Slitherine

Just now I played half an hour of Pandora, my first 30 minutes after just shortly starting the game previously, after getting beta access.

Now, here are things I noticed, in sequence as I encountered them. Accordingly, organized as a list of points, not a coherent text.

Looking through the start screen, I take a look at the factions. They seem very much like in Alpha Centauri, maybe a bit too much. Perhaps it might be good to mix it up a little, change a few boni, or exchange one of them for something thematically related.
Watching the intro I am pleasantly surprised, it is rather nice and I like it, though it feels a bit sterile. Would it be possible to hint at the planets endemic life, perhaps with a landing shot at the end? One of the key achievements of Alpha Centauri was how atmospheric it was. Looking at the presentation of Pandora, it seems that you guys feel the same, and made a lot of progress. But I think you are not quite there yet.
Another example becomes visible once the actual game starts - the interface has a lot of style, but nonetheless looks sterile. A potential easy fix might be to remove the frames around fields like 'Selection', to make it less blocky. The association of content should be clear enough. Another possibility might be to tint the frames in the factions colours?

While I am talking graphics, the tiles and units are really nice! Very clear presentation of map elements, easy to read and yet aesthetically pleasing. The fog effect during zoom is nice as well.

Onward to the handling - would auto-explore as an option be possible? It takes some micromanagement from the player, and I guess corresponding routines are already in the game for AI units?
In a similar vein, an auto end turn, switched on in the options would be very nice. One element I really like is the outcome preview for conflicts - very nice indeed! It allows more meaningful decisions in game, always a good thing. But perhaps move the display to bottom center, to make it more prominent?

The city build menu works very well, but again a bit sterile. Same problem as above. A huge plus is the very clear layout, with all relevant information easy to find.

More usability issues - why can't I queue research within the already visible tree? I get the randomization, and think it is a good idea. But why can't I queue for the stuff I already see in my future?
And more importantly - why do I get no hint what the tech I research will do? With many it is easy to guess, but not nearly all of them - some are a bit cryptic, for example Quantization. Not knowing what they will do means I cannot make an informed decision, means that it becomes randomly choosing based on guesses. This is a really glaring flaw.

That it it for now. I haven't even found other factions yet. Overall, I really like what I see. No technical issues, everything just ran fine.

Thanx for the feedback, regarding the specific benefits from research, you can see what you get from researching something by the icon to the right of the research name. For instance if you hover over the apc icon to the right in the "analytic dynamics" research box you will see the information you need. You not noticing this indicates a problem and i would like to hear what kind of UI changes would solve this problem in your opinion?

Soheil wrote:Thanx for the feedback, regarding the specific benefits from research, you can see what you get from researching something by the icon to the right of the research name. For instance if you hover over the apc icon to the right in the "analytic dynamics" research box you will see the information you need. You not noticing this indicates a problem and i would like to hear what kind of UI changes would solve this problem in your opinion?

First of all thank you for the reply. By now I have actually found the information, mainly thanks to a LP video on Youtube. So, perhaps partly my fault. But if I were to analyse WHY I made that mistake, I'd say that while I did see the small icon that could provide more info, I didn't make that connection. Obvious solutions would be a tutorial that explains this (among other thongs), but I know that tutorial design is costly and takes a lot of time. As regards alternatives, I am currently at work an can't check. But would it be possible to add the information to the primary tool tip you get when clicking on the research as such? In terms of screen real estate that might be the easiest - and in general, it seems that the list of stats for each tech is limited. It also seems you could make the research tree window larger, providing space for the info to be included within the box of each tech. However, I am playing at 1920x1080, so that might not be a good example case. In a similar vein, maybe even add it below the clickable listing within the tree, so that it is possible to see all possible stats within the same display? Finally, you could try to set aside a small area under the tree/to the side of it to fit in descriptions and stats for a selected tech? But as with all of thee three last idead, not sure if the screen real estate is there. Also, this is likely to be the most clunky looking solution.

Edit: Just to add - the current solution actually is elegant, just easy to miss. If I had a choice, I would prefer a tutorial to all other solutions.