First Impressions

[dicydico]

Well, I have to say that in several ways the game looks quite nice. As an old Alpha Centauri hand I found it fairly easy to pick up and play with a lot of the ideas being carried over. The terrain is much more varied, and I do like how the world seems to be practically crawling of life when you arrive. The only issues I noted were more behind-the-scenes. For some reason whenever I tried to copy/paste the software key from the email I received into the game it crashed consistently. There have been a few spelling and grammar issues in the dialogue, the most notable example example of which being one of Schreiber's requests for open borders.

"Shall we loosen our border restrictions. We alreayd know everything you've got, anyway"

I played for roughly an hour and seemed to be doing alright. I do like the unit stacking mechanic, though after the more recent iterations of Civ I find myself missing the automated 'Explore' command for military units early on. Beyond that, I had a general sense that the tech tree didn't really flow as I might expect. Techs lead to techs that didn't seem all that related to each other. This isn't really game breaking or anything, but it just seemed odd.
This is something I'm certainly looking forward to playing with my friends; it just needs a little more polish.

*Edit: One other thing I'd like to mention. The lack of Secret Projects/ Wonders kind of felt odd here. I'm the sort of player that tends to spend most of the campaign in peaceful building, and there were considerable gaps where I had no structures to build and no projects to work on. It would be nice to see those if they could be worked in.