great game - first impressions

[ilja]

Hey,
I'm a big fan of the Civ series (played it from no. 1) and loved Alpha.
Pandora is a great game. It runs a peach on my machine that struggles with civ 5 (2.4GHz 4GB vista) so hats off to you for that.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS
I picked up everything real easy (no surprise given my history with civ)
I thought everything was intuitive. When i did make a mistake - like attacking a creature too tough because i didn't notice the 'battle panel' - i simply reloaded or licked my wounds (and learnt the lesson!)

PROS
+Like the styling
+city placement is great. You nailed it with the expanding boarders etc. I'd like to see no limit to how far the borders can go from a city (unsure if there is) - too enable mega-cities as an option. - you could then choose to cluster cities near each other.
+weapon types- not too many. Great balance.
+loved resource sharing (food in particular) and the idea of populations moving around between cities - didn't notice it happening much in practice tho
+heaps of local wildlife to attack/avoid - gives a real feeling of being on a foreign (unwelcome) world

CONS
-found balancing resource use a little fiddly (crystal usage etc). I'd prefer the the AI do it automatically for me (maybe it does)
- maybe a little too faithful to aplha.
- personally i'd prefer research to go a little slower (50% slower even) - or an option to set this at the start of the game.

SUGGESTED FUNCTIONS
-terraformer 'Road To' function. As an idea, when you click 'Road To', your icon changes and every terrain hexagon you click on gets a 'build a road there icon' and then you click the 'Road To' button again to switch off this function. This way you can set exactly where the road is placed - you don't normally place roads for distances much more than 6 or 8 hexagons at a time anyway.

-cap on number of units in a hexagon. Perhaps allow the parameter to be set at game start or have a couple of options from which to select. I'd like to see war units limited to 3 and non-war to the same. Unlimited stacking is silly. Limiting to one is ok (as per civ 5)

-form army - related to above. So they move as one. May still have to attack independently.

great game. let me know if i should post more ideas.