Pandor: First Contact - Just Announced Space 4X from Slitherine and Matrix

I agree with much of what Rob said. It’s certainly not a SMAC clone and the game can stand on its own two feet.

I think I know why tbg couldn’t get into it - it does start a bit slower than other 4X games due to the shared resources. It picks up a bit after 30 turns in or so.

The overall package’s production values are excellent, especially for a first-run game. This includes a bunch of items - things like graphics, sounds, interface and overall stability are quite good. The game is visually appealing, the interface is a Civ V clone (which is a good thing), the unit graphics are neat, the sounds ok, the music unobtrusive (maybe a little too forgettable) and the game has only crashed on me once. Other things work really well - stuff that’s not so simple like map scripts and the combat AI. These things can sink a game (FE:LH’s map scripts are still awful) and here they’re just nailed.

I like the flavor of the descriptions. Inspired by SMAC, they help breathe life into the game. A couple of other concepts that seem to work well are the semi-random tech tree, the unit editor and the global pool of food, minerals and the like. I didn’t see the impact of migration from one city to another, but supposedly it’s there. Because of these concepts, the game starts off a little slower than other 4x games, but it makes up for it later. Each civ has its own personality and that’s generally a good thing (more on the downside of this later), and between the descriptions, the AI and some of these other factors the game had some unique flavor. It’s not faceless and that’s a good thing.

Operations are neat and can be used to devastating effect. I found out that the hard way when my massed army was bombarded repeatedly due to an AI operation. There’s nothing like losing half of your killers stack of doom to an aerial bombