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I started my first game and was amazed at how quiet things were. After 150 turns, I was almost convinced that there were no people around me. I was trying to work out the tech tree and what buildings did. I didn't realize that I could build anywhere in the teleport range of my city. However, I sprawled out quite a bit as I was playing at building different buildings.
I got to Turn 200, then there was an alert but, I wasn't involved. 10 turns later a second alert came up. This time the Burlust decided to attack everyone.
Apparently, I was in the middle of the war as everyone immediately descended in about 25 ships across my city initial range. Apparently, they brought along a couple of subterranean creatures and proceeded to demolish most of my city.
I barely survived thanks to a Missile Base next to a wonder giving me 2x range.
A few things I couldn't quite grok during the game were pollution and disease.
I ended up getting hit with 10 diseases 1 almost every turn. At one point, my entire civilization was down to 150 from a high of about 2900. When I tried to recover by seeing if lowering my pollution would fix this. I built extra trash dumps but, couldn't figure out how to lower trash in any other way. Recycling station didn't seem to do much. I figured it would lower my trash produced by 1650 from the tool tip but, it didn't. I also tried to use a Biomass reactor and that caused my pollution to skyrocket to over 6000. I'll grant that was just after a monster destroyed a few buildings in an outpost area.
At that point I closed the game for the night and it updated. I'm going to start a new game tonight.
My initial thoughts.
Only Missile bases seemed to be effective. Barracks and helipads seem like they sometimes managed to do damage but, rarely did they actually clear a saucer or do damage to a critter.
Money is too easy to come by. Granted, I'm dropping missile bases all around my cities to keep the neighbors at bay, however; I regularly had 2-500 thousand crowns and only had a single bank, mall, and commercial building.
Diplomacy feels a mess.
Why are there diners if people just eat food from farms?
I got a ruined ancient city on a desert mountain tile. Nothing can be built adjacent to it but, it only provided science and Language boosts. Maybe there is a building later in the tech tree but, I didn't get to it in ~500 turns.
Diseases are rampant and the planet was absolutely committed to infecting me with everything it could, I think there were 6 in 10 turns. This also seemed to coincide with a rash of Sinkholes, 3 in 5 turns.. I got a culture benefit to improve the foundations to prevent this.
Polution didn't work as expected and I couldn't figure out how to "clean up" my civ.
Still am looking forward to starting again and seeing if I can figure out a better plan.
As noted by previous posters, my entire starting zone was jungle with a small bay, a small mountain range to the west of my starting city and fairly sparce resources. I had 1 in my initial city and got maybe 7 by the time I quit.
