Slitherine

I'll just ramble about my first games in Pandora here.

First game, random faction (Terra Salvum), medium random world, easy AI, low alien aggression:
Spent first 30 minutes reading tool tips, which were nicely done, and helped explain a lot of the game. The game mechanics were similar to other games I know, with a few things standing out. Finally a game where 50% of the population is not stuck farming. Congrats. It took me a while to realize how border growth actually worked, but when I got into it, it was also a nice way to do it.
At first, I researched everything. Something I quickly learnt was a stupid idea, and I started looking forward and at my needs instead. I kept on making the most powerful units, while it looked good on paper, I did not expect the surge of units the AI (Divine Ascenscion) threw at me. It was a slaughter, of the AI units, but the sheer mass of units overcame my super-defensobots. I quickly succumbed.
Looking back, I focused too much on researching worthless things, while not understanding all mechanics, and produced far too few units. Respect for AI was gained.

Game 2, random faction (Noxium Corp.), medium random world, easy AI, low alien aggression:
This time I went out and cherry picked techs early on, while keeping a decent defense. Using the military advisor (We can defend against attack) I cruised through the game, abusing the insane power of this faction (reduced cost of buying) to the max. Game was won very fast, with a tech victory. I massively outteched my opponents, and Imperiums assault on me was met with nuking of all his special resources.

Game 3, random faction (Solar Dynasty), medium random world, medium AI, very high alien aggression:
I tried to do the same approach as game 2, but I had to keep on building troops to keep the aliens at bay. They overran many of my cities as I could not build defensive units fast enough, but eventually, together with the AI, I was able to clear out the hives. I thought Solar Dynasty had some pretty good faction bonuses, but after a while, I fell behind. My tech was good, but I was unable to keep up with the unit production of Divine Ascension, along with their constant orbital bombardments of my city defenses. -25% cost trumps +50% production any day. I suspect a combination of poor starting location and bad early choices (and late game choices) gave me problems. Eventually I quit the game as I realized that I could not keep up with the AI unit production anymore.

Some observations:

I have not fully explored this yet, but I sit with an initial impression that all bonuses and penalties in the game are additive/subtractive. This means that faction bonuses that are subtractive, and where very little research and buildings also gives subtractive bonuses, are VERY strong, while bonuses that are additive, and there are many other additive bonuses from buildings and research, are very weak. Examples of this is Divine Ascenscions -25% unit cost. It is 100% effective through the entire game, while the -33% research is quickly eaten up by all the building and research bonuses. On the other end of the scale, is Imperium and Togra University. I still need to confirm if all these bonuses/penalties actually are always additive. (Edit: It seems like the -33% research is applied multiplicatively only on researchers, not buildings. It slightly changes things around.)

Orbital bombardment makes a hell of a lot of message spam.

Workshop needs a confirm screen and an undo button.

The aliens disappear too fast from the game. I kinda miss the "fungal bloom" from Alpha Centauri really.

Is there any good reason to not have the possibilty for every weapon kind on any chassis? Air Chassis with flamers makes perfect sense if you think of them as bombers. Same with artillery. Sniper tanks?


Back to the game I go...

My experience with my first game was similar, I was soon swamped by Divine Ascendancy troops and couldn't advance anymore. Also, I didn't really understand how diplomacy works. By the end of the game all factions were furious with me and the only reason I see were the public denounces made by DA (who was later followed by the Imperium).

Orbital bombardment makes a hell of a lot of message spam.

1 msg for each unit at the tile, do you think artilery do less spam ?

Is there any good reason to not have the possibilty for every weapon kind on any chassis? Air Chassis with flamers makes perfect sense if you think of them as bombers. Same with artillery. Sniper tanks?

It don't realy make sense.
Flamer on an aircraft, flamers are a very close range weapon, not that close like claws from the aliens. An aircraft can't sneak by the target like a trooper can, the target would got a free first shoot. Ok that isn't at the current combat but thats prolly why you can't equip flamer on everything.
Artilery weapons are far to hvy for an aircraft, same with the cannon weapon.
Sniper on a Tank, hmm isn't that basicly what an artilery do ?

