Holy crap, that first military tech is really freaking important and useful now.
That's very true!
I haven't gotten much time to really get into it.
But I like territories and I like how the game feels more right now. The map feels smaller (it is), I ran into 3 races by turn 77. I now want to "share" the lands of the other races. I'm claiming tons of resources, but managing them is troublesome. I would really like it if the tooltips on the inventory screen for resources was added soon. The tech tree feel tighter, but also more awkward. That could be an experience issue.
In general I feel more involved and active and less like playing SimCity (not that either is a bad thing).
Awesome on the meeting of more races that soon, and that you're running into that much desire to "share" their space.
The resource density might be too high right now, I'm not sure.
Glad that the tech tree feels tighter, although I'm not sure what is feeling awkward about it -- only real change this past time has been the removal of the district additions. Is it a spacing thing?
I'm glad that you're feeling more involved and more like this is a 4X than a citybuilder, because that's definitely the goal. Not that I dislike that SimCity feel, but it was always meant to be one component of a larger 4X, not "that's how it feels" and then "oh hey, there's some 4X stuff over there I can optionally mess with after 200 turns if I want."
Looking at the patch notes, this sounds a heck of alot more interesting (and less confusing) than the way things were before.
I'll give it a try tomorrow I think, and post some impressions. I'd do it now, but pain is present (again) so no mouse-based games right now. You'd be amazed at just how obnoxious that gets.
Awesome on all but the pain -- really sorry to hear that's still plaguing you right now.
I'm thinking also that reduced map sizes are a good thing; one of my most constant complaints was amazing amounts of blank space that didn't have a use or purpose.
Agreed. Copying for a third time (third thread) because it's definitely relevant again:
The smaller map sizes really are more reflective of the original intent of the game (having that Risk-like feeling of always being near everybody). The reason I didn't have that before was because we needed big amounts of buffer space between players and other AIs in order to have the player not getting attacked constantly. Now with territories and incidents and so forth, that's no longer really a concern, so I get to go back to the original Risk-like intent. I hated how far away all the AIs were in the past, because I felt like I never saw them and had no reason to interact with them. But I can definitely understand how that's a huge change in feel. I imagine that having fewer AIs, and possibly custom map sizes, will be a thing in the future. Though to be warned, custom map sizes that are larger will run like a dog