Slitherine

Summary: Wow! Excellent!

Background: I've played many different 4X games with SMAC being my all-time favorite. Before playing, I read a quick preview but didn't visit the forums or look for an online manual.

Loading screen and first five minutes:

Looks good. While reviewing my factions choices, I had to wonder "hmmm, what the heck is a frontier bonus or penalty?" You'll learn soon enough, but first impressions would be better if there were no undocumented terms in the initial screens. Perhaps you could allow various words to be clicked on or hovered over to see a definition.

First move. "Hmmm, should I found the city or should I move on top of that special resource?" Turns out that, not unexpectedly, a city has initial access to the surrounding hexes and you can't build on top of specials anyway. It would have been nice for the newbie tip to suggest founding a city near a special but not directly on top of it.

Early on, you'll try to do some things that aren't allowed. For example, I think building a road in fungus doesn't work. Later, I noticed that the limitation was one of the notes always included in the action box. However, if you click the button for a disallowed action, there should be a popup re-iterating the reason the action is disallowed. On a similar note, there should be feedback when trying to build a city after the colonizer has moved. Maybe a popup if you try to initiate a multi-turn action in fungus that won't end well -- for example, trying to clear fungus with a former that's only at 20% health.

Some of the forest hex images don't show roads very well.
I would have liked to be able to zoom out further.
I like the toggle in various civs that highlights various specials.

After more time:

I played my first game at standard difficulty with the "eco" faction. When I made contact with another faction, I found that I only had two cities and they had a half dozen or so. A bit more play and they declared war. I was obviously outclassed and should have been playing differently. So, scratch that game.

My second game went better. I chose the "tech" faction. I ended up with the southern half of a continent with a lot of room between myself and any of the AIs. Mid or late game, I was surprised by the "corporate" faction doing orbital drops of colonizers into "my" half continent. Annoying - I had plans for that area. Later, he built a city between two of my cities, cutting one of my cities off from the rest of my empire. I think many players would prefer some limitation on that. Perhaps some sort of border mechanism that extends a bit past a cities worked hexes. The border distance could be variable and extend only a few hexes toward virgin territory, but extend several hexes in the direction of another city by the same faction.

The "corporate" AI ended up with a research win. Part of his success was probably that he had a small continent to himself.

All, in all -- excellent.

I'm hoping a more extensive in-game encyclopedia is planned to go along with the manual.
The dots on the diplomacy screen seem to indicate strength. Relative to each other maybe? We need a screen showing the strengths of both the AIs and the player.
The factions don't feel as unique in gameplay as those in SMAC and the leader interactions don't seem to have as much personality, but that's not a game killer. Then again, I don't have enough time playing each of the factions to be sure of the gameplay differences.
I don't have a feel for inter-faction warfare as that didn't happen in my only full playthrough. I'm guessing lightly defended cities with roads and droppods to reinforce after a surprise attack will work.

Kudos!

Thanks for feedback ArcaneTourist!

Played a second complete game, this time as the Solar Dynasty. Won a research victory. Defeated one of the other factions that declared war on me.

I didn't have any issues with the opponents creating cities in the midst of my empire. The first game was enough to teach me the lesson that some city spam and preemptive placement was needed. Also, I observed the AI sometimes having a scouting unit camp out on a nice spot to prevent someone else from founding a city there. Nice tactic. Still, a border area that disallowed the opponents from building near me would be nice.

The AI will air-drop colonizers. But it won't air-drop a former into fungus to clear a spot for colonization. My last few cities were creating using this technique.

The AI does not seem to use armor, so it never has units any where near the strength of my best units. The AI also doesn't seem to do much with mixed unit tactics other than to use both bio-oriented and mech-oriented weapons. I didn't see the AI try any of the following:

• Use very strong but expensive defenders to protect cheaper effective snipers. (The defenders never attack, they just soak up incoming fire and then heal.)
  I didn't notice if the AI was able to move wounded units to a nearby city and move healed units to the front line?
  Make use of artillery or orbital bombardment.
  Use fast units to scout. (But perhaps the AI gets the equivalent of free orbital scans anyway....)
  Have a few strong fast, but expensive units for emergency reinforcement.

Perhaps road movement should cost 1/3 of a movement point instead of a half point? This would allow infantry to start from a position out of artillery range but move to engage the artillery. Might help the AI. Not sure if it's a good idea or a bad idea...

Perhaps an mid game road improvement to rails or mono-rails to double road movement? Enemy forces would only get normal road movement speeds though. Perhaps enemies shouldn't get any road movement? As it is, a blitz is perhaps too effective. You can't afford to defend everywhere (and if you try, you'll end up with obsolete units). Nor can you reinforce over long distances. So, unless the AI notices a build up and prepares, a half dozen units will steam roll through lightly defended cities. Then again, in my game, I might have killed off any spare military the AI had as part of my attack on his first city. So, maybe the AI did try to build up near the borders, but simply couldn't compete with his poorly designed units. The opponent was Togra University and they declared war, so they were probably of comparable strength and perhaps better techs.

As others have noted, something feels off with the miners and farmers. And the scientists too. Since production is global, why am I micro-managing workers on a per city basis? I'd like to say how much of my pop is building things in any given city. However, the rest of the city's pop could be allocated based on global needs. Perhaps I could set a global emphasis on how much science, food, and minerals I want. The game could then allocate citizens across the various cities to maximize results. Here's one thought for an interface: Perhaps a set of three global sliders for miners/farmers/scientists. The sliders would be tied, so if you increase scientists, the miners or the farmers or both decrease (there could be a locks on each slider so only the unlocked one changes). Those sliders could be visible on the economy and city screens. In the city screen you could perhaps have two boxes. One would be the construction workers. The other box would represent the pool of resource workers. You could still drag pop between the construction workers and the pool of resource producers. However the sliders within the resource producer's box would control global allocation, not local. This could work with or without the idea of combining farming and mining into a single worker type. Pandora is still a good game if this is left unchanged, but there's a difference between useful micromanagement and should-be-unnecessary micromanagement.

The fast speed of aircraft and sea-craft might mean that letting them capture cities is unbalancing?

In SMAC, air drops were slightly limited by not being allowed near a city that had an airport. I had wondered if Pandora should also have some sort of limitation of dropping units deep into enemy territory? I suspect the limitation that the units must be biological is probably sufficient and that the cost of a drop helps game balance.

The economy screen can be sluggish when changing the tax rate or when moving workers. There needs to be a slight visual gap between the cities in the economy screen. I don't know about others' preferences, but I'd prefer a clean spreadsheet like list with city names on the left and columns of info.

It would be nice if the economy screen provided some sort of indication of the amount and quality of military forces there. Perhaps a rough estimate of offensive and defensive strength based on the number of units, their strength, and their specials. The estimate could be either that of the best single unit (treating offense and defense separately) or an estimate of the total of all units.

In windowed mode, the map should still scroll when the mouse nears the map edges.

The in-game help needs more topics. In addition to "features", "factions", etc there needs to be a "concepts" list with topics like morale and city growth. It would be better if the help was more like an encyclopedia with "features", "factions" and other top-level pages and with hyper-links between entries.