Early Thoughts

[JeffGeorge]

As someone who probably spent more time playing Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri than any other game I've ever played I have high hopes for Pandora. I decided to just jump right in without any preliminaries. I set everything to random and just started playing. So far I've only put about 30 minutes into it but plan on spending a lot more time on in-depth analysis. I like the atmosphere and visuals though I have to admit that I'm not really sure what everything in the game means yet. For example, when I have a unit selected and see the various icons and numbers I don't really know what they are. My first impression of my opponents is that they don't really seem to care whether I'm in the game or not, unlike the SMAC factions. Of course, I must repeat that this is only after half an hour of messing around. I really like the idea of a random tech tree each game as I'm all about variety, but I'm not sure I understand how that functions, either. Are all techs just randomly placed in a position and have random prerequisites or is there some logic built in? It also seems to be a rather small tech tree compared to SMAC. (Yes, the comparisons to SMAC are inevitable.)

I do believe that there is a lot of potential for this game to become the spiritual successor to SMAC and I will do my part to help in any way I can. Is there a quickie reference guide or something somewhere, or should I just start reading the in-game documentation?