Thoughts and feedback from a recent buyer.

[Elothan]

I bought Pandora yesterday, and I just thought I would share some of my impressions of the game.

As many others I was a bit disapointet with Civ: BE, and went looking for a better alternative and ended up buying Pandora to se if it would alleviate my SMAC fix.

+As a whole the game both look and feels solid, and captures the atmosphere of setteling on a alien world well.

+The workshop, while a bit basic, suits my needs well

+The game seems to have a good difficulty (for a non-expert player like me )

+Good voice on a lot of stuff.

+Very good music.

Overall I like the game

So on to the nitpicks:

The lack of a overarching diplomacy function:
- I would have loved if there was a sort of Planetary council where we could handle larger events (Smac did this ok, but I would love even a basic version of it with diplomatic victory baked in)

The diplomacy screen layout.
- I am playing on 1920 *1080 , and the diplomacy window is small, and the text options are way to close to each other, making it a pain to scroll trough the options to find the one you want I have enabled larger texts, but a scalable window would have been nice.


All in all it is is a solid game, and with a few tweaks I feel it can be one of my new favorites

[Xilmi]

The diplomacy screen layout.
- I am playing on 1920 *1080 , and the diplomacy window is small, and the text options are way to close to each other, making it a pain to scroll trough the options to find the one you want I have enabled larger texts, but a scalable window would have been nice.

Very much agree on that.
Being forced to scroll when it really would not be necessary results in a bad haptic when otherwise the game is pretty good in that regard.

[Sawelios]

I played Pandora this morning for the first time, about 2 hours.
Visually this game is amazing. GUI is slick, logical and useful. Tips and help are informative. Sound effects and music are very good too (though I met a bug, when sounds didn't load correctly from the start and there was no sound in game at all). Unit customization is satisfying. Tons of enemies, terrain features and various resources are very welcome. Research system is very good too.
So I have only one question (or two): WHY this game still doesn't have public attention it deserves, and WHY the hell developers QUIT such a gem of a game? If we look at this game attentively, we can see the TRUE successor of Alpha Centauri. Yes, some elements are just copy-pasted, but exactly in those elements we have a space for further improvement. Social agendas, for example. I feel that another (maybe final) expansion could make this game simlpy a paragon for a modern 4X Civ-like sci-fi turn-based strategy. CivBE can go to where it crawled from...
So WHY, why, why?

[Xilmi]

Well, I've been asking a similar question to yours back then in this threat: viewtopic.php?f=173&t=51363

I'm pretty sure that almost everyone who has a direct comparison of Pandora to other genre-highlights like Civilization 5 and Endless Legend, cannot possibly consider Pandora a bad game.
It at least is very solid but depending on personal preferences for some people, like me, can trump the competition.
For example:
I like short turn-times. Civ5 and EL both don't have that. Pandora does.
I like complex economy management with a lot of decision-making and possibilities to do it wrong. EL and Pandora have it, Civ5 not so much.
I like good AI. In all 3 games the AI still has a lot of potential to improve, but Pandora-AI at least is good in military-deployment.
And most importantly:
I like being able to contribute to a game I like. Amplitude allowed me doing so in the past. Some of the stuff I modded back then for Endless Space made it into the game. But I feel they are getting too big for that and it becomes increasingly hard being heared as one of the many voices. Firaxis is so big, that I wouldn't even bother to try. And Proxy-Studios... Well I guess I don't have to lose any more words about how amazing I feel about being able to contribute directly in the source-code!

I think that the developers moving on to a new game is mainly just because the game doesn't have the public attention it deserves.
A new company on the scene always takes some time to become more recognized.
This is mostly done by fans who recognize that the game is underrecognized and then change that by spreading the word.

I also think that keeping the forums active plays a big role in that. Many potentially interested people inform themselves about a game by checking out the coresponing forums. Seeing activity there is way more likely to intruige them than if the place looks desolate.

[Crunchyblack]

Pandora is a good game, but its far too much like Beyond Earth, you know that reskinned CIV5 DLC they are charging $60 for? Well that game has everyones attention, many are upset with it, for the reasons I mentioned as well as the simplification of the old Alpha Centauri systems.

Pandora, even with the DLC is still cheaper, and its not a half assed reskin....problem is...it still simplifies a lot of what made Alpha Centauri does, with last generations graphics.

So you have less price, basically the same game, and worse graphics than the game that has everyones attention, which is Beyond Earth.

What Pandora needs to do is to capitalize on the failings of Beyond Earth.

Greatest issue I see with Pandora is the very linear item upgrades via the tech tree. Its all 100% linear, youll never want to use the prior tech tiers items when you have the latest tech, and once you get the final tier you can toss the rest. This goes for every item. Yes cost is a factor but production scales, what was an expensive white geared troop early game is just as expensive as a all gold troop end game.

On top of that there is a lack of damage types and armor types to add variety and strategy.

It might be too much to ask the devs to consider this, or impossible financially or resource wise....but they need to take a hard look at making empty units that do not trump the earlier units, as well as having a wider variety of weapons that do specific damage types and armors that counter them while leaving a weakness.

Right now with the tech tree im basically doing a cheap infantry, with the tier 1 hellfire and missles which means I get to skip all the other units until tier 2, where I just spam purple tanks, skipping all the research on anything else (militarily) then for the last tier ill go with gold jets and mechs skipping the rest and junking my entire army prior to that point....its too linear.

Add stuff like this to the game, then focus on that portal and infestation system that's at least providing different gameplay from the $60 CIV5 DLC. Youll get people attention then. Right now, as much as I like the game, its just a cheaper less graphically intense, version of Beyond Earth, with all that game does wrong included (no map mod system? in either? really?)

[Zak0r]

Well Pandora is an hommage to Alpha Centauri, so the similarities are wanted. The similarities with Beyond Earth were not in Proxy Studios' hands because Pandora came out one year earlier when no one was even talking about Civ BE.

As for the never reused techs I wouldn't agree. There are situations when you will want to use older techs which are connected to the cost. Since upgrades have almost always the same cost like buying the difference in production (Togra even has 50% discount), you can build cheaper units for city defense and upgrade them when needed (also weapons don't count against artillery and orbital strike, nuke, black hole). This is more effective than having the most expensive units everywhere because you can divert more production to offense. Also artillery mostly doesn't need the best armor since it shouldn't fight in direct combat anyway. All in all the gold weapons, armor and unit types are very expensive and it is way more effective to think about if you really need it for the specific task.

What do you mean lack of damage types and armor types? You have 7 different weapons. MG is good against biological, bad against mechanical. Rockets good vs mech, bad vs bio. Flamethrower very good vs bio, bad vs mech, shitty vs air. Cannon good vs (big) mech, bad against small bio and air. Sniper is good against bio, little less but still useful vs other stuff. Artillery is useful vs all (ignores enemy weapon). Laser is the alround weapon. Ok you can't give a mech a bio armor or the other way around but saying there are not enough different types just let's me doubt how much you looked at the details. How many such types does Civ provide?

If you think the game is too easy, try a higher difficulty and the Beta with significant AI improvements.

[Xilmi]

@Crunchyblack: Most of the stuff you mention to want to have actually is modable. If you have great ideas for more diversity for weapons and counters, go ahead.

However, like Zak0r, I think the current amount of stuff to know about what counters what already is quite a lot.

6 unit-types and 8 weapon-types, allow for a lot of combinations.

From alround over soft-counter to hard-counter everything is available.

What exactly are you missing in that regard?

I agree that techs and buildings are a little-bit generic and scaling is quite linear. But that also makes it easier to to keep the overview and ensures everything is balanced.