played easy ironman as zenith, got to act 2, but i couldnt do any diplomacy/interaction other than destroying an enemy expansion and taking the land, do you need to wait until the linguistics is completely leveled? that was going to take AGES (level 3 was at like 200 turns to complete with three linguistic buildings). The natural wonders seemed to work, but there were 4 outside my land and I couldnt do anything about them, unless I tried to spam coast guards to destroy the other races (they did way a lot more damage than anything else I had).
The planet gave me a fire breathing lizard or something in retaliation (among many other penalties), that exploded my fire dept needs, I understood that would last 5 turns, but the effect just remained forever, even after blowing up the buildings and rebuilding them.
The war part was hard to understand, attacking looked simple although double click is hopefully a placeholder/shortcut and a button is added (open building with mouse wheel then click the attack button for example), because I only figured that out after I guessed there had to be a way to use my "military", never found how to do that commandos thing with the barracks. In that sense the "attack planner" is very convoluted and after one correct use and one that failed (I ended up actually attacking the neighbor) to later try to get the correct use again to no avail (by correct use I mean when it shows how much health you should remove form the enemies base). It should be 1) select military building and choose to attack (double click the "source" or the button I was talking about), 2) hover mouse over target. Period. A 3) placeholder step could be press B to toggle the planner, but it is not necessary, basically the planner should be always active.
One of my neighbors, the one I attacked seemed to start some teleportation attack, I saw several Ufos on my land but they always disappeared the next turn. Left me clueless as I dont seem to have units anyway.
There was no screen where I could see how much of every stat I have plus what I need, I always had to react to problem as opposed to plan ahead (unless I wanted to hover over every building and do the math...), still act 1 was easy to keep on balance. Mutagen seemed nearly impossible to get (only 30 per chemical plant), and the science lab (act 1) requires a ton of it by act 2, especially after it levels up the entire game. It seemed to be a local resource as well which means you have to really plan ahead your city (and have like 1 science lab and 5 chemical plants on a city territory, just for that lab, and then some more if you want other buildings that use labs), basically the act progression punches you in the gut.
Being on easy I guess, I ran in the red for all of act2 and never saw any real penalty, or the game does not show me the penalties straight to my face. I did have some other stuff happen as random events, for computing parts and stuff, but I had a huge deficit of mutagen for the entirety of act 2, and then 150k fire control deficit towards the end (my whole country should be in flames by then), didn't see anything change.
(to vet testers) Which ones of these are intended or my fault so I dont report them?
