Cyborg's initial thoughts

[Cyborg]

* Artwork and graphics: the best yet. Some really great drawing here.
* Performance: not even an issue
* Sound: This gets added in later.


Well that's the easy stuff. The next is more complicated.


* Gameplay: Feels like SimCity and civilization, except way more punishing on balance. You are always trying to balance the scales to keep your city from too much disease or crime, and yet so punishing right now that I can't say I really like that part of it. You can find yourself in some kind of death spiral that there is no coming back from and yet you never get a "YOU LOSE" message. I want to be focusing more on some kind of goal, whether it's kicking some alien ^%$, making nice with the planet, or some other victory condition. Instead, I find myself min/maxing the crime numbers. Right now, the numbers are not balanced, so it can be very frustrating.


I don't feel that I'm interacting with other races at all or even feel that I need to. Because the sprawl isn't that big, you can stay out of everyone's hair relatively easily, and just go about your business of making an awesome city. And only one city, because I don't see much reason to build a second one.


Some of the effects of what you do are rather hidden. For example, someone said not to build on jungle hexes, but I don't see why or where that's indicated. I found some items on the ground to build terrariums, but I don't really know what they're doing. I guess in that way it's very much like civilization for new players, and that you don't really know what stuff does. Just that it's something you probably want because it's a resource, and there are not that many of them laying around.


As far as military, it's very manual. Because there are not supposed to be that many buildings, it's doable, but every turn I am repeating the same clicking process without really thinking or making any kind of choice. It's not immediately clear what all of these military buildings do, and some of these buildings are missing tooltips entirely.


Is it fun? Yes. I think so. I enjoy creating the cities and seeing what happens, but I wish the game would play *with* me a little bit more instead of feeling like I'm playing by myself in the middle of nowhere on some planet.

[Aklyon]

If you look on the bottomleft tooptip when placing a building, if you're over rough terrain like jungle or rocky it'll add to the top lines about the additional build time needed. Explorer camps are immune to this.

[Endymion]

As far as military, it's very manual. Because there are not supposed to be that many buildings, it's doable, but every turn I am repeating the same clicking process without really thinking or making any kind of choice.

I mostly felt the same when I tried out some military stuff since then I have mostly avoided doing military stuff if I can help it.

[Misery]

* Artwork and graphics: the best yet. Some really great drawing here.
* Performance: not even an issue
* Sound: This gets added in later.


Well that's the easy stuff. The next is more complicated.


* Gameplay: Feels like SimCity and civilization, except way more punishing on balance. You are always trying to balance the scales to keep your city from too much disease or crime, and yet so punishing right now that I can't say I really like that part of it. You can find yourself in some kind of death spiral that there is no coming back from and yet you never get a "YOU LOSE" message. I want to be focusing more on some kind of goal, whether it's kicking some alien ^%$, making nice with the planet, or some other victory condition. Instead, I find myself min/maxing the crime numbers. Right now, the numbers are not balanced, so it can be very frustrating.


I don't feel that I'm interacting with other races at all or even feel that I need to. Because the sprawl isn't that big, you can stay out of everyone's hair relatively easily, and just go about your business of making an awesome city. And only one city, because I don't see much reason to build a second one.


Some of the effects of what you do are rather hidden. For example, someone said not to build on jungle hexes, but I don't see why or where that's indicated. I found some items on the ground to build terrariums, but I don't really know what they're doing. I guess in that way it's very much like civilization for new players, and that you don't really know what stuff does. Just that it's something you probably want because it's a resource, and there are not that many of them laying around.


As far as military, it's very manual. Because there are not supposed to be that many buildings, it's doable, but every turn I am repeating the same clicking process without really thinking or making any kind of choice. It's not immediately clear what all of these military buildings do, and some of these buildings are missing tooltips entirely.


Is it fun? Yes. I think so. I enjoy creating the cities and seeing what happens, but I wish the game would play *with* me a little bit more instead of feeling like I'm playing by myself in the middle of nowhere on some planet.

Yeah, that's been pretty much my thoughts as well.  Particularly the final bit; it just feels like my city is the ONLY thing happening anywhere, which I think is where the game is losing me currently.  I dont feel very involved in it, for lack of a better term.  I build things only for the purpose of building things, and the skill points or whatever and the research choices all seem kinda arbitrary and I end up doing them in the same order every time (I find *alot* of 4X games have this exact problem).  And beyond that.... nothing really happens.  And indeed, I dont see a reason to build a second city.  After a few goes at the game I just settled into a sort of rhythm, and there's little actual strategizing or choice-making once that happened.

I might get some flak for this, but so far, I just dont feel like the "no units" idea is working out very well.  It just means that things are... barren, I think is the best word.  The clump of buildings in the middle of nowhere is the *only* thing that's happening and the only thing to interact with.

Which could also be a big problem as first impressions go when selling the game, because people looking into it might not find much very exciting about many screenshots.  Hard to say on that one though.

Overall, I've ended up just not playing it too much, which is the first Arcen game that's had me saying that, really.