First impressions - Windows Edition
Posted: Sat Jul 27, 2013 11:06 am
Hi everyone.
Just downloaded and installed the Pandora Beta and spent about an hour playing.
Playing Terra Salvum on medium difficulty with a medium sized world.
Install went smooth, no issues there. Also the update procedure. However my first comment is here. I started the game twice in the hour to check the saves and so forth and both times a significant amount of updates were loaded. Kinda felt like the updates were applied again?
Look and feel of the game is great, the ambient music sets a nice atmosphere without being invasive. The world looks nice and detailed.
The starter breadcrumbs were good, mostly showing me what I needed to do next, aside from finding the End Turn button. Yes yes, could not find it at first as I was usually in the city view when looking for it.
The mouse-wheel zoom was pretty intuitive and I really liked the way the interface indicated which units needed orders.
I would say it took me about 30 minutes to get an idea of what I needed to do but it will take quite a bit longer to get a full grasp on the game.
Now to the things that niggled:
1. For me the transition of the initial colonizer to the city and first colonial trooper lacked a bit of eye candy. Click and there you are. A little building animation could be awesome maybe?
2. I continuously found the auto-scroll at the edges of menu boxes pretty distracting. Slight miss-hover and there goes the entire map to the left or the right. Maybe a bit more dead space surrounding the clickable areas of the menu boxes.
3. I would really like to be able to re-sort the production queue. Tried to do that and all that happens is the item I click on gets taken out completely. So when I have a long production queue all set up and suddenly I need more troopers or tanks I had to redo the entire list.
4. When more than one unit type occupies the same space it is not very clear unless the area is selected. A badge showing the unit types present would assist a lot. You can see a number indicating that more than one type is present but it may become confusing in the long run.
5. In my opinion the Raze City button is far too accessible. I don't want to be accidentally clicking that!
6. I was asked by a breadcrumb tool-tip to select buildings that were built from the left-hand bottom menu. Doing this only asked me if I want to sell the selected building. Should this not maybe keep the building stats displayed somewhere instead, with the option to sell from there?
7. After an hour of play I had many aliens come to visit and stare at me. Not once did they attack, even if they could clearly win even when my troops shares adjacent cells. All troops I lost were from me initiating the attack. This felt a little bit weird.
My apologies if I covered items already discussed or missed some information, this was truly install and play an hour as requested by the initial email.
Just downloaded and installed the Pandora Beta and spent about an hour playing.
Playing Terra Salvum on medium difficulty with a medium sized world.
Install went smooth, no issues there. Also the update procedure. However my first comment is here. I started the game twice in the hour to check the saves and so forth and both times a significant amount of updates were loaded. Kinda felt like the updates were applied again?
Look and feel of the game is great, the ambient music sets a nice atmosphere without being invasive. The world looks nice and detailed.
The starter breadcrumbs were good, mostly showing me what I needed to do next, aside from finding the End Turn button. Yes yes, could not find it at first as I was usually in the city view when looking for it.
The mouse-wheel zoom was pretty intuitive and I really liked the way the interface indicated which units needed orders.
I would say it took me about 30 minutes to get an idea of what I needed to do but it will take quite a bit longer to get a full grasp on the game.
Now to the things that niggled:
1. For me the transition of the initial colonizer to the city and first colonial trooper lacked a bit of eye candy. Click and there you are. A little building animation could be awesome maybe?
2. I continuously found the auto-scroll at the edges of menu boxes pretty distracting. Slight miss-hover and there goes the entire map to the left or the right. Maybe a bit more dead space surrounding the clickable areas of the menu boxes.
3. I would really like to be able to re-sort the production queue. Tried to do that and all that happens is the item I click on gets taken out completely. So when I have a long production queue all set up and suddenly I need more troopers or tanks I had to redo the entire list.
4. When more than one unit type occupies the same space it is not very clear unless the area is selected. A badge showing the unit types present would assist a lot. You can see a number indicating that more than one type is present but it may become confusing in the long run.
5. In my opinion the Raze City button is far too accessible. I don't want to be accidentally clicking that!
6. I was asked by a breadcrumb tool-tip to select buildings that were built from the left-hand bottom menu. Doing this only asked me if I want to sell the selected building. Should this not maybe keep the building stats displayed somewhere instead, with the option to sell from there?
7. After an hour of play I had many aliens come to visit and stare at me. Not once did they attack, even if they could clearly win even when my troops shares adjacent cells. All troops I lost were from me initiating the attack. This felt a little bit weird.
My apologies if I covered items already discussed or missed some information, this was truly install and play an hour as requested by the initial email.
