First off, thank you very much for allowing me to participate!!!
Skylaxians, Normal, Terrestrial
I like free building placement. Damn dense jungles. Seriously. This planet is like 90% jungle.
It lead to little "sub districts" where I'd place things. So I ended up having 6 houses around an eatery as it's own little pod. Same for shopping mall and bank/commerce centers. Definite plus.
I pressed tab... Underground oooooooooOoOOOOooo. Rush sonar!
I was a little confused with the teleporters. They allow you to build farther away but you need to place a civic center to do so? Is that right?
Some of the numbers I do not understand. Up at the top. If I am producing 3k+ crops, 3k+ water, and 3k meals, why is the number near the meals 800?
I feel like the lander gets upgraded to max really quickly.
Should I be destroying my rural farms for hydroponics to reduce crime and building count? Same with solar energy for nuclear?
My population got a virus that had a very low mortality rate. Something like 1%. My birth rate was something like 1.3%. I let my entire population get infected. Then all my buildings took a butt-ton of damage which took 140 turns to repair. I guess everyone went insane and damaged it? I also started losing population at a pretty alarming rate, lost half my city. I guess the mortality rate is only an average and not a fixed amount.
Do police work in an aura or only on what they touch?
Same with hazmat. I have like 8 hazmat facilities down but my pollution cleanup was something like 500. I was under the impression that hazmat gave ~100 cleanup per tile it affected? Might be me reading it wrong.
Armor drakes near me. Rush guildhall!!
I put a guildhall down, told it to train the cute little animals. Whoops. It gives adjacency bonuses to helipads... I put it next to the industry... Demolish.
6 heli pads surrounding a guildhall with armor drakes is ridiculous. Even more so with the social progress that increases air fighting, like pilot culture. Do the helicopters ride the drakes or...?
There was a Boarine hidden barracks that I couldn't for the life of me destroy. I even sent all my crazy helicopters at it. It seemed like it was immune to missiles and helicopters. So I sent some ground troops at it which it intercepted. Frustrating, but only because I'm not sure how it works. It didn't really pose a threat, it just wouldn't die.
Auto terraform. Set it to 99. It took all the plains around me and made them into blue Skylaxian stuff. It looked cool. I also noticed that the Boarines next to me had all snowy tiles and caves. That's when I discovered they were underground. Cool.
My OP helipad setup was enough to deal with any rogue that came my way. Hehe. I love air buildings.
Speaking of units, there were saucers everywhere. I noticed they teleported in. Do I get these? Are they actually units? Do I get units? Like Civ style? Or are they "buildings" which just teleport?
I liked building the city. Can't for the life of me keep pollution down. Crime was never an issue, it was fairly easy to take care of.
Injuries were easy to take care of. One hospital was enough, two if injuries started racking up.
Unemployment was interesting. I was constantly fighting unemployment, looking for industry to put down to generate jobs.
Crowns were never an issue as soon as I got a few industry buildings down. I was rolling in money with nothing to really spend it on past a point, with only the concurrent building count slowing down any expansion I planned.
I tried to start generating market items with the Literari (I think that's wrong but hopefully you get it) which I thought wrote fiction and stuff. I tried to sell knowledge, entertainment and military tech, all of which I had none/there were no buyers.
Interesting point, I researched Boarine linguistics to max, and talked to them successfully. But then I attacked them and destroyed half their city and when I went back into diplomacy with them they were back to gibberish.
I noticed that I seem to click through some elements of the UI on the left side. For example, I tried to select the bulldoze tool to remove a building, but under the bulldoze was another building of mine, which was summarily detonated by the damn demolition boys. Trigger happy idiots. It happened a second time before I realized what was going on.
I think the base building groundwork is solid. I liked it overall. More depth will come, I'm sure, with tutorials and understanding, maybe some clarification of what certain things do/your resource amounts and what they mean (up at the top) and combat stuff. The AI seems very passive, which is on purpose for testing I'm sure, although the Boarines did get mad and attempted a counterattack. It was too late though. My city has a lot of bacon now.
