain in those six hexes.

Navigating the map can be accomplished in several ways. You can click on the mini-map in the bottom right corner to go directly to an area. You can use the arrow keys to move around the map. And you can also drag with the mouse; this is particularly useful to make smaller adjustments of the map. You can also zoom in and out of the map using the mouse roller; I am not sure if there are any keys that can zoom for those with a mouse without this feature.

Pandora starts out with native life as a very aggressive enemy. Unlike many 4x games where you have some time to make extra cities and develop before you are exposed to combat, native life in Pandora will attack you right away. You should keep this in mind when you pick you initial your initial research priorities and builds.

CITY MANAGEMENT

Clicking on the red city name on the city hex opens the city management screen. City management is the most important aspect of the game. If you fail here, no amount of brilliance in military tactics will save you.

On the middle right side of the screen, the Population box allows you to allocate the citizens of that city to particular tasks. All of the tasks except Workers produce a global pool of resources that are shared between all cities. This is important because some cities are better at producing some kinds of resources than others. The available tasks and what they produce are shown below:

Farmers: Food
Miners: Minerals
Workers: Production
Scientists: Research

Above the Population box is a resource summary that shows how much of each resource you are gathering/producing each turn.

Growth: Determines how fast your city gets another citizen. I do not know what affects the growth rate.
Food: Sum of all output of farmers
Minerals: Sum of all output of miners
Production: Sum of all output of workers. Each worker consumes 2 minerals, and produces 2 production.
Research: Sum of output of all scientists. Each scientist produces 2 research.
Pollution: I do not know exactly what affects pollution, nor the effect that pollution has on anything else. For all I know, pollution does nothing.
Credits: Each citizen seems to automatically produce a number of credits, which depends upon the tax rate.
Morale: Morale increases for lower taxes, and seems to decrease for larger cities, and captured cities. Morale acts as a multiplier for all of the above resources.

Some factions have bonuses that impact the values stated above. For example, University gets 3 research per scientist, instead of 2.

The tax rate can be set using the Economy box at bottom of screen. Tax rate affects morale. The lower the tax rate, the better morale. I generally set the tax rate between 10 - 20% to keep enough money coming in, but keep morale high. You can look to see what total production you are getting at various tax rates, and set the tax rate accordingly.

The amount of output from farmers and miners is highly dependent upon the hexes available in the city for them to work. Farmers will work whatever hexes can give the biggest food output. Miners will work the hexes that produce the most minerals. It is very important to use Formers to improve some hexes for your population to work. So a Former should be one of your first build priorities.

There seems to be no way to take advantage of the balanced resources produced by forests. In SMAC, forests were a staple of the game, because they produced a balanced output of minerals and food, and lowered pollution. But in SMAC, you did not assign citizens to categories like farmers and miners; you just selected what square you wanted that citizen to work, and they produced all resources from that square. I personally like the SMAC approach better. I think Pandora would be better served to merge Farmers and Miners into Gatherers, and then allow the player to assign each Gatherer to the hex that they want that Gatherer to work. This would immediately address the problem that forests have in Pandora.

You do not want to run out of any of the resources in your global pool. A lack of food means a citizen will die. A lack of credits will disband a unit or building. A lack of minerals causes a worker to be idle and production to slow.

Based on what hexes are available to work, some cities have more of one kind of resource than another. An excellent hex may allow 4 or more resources to be gathered by a single farmer or miner. Sometimes there are no more resources of a given type, and allocating an extra farmer or miner produces nothing. You should check the results of assigning farmers and miners, and if adding a farmer or miner to the pool does not raise the output by at least two, I would consider instead putting the citizen on a different task, such as scientist, unless you a desperate for a particular resource to avoid a shortage.

On my test games, I found that I got my initial research done fast enough just from the basic city output with no scientists. So I used my citizens for other roles as long as I had hexes that were productive enough to work, and then shifted them to science.

Production is managed on the far right side of the city management screen. The Workshop will allow you to tailor new units with weapons, devices, and armor, as you gain new technologies. It will also allow you to design new types of units such as aircraft and tanks once appropriate technologies are researched.

