Slitherine

5 minutes
The game looks pretty nice. The UI is very sleek looking. The opening cinematic is cool. After forming my firs city I click around the options and stuff.
It feels familiar like alpha centauri. I see familiar fungus and xenoaliens. I grab flamethrower tech and build some squads to burn out the xenos.

30 minutes
I figure out the differences from alpha centauri. The split into farmers and worker feels weird because you can't utilize forests at all with that. Split into miners and workers is interesting.
I started in tundra/arctic area so I'm struggling for food. I exterminate some xeno hives with my hellfire squads. They try to roam and attack but they get roasted.
I see the first alien giant and shit my pants a bit. He attacks my city with adaptive walls and kills one of my hellfire squads. The second one kills him after he's damaged from the attack.

after 60 minutes
I get into a brief war with nearby civ. I'm on the defensive but I have hellfire squads in my cities with adaptive walls so they can't do much. They send a few tanks but they're armed with missiles when I don't have armored units at all. My hellfire squads kill them thanks to adaptive walls and veterancy.
I start spamming snipers and kill the attackers camping outside my cities. They offer me peace after I kill all their attacking force.

after 2h
I go into blue tech level and see that it's mostly upgrades. I get assault armor with super flamethrowers and go to war. The third civ on my continent also declared war on the guy. I push the enemy easily as he's using outdated tech. I also build fusion beam giant mech that annihilates everything in it's path. I easily conquer the enemy. I don't know if I like the idea of researching the same things multiple times.

after 4h
I get assault armor shock rifle snipers and go to war with the third civ that's on my continent. They're way ahead of me tech wise and production wise but I see that I need to do this or it will be even worse later. After I attack I see his units are terrible. He's using good base unit with weapons but no armor at all. Because of that I easily push him back and start taking his cities. Later in war I see he has the gold tier 3 infantry armor while I still use my assault shock rifle snipers from the beginning of the war. He still doesn't use any armor on his units. Near the end of war when he's nearly dead I manage to build a cerberus mech with beams and first strike which is invincible. I easily conquer the enemy.

I got the continent to myself. I got some nukes and tested them and decided to not continue the game any more.

Opinion and suggestions.
1. The AI is pretty bad. They had massive tech and production advantage but were using terrible inefficient units without any armor.
They were sending endless waves of weak units at me. It was free xp for my snipers. AI need to use best armor by default. I don't know why they don't do that.

2. The tier system is very unimaginative. Researching everything 3 times is boring.
The tree is also very narrow. The techs are just assigned randomly not grouped into logical progression. I get entertainment centers and then you have laser beams after that. Alpha Centauri had incredible tech tree that was interconnected but also clearly divided into branches and had insane amount of flavor and atmosphere.

3. Operations are really awesome idea. I love them.

4. There are like no improvements at all. You have mine, farm and a road. You also have forest but they're useless since you can't harvest both resources from the tile. The pollution penalty doesn't matter much and you can ignore it.
I got terraforming and it said that you can improve ecosphere but I didn't see any new option for formers.

5. The UI is very good. Very smooth and efficient. I love the workshop. You can very easily modify units without multiple screens and confirmations. Feature I'm missing is being able to queue tech research with shift+click. Can you queue tech at all?

Overall I liked the game very much. It has great potential. It need more diversity in techs and improvements. Also rearrangement of tech tree so it makes more sense. Maybe tech color grouping. LIke combat, eco, industry.

After reading some forum posts I found out why I was thinking the tech tree progression didn't follow any logic and there were no branches. It turns out it really is random. That's interesting feature. You have to sacrifice a lot for it though. You can't have the more unique techs and the tree is scrambled all over the place so you lose some flavor. The alpha centauri tree is a work of art and it's really beautiful. I don't like the random tree because it looks ugly and generic. You just have stuff like farms I/II/III & guns I/II/III. You get all your options in first tier and then the second tier is 80-90% just upgrades. No new stuff at all. Even the upgrades are boring. It's just the same thing but with higher numbers. Base units have some different upgrades but they're the same +25% attack for T2 and +100% healing for T3 for all units. It's boring.

That was an insightful post. I agree with all of your points.

It would be a lot better to have a standard sensible tech tree, and have a randomization option for those who want more variety (at the risk of having a nonsense tech tree).

I have made the point about Forests myself, which is why I think miners and farmers should be merged as a gather class. (I have another post about that.)

There are nice things about Pandora, but there is a lot that suffers in comparison with Alpha Centauri. I personally would have like adding the good graphics and hexagon grid and global resource pool to a new version of Alpha Centauri, and keep the Alpha Centauri excellent tech tree, buildings, secret projects, society factors, governments, etc.