The early game is [slow]...
population [growth is slow]...
economy [growth is slow]...
tech tree [is meaningless]...
The interface [lost information]
[Juffo-Wup fills my fibers and I grow turgid. Violence ensues.]
The v3 changes have removed a lot of the micro and well as limited the player's ability to expand. Early game is slow for most races, unless you build small shops fairly extensively. The other basic economic buildings (lumber camp, fishery) aren't really viable. Many races have problems getting to the first cloning center, and the game doesn't pick up until then. Given the lack of building placement relevance it does seem like whack-a-mole [problem]. The events are intended to fill that void, but they aren't complete yet. In that note it seems like SBR is aiming for something like King of Dragon Pass, but the event depth is too shall. The events are effectively random noise right now. As for the techtree, each time I'm prompted, I just queue up everything on the short list and forget about them, I get things when they finish. So I agree with most of the content of Misery's view. I'm guessing he picked an awkward starting race and didn't focus on small shops, but the general consensus of his post isn't inaccurate.
I just started with the Krolin, since they're chosen by default, and I went into this not really knowing what's going on. It was made apparent almost immediately that the small shops were the central source of money in the beginning, but.... there's nobody to run them! Population went up by exactly 13 every turn.... no matter what I did. I figured that the increment would get larger as the population size increased.... more people having more kids and all.... but it never moved! Population kept rising by that amount, and that amount never changed. I saw that a hospital was meant to be an early game method of increasing it, so I built one, which took 20 damn turns (and most of these turns didn't contain anything for me to do, because the numbers werent there to do them with).... and the number went up by a whole FIVE. This didn't exactly do much to speed things up.
This.... was baffling. And slow. And since the placement of buildings... at least at this earliest point (does this change?) seems pretty meaningless (I just stuck them wherever, it didn't seem to matter much), that just makes even that bit uninteresting.
Not to mention that the tech tree's speed does NOT seem to match this. For example, in not long at all, even if you get a bunch of other techs first when you dont need to, you can unlock that business office thing. Takes, what, 300 people to run it, yeah? But when you get it, even if you took some extra time getting other techs first... you're not anywhere NEAR the point of it being practical or viable. It's like the pace of the game was entirely distorted.... but the pace of the tech tree wasnt changed whatsoever. It's very disjointed, from what I've seen of it.
Now, I'm not exactly the grand master of strategy games here... so my own opinion probably isnt all that important, and might not match up with what others are currently thinking about the game. But, that's exactly why I'm asking about this, to see if I'm missing anything major here, because that's kinda the feeling I get. Like, this whole thing just is not at all working right... so something's gotta be off, and I just cant tell for sure if I'm just not spotting something, or if there's a genuine balance/pacing/whatever issue going on right now.
What I do know is that, by my own viewpoint, I can see alot of potential players getting very, very caught up on this aspect. Starting the game, but just losing interest because there's nothing to do, nothing happening.
I mean, I can get the idea of the events, but... even those cant possibly do all that much, because one way or another.... your actions are still *very* slow. All I can see them doing is forcing choices on you that you otherwise wouldnt make. Like, okay, I'm building up population so I can place this linguistics thing, because I know I need it, and building up money, just let it do this for about 12 more turns, aaaaaand.... oh, wait, Godzilla is here, now I *have* to divert from that to place this extremely specific building to deal with him... and now the rest of everything I had to do is just delayed.
I mean, that early on, it's not like you're going to be trying to come up with a group of interesting building placements and changes to make to solve problems, because you can barely make any moves to begin with. There's just no ability to do so. If the events were firing off right now.... this would be even slower.
Really, it's that population thing that is just killing the entire thing for me. It just... it drags it to a near halt.