Your first production selection should be a Former, unless you chose a faction that starts with a Former. Make sure you have an least one citizen allocated as a worker, and that you have enough minerals available each turn to be used by the worker(s). Once you have a former, you should send it to the most productive hexes currently worked by your cities, and improve whatever is being gathered. You can see what resources a hex produces by looking at the map, and you can also look for the citizen icon to see if the hex is being worked. Use mines to increase minerals in hexes being mined; use farms to increase food in hexes being farmed. Build roads in every hex your former enters; it will save you a lot of movement in the long run. Ignore forests for now, since the current games does not seem to know how to gather balanced resources.

When you have a city selected in a map view, you should see a lot of white flags surrounding the city. These are potential directions that your city can expand. The green flag shows the hex that is marked for the next expansion. You can mark the hex you would prefer for expansion by clicking on a white flag, turning it green. Then, next time the city population increases, the city gets control of the hex with the green flag.

You should pick a hex that is most abundant in the resource you need; it should produce a minimum of two of the resource needed after being improved by a Former (preferably more). You can also pick the direction based on looking ahead to where you want to expand, since each subsequent expansion gets more options based on the last expansion hex. So if there are some high mineral mountains that cannot yet be reached, and you have to expand through an unproductive hex to reach them, it may be worth it in the long run.

After producing the Former, you should make military units. Troopers are all you can make at first, so make them. Do not even think about a Colonizer at this point; even if you are friendly with the other human factions, there are too many native enemies out there! Only after you have built enough military units to make a secure perimeter should you starting thinking of building a Colonizer.

Some comments (hope you dont mind):

Pollution lowers Morale and is generated by the colonists in the city. It can be reduced by certain buildings, faction traits and terrain features.

"A lack of energy will disband a unit or building" <- this should be credits, not energy.

I agree that miners and farmers should be combined into one type of colonist.

I would disagree with your statement of waiting with colonizers. You should try to build a few more citites as fast as possible as this increases your resource gathering tremendously and waiting too long means you will fall behind. There is no disadvantage to expanding fast at the moment that I know of. This also means you can pump out more units faster and deal with the aliens a lot sooner. Completely ignore the aliens in the beginning since it takes a few turns before they actually start attacking you and focus on expanding. Once they turn hostile then start fighting them, but not before. I hope the developers will fix this in the future and penalize you for expanding too rapidly, but at the moment theres no reason not to.

It seems that the baseline +8 growth is the same for everyone and it can be negatively affected by terrain features and positively by Morale. It seems to me that it is a constant and you can only add to it by the production option.

Territory acquisition rate is based on city growth. Every time your city grows, you grab another tile.

Victory Progress can be seen while hovering over Economy, Military and Research tabs (this took me FOREVER to figure out).

I've tried to figure out what Frontier Penalty is, and from looking at the xml files it seems to have something to do with resource gathering. I'm not even sure it's enabled in this build.

Thanks for the feedback! I edited the energy and replaced with credits. (Energy is money in SMAC.)

I tried to use my typical 4x strategy in my first couple of test games: build a Former, then go straight for a Colonizer. I found it impossible to defend both cities. I had to abandon both of those games as lost.

I then tried the military first approach, and have had no problems winning on average. It may just depend on the random map, particularly how many hives are nearby, and how often they spawn native life. It could be if your initial scouting showed no hives nearby, it might be safe to expand early.

EDIT: I just tried the early expansion strategy again. The game starts in January 2101. In June 2103, my HQ is surrounded by 4 Drones and 2 Spitters, and since I preferenced expansion, I have only two units to defend myself. Needless to say, my HQ was decimated. I attached a screenshot; at the time of the screenshot, I had killed two drones, but took some damage, and still had two Spitters and 2 Drones left to deal with. BTW, this is typical of the games I have played. Pandora is incredibly aggressive and you have very little time to defend yourself. If your games are different, i.e. you do have time to expand and still defend yourself, I wonder what accounts for the difference?

PS: I had to edit down the screenshot since the maximum file size is 256K, and the full screenshot was 413K. It would be a lot better for the system to have the files size limit increased to 500K, so that people can post unedited full screenshots.

