So far, 145 turns into a game set with quick start with Zenith, no adjustments to the game parameters.
Firstly, foremost, it was more than a little unclear how to actually place buildings. Or even that I could. No really. For the first turn of a game, this needs to be signposted *much* better.
A few turns later, I saw flashing icons over my explorer camps. What did they mean? Buggered if I could tell. Eventually I worked out that if I right-clicked on the buildings and read through all the details, I'd discover that they were due to accidents. What could I do about them? Nothing, so... why tell me about them?
In the first half an hour, I placed buildings down, tried to work out what all the numbers meant, and how they interacted. It wasn't too tricky to work that all out, and having worked out that the flashing icons indicated problems, things like buildings not having enough water available were quite easy to understand at that point.
Eventually, I had an icon with an exclamation mark saying I didn't have a scout. That was fair enough, but I had some trouble working out how to solve that problem. I would suggest that clicking on such an icon would automatically select the tab with the scout building (ideally highlighted) and even automatically select the scout building to be built. This kind of automatic assistance is a massive help to people, people who know what they're doing likely know what that warning will be about anyway and won't click it.
I continued building my city for a while, build, build, build, numbers go up, numbers go up, numbers go up (and yes, eventually I built a scout building).
Eventually, I made contact with some other races, whereupon I attempted diplomacy, and of course, couldn't, because I lacked the necessary tech. I got the tech shortly thereafter, but looking through the diplomacy options for the couple of races whose languages I could speak a little better, well, I couldn't see anything useful to do.
There seemed to be a war going on, so I dug through the interface, and sure enough, there was a war going on. One that had wonderful "join" buttons available. Oh! It would have been *really* nice to have been invited to this, or told about it instead of having to dig for it.
Eventually I had the tech and worked out how to start a second city, so I did so. The interface for building buildings gets a little janky at this point. I need to have the city selected in order to build buildings for that city. Sometimes, when I've looking around at other stuff, I get confused why I can't build something; sometimes it tells me that I lack a population requirement of some kind, but then, nope, I can't build a housing block either. Why not? Oh, right, the wrong city is selected. If I had multiple cities, this would likely be even more of an irritation.
Almost immediately after building the second city, I took the "Advanced Criminology" Cultural level as I had a low level background crime. And my primary city exploded with crime.
Well over 100 deaths per turn due to crime, every turn, the population freefalling. Suddenly I had to disable most all of the buildings in my primary city to try and keep my police stations manned. And this was the most fun I'd had in the game thus far because this is *the only thing* that's happened in the game thus far.
At the point of writing this post, the population decline seems to have reached equilibrium with the birth rate, but I'm not sure how I'm going to improve it in any way; I have near total police station coverage, yet it seems to be insufficient. What else can I do? I have no idea, and the game offers no suggestions.
Anyway, to other points.
The interface of the main screen is quite nice, but I think there should be a lot more popup tooltips for the numbers in the top left tables. Lots more tooltips! Ideally offering suggestions to the player about what to do to raise/lower numbers.
The table that pops up when you right-click a building is hard to parse for useful information. Sorry, I've never designed UIs before, I'm not sure what to suggest to make it easier for the player to extract useful information from the screen.
The artwork I've seen is rather nice; it's great to see an Arcen game with more appealing art assets.
The sound effects I've heard are functional (not sure what else to say here).
I like that menus/windows can be right-clicked out of, but it would be better if it didn't automatically select the details window for the tile underneath the right-click.
In summary, the game seems somewhat sparse on gameplay. The definition of gameplay which most often seems to get bandied about is "a game is a series of interesting decisions," maybe that's not true, but I went for almost 150 turns making pretty much no "interesting choices", just trying to understand the numbers and make them go up for no obvious purpose. This seems less than ideal.