Canute wrote:

Orbital bombardment makes a hell of a lot of message spam.

1 msg for each unit at the tile, do you think artilery do less spam ?

Does this mean you agree with me on the spam issue, or not? Yes, 1 message per unit on the tile is excessive in my opinion.

Is there any good reason to not have the possibilty for every weapon kind on any chassis? Air Chassis with flamers makes perfect sense if you think of them as bombers. Same with artillery. Sniper tanks?

It don't realy make sense.
Flamer on an aircraft, flamers are a very close range weapon, not that close like claws from the aliens. An aircraft can't sneak by the target like a trooper can, the target would got a free first shoot. Ok that isn't at the current combat but thats prolly why you can't equip flamer on everything.
Artilery weapons are far to hvy for an aircraft, same with the cannon weapon.
Sniper on a Tank, hmm isn't that basicly what an artilery do ?[/quote]

Flamers can be delivered as bombs. Think napalm.
Artillery weapons are not far too heavy for aircraft. They are called bombers when you have artillery on aircraft.
In the game, sniper has different stats (+25% vs bio, -25% vs mech). Artillery has splash (and I assume that means it hits the entire stack of units)

Game 4, picked Divine Ascension, medium random world, medium AI, Very high alien aggression:
Attempting to play a game where I, in lack of raw science power, wanted to have a lot of colonies that had the research buildings doing the work for me. Slow science start as expected with Divine Ascension, but soon I caught up, and massively surpassed and won a science victory. My military might was unrivaled most of the game. My economy was also far beyond the other AI's, even though I really suffered with low population for the longest of time. The aliens were somewhat of a challenge at the start, they did get some cities, but mostly they fueled by economy with their hives, rather than destroying for me. Imperium played sandwich, and when I saw him losing cities, I annihilated him. This brought up some kind of bug.

When you capture cities, it would seem like the city population is not properly distributed. Even if it says you got 3 plots for farming, there may be more, hidden population hiding behind the 3 you can spot. The worst case I experienced, was a city where it showed me as having 2 people doing mining, but once I destacked it all, I realized I was lacking atleast 10 population in that captured city.

Game 5, picked Divine Ascension again, medium random world, hard AI, very high alien aggression:
Now I ramped difficulty to max. Early game was challenging enough with all the aliens constantly eating up my troops, but I survived and cleared out the hives. I managed to keep my military high enough and research good enough to keep all the AI's off me, and I built a ton of colonies all across the planet. However, I fell too far behind on research, and had to watch Terra Salvum win a pretty clear science victory. Interestingly enough, my problem was not the science itself, but my inability to produce enough population throughout the entire game. Even spamming of cloning vats was not enough to keep my population growth high enough. I also had a perfect tech tree start.

This was also my first game with polluting fungus. This seems a lot more balanced and fair. Although, late game, you gotta fungi everything, and that just seems weird. I think there needs to be tech that improves farms and mines to be better, or atleast equal to fungus.

Something I see happening frequently, is that formers and colonizers often end up defending, even when stacked with (flamer) units.

When you write that the AI gets a big boost to Morale, you are not kidding, but +16? Wow.

I have some more mundane first impressions. I like the intro movie but after seeing it once I would like to be able to skip it with the space button or a mouse click. I was not able to do that when I started the game a second time. I would like the compendium information to be in a slightly large font. I have a 24 inch monitor but still had some trouble reading the info. I did notice what seemed to be a large amount of typos. Someone should proof read the text again for accuracy. Lastly, this game is clearly a remake (or dare I say) a cover of Sid Meirs Alpha Centauri. You have captured some of the best elements but since I have also played that game you need to be prepared that this game will be judge by that game which is still after so many years an outstanding game.

Dave

dfinnigan wrote:I like the intro movie but after seeing it once I would like to be able to skip it with the space button or a mouse click.

DId you try Esc? I am sure there is a key to skip the movie. Or do you think that space and mouse click should also be default?