Earthmichael wrote:I tried to use my typical 4x strategy in my first couple of test games: build a Former, then go straight for a Colonizer. I found it impossible to defend both cities. I had to abandon both of those games as lost.

I then tried the military first approach, and have had no problems winning on average. It may just depend on the random map, particularly how many hives are nearby, and how often they spawn native life. It could be if your initial scouting showed no hives nearby, it might be safe to expand early.

EDIT: I just tried the early expansion strategy again. The game starts in January 2101. In June 2103, my HQ is surrounded by 4 Drones and 2 Spitters, and since I preferenced expansion, I have only two units to defend myself. Needless to say, my HQ was decimated. I attached a screenshot; at the time of the screenshot, I had killed two drones, but took some damage, and still had two Spitters and 2 Drones left to deal with. BTW, this is typical of the games I have played. Pandora is incredibly aggressive and you have very little time to defend yourself. If your games are different, i.e. you do have time to expand and still defend yourself, I wonder what accounts for the difference?

I've been involved in the playtest for about 2 months now and I can tell you that trying to expand too early is a quick way to die. The game gives you some time to build up some decent flamethrower units to defend your HQ city. Wait until you have a good number of them to go after the hives. Also, seekers with their 2 range are really good for defeating the spitters. You need to build up a rather large military force to take out the hives before you can really start expanding. Then, expand like crazy, because if you don't, the AI factions will take over everything.

Thanks for putting together the manual. It will help new beta testers, I'm sure. It took me a while to figure out some of the workings and tricks of the game. Also, the game is far advanced from it's initial release. The developers listen to our ideas and implement them. Give all the feedback you want. It helps them build a better game.

COMBAT

The following information has been gained by observation, attempting to reverse engineer the combat system. I would appreciate any corrections by those who are "in the know"; it would have been better for this article to have been written by someone who actually knew the internals of the combat system, rather than someone who has just played a bit. But on with the article...

First, you should unlearn what you have picked up with other games like SMAC, Civ, SPI, Avalon Hill, and most other combat games. In Pandora, there is not a rating for offense and defense; there is only an aggregate combat rating for a unit which takes chassis, weapons, armor, and devices into account. Some chassis, weapons, or devices give bonuses depending on whether you are the attacker or defender, but those bonuses apply to the aggregate combat rating. So increasing the strength of the armor on a unit increases the overall combat rating, not just the defense.

Terrain also behaves differently. In most games, the terrain of the defender is all that is taken into account. With Pandora, each unit is affect by the terrain that it is in. So attacker terrain affects the combat rating of the attacker, and defender terrain affects the combat rating of the defender. You should take this into account when deciding a direction for attack. An armor unit is 25% less powerful attacking from a mountain verses a grassland.

With most weapons, an attack continues multiple rounds, until one (or both) unit is destroyed. However, some weapons like sniper files and artillery are single shot, with no retaliation. In this case, an attack may only weapon the unit attacked, and not completely destroy it. However, this type of attack has the advantage of no damage to the attacker!

Most units only attack a single enemy. Artillery will attack every unit in a hex, so it can be very powerful to weaken all defenders in a hex. This can be especially important when attacking a strongly defended city.

Some operations like orbital bombardment behave like artillery, attacking everything in a hex. Some operations, like a black hole, decimate the affected hex and all 6 surrounding hexes.

All combat is affected by random factors. So even if you have a combat advantage, you are not guaranteed to win.

Combat units are designed using the Workshop. This selects the chassis, weapon, armor, and devices for the unit. In every case, an enhancement that increases the combat value by a certain percentage, increases the cost of the unit by the same percentage. Of course it is always great to have a powerful unit. But it may be more important to get a less powerful unit that you can build more quickly and get into battle sooner.

Pay careful attention to the bonuses on the chassis, weapon, armor, and devices. Some may provide bonuses attacking some units, while penalties attacking others. Some provide an attack bonus. Some provide a healing bonus. Some provide a defensive bonus. Try to select based on the role that you want that unit to have.

Speed is another important factor. Aircraft are the fastest units with a speed of 4. But they also are the most costly chassis, so an air unit with a given strength will cost more than a tank with the same strength. Boats generally have a speed of 3. Most land units have a speed of 1, but some land chassis have 2 speed.

Sight range is also important, especially for scouts. Aircraft and boats have a sight range of 2. Some devices will increase sight range.

All units have an option to heal. They can do nothing else that turn, but recover 10% of their health. Some units have a bonus, and will recover more health when healing. It is best to plan your attack so that damaged units can withdraw behind the front lines to heal, and return only after they are back to full strength.

In my opinion, snipers and artillery are really the key to effective combat. Damaging the enemy without taking any damage in return is a great strategic advantage. The artillery attack on every unit in a square can clear out the most reinforced stronghold. And currently the AI does not seem to build artillery, giving a human player a tremendous advantage over an AI faction, even if the faction has many more combat units.

COMBAT

The following information has been gained by observation, attempting to reverse engineer the combat system. I would appreciate any corrections by those who are "in the know"; it would have been better for this article to have been written by someone who actually knew the internals of the combat system, rather than someone who has just played a bit. But on with the article...

First, you should unlearn what you have picked up with other games like SMAC, Civ, SPI, Avalon Hill, and most other combat games. In Pandora, there is not a rating for offense and defense; there is only an aggregate combat rating for a unit which takes chassis, weapons, armor, and devices into account. Some chassis, weapons, or devices give bonuses depending on whether you are the attacker or defender, but those bonuses apply to the aggregate combat rating. So increasing the strength of the armor on a unit increases the overall combat rating, not just the defense.

Terrain also behaves differently. In most games, the terrain of the defender is all that is taken into account. With Pandora, each unit is affect by the terrain that it is in. So attacker terrain affects the combat rating of the attacker, and defender terrain affects the combat rating of the defender. You should take this into account when deciding a direction for attack. An armor unit is 25% less powerful attacking from a mountain verses a grassland.

With most weapons, an attack continues multiple rounds, until one (or both) unit is destroyed. However, some weapons like sniper files and artillery are single shot, with no retaliation. In this case, an attack may only weaken the unit attacked, and not completely destroy it. However, this type of attack has the advantage of no damage to the attacker!

Most units only attack a single enemy. Artillery will attack every unit in a hex, so it can be very powerful to weaken all defenders in a hex. This can be especially important when attacking a strongly defended city.

Some operations like orbital bombardment behave like artillery, attacking everything in a hex. Some operations, like a black hole, decimate the affected hex and all 6 surrounding hexes.

All combat is affected by random factors. So even if you have a combat advantage, you are not guaranteed to win.

Combat units are designed using the Workshop. This selects the chassis, weapon, armor, and devices for the unit. In every case, an enhancement that increases the combat value by a certain percentage, increases the cost of the unit by the same percentage. Of course it is always great to have a powerful unit. But it may be more important to get a less powerful unit that you can build more quickly and get into battle sooner.

Pay careful attention to the bonuses on the chassis, weapon, armor, and devices. Some may provide bonuses attacking some units, while penalties attacking others. Some provide an attack bonus. Some provide a healing bonus. Some provide a defensive bonus. Try to select based on the role that you want that unit to have.

Speed is another important factor. Aircraft are the fastest units with a speed of 4. But they also are the most costly chassis, so an air unit with a given strength will cost more than a tank with the same strength. Boats generally have a speed of 3. Most land units have a speed of 1, but some land chassis have 2 speed.

Sight range is also important, especially for scouts. Aircraft and boats have a sight range of 2. Some devices will increase sight range.

All units have an option to heal. They can do nothing else that turn, but recover 10% of their health. Some units have a bonus, and will recover more health when healing. It is best to plan your attack so that damaged units can withdraw behind the front lines to heal, and return only after they are back to full strength.

In my opinion, snipers and artillery are really the key to effective combat. Damaging the enemy without taking any damage in return is a great strategic advantage. The artillery attack on every unit in a square can clear out the most reinforced stronghold. And currently the AI does not seem to build artillery, giving a human player a tremendous advantage over an AI faction, even if the faction has many more combat units.

not a lot of information but lets keep the idea alive. I need to know what some of these terms like power and growth and pollution actually do in order to effectively play the game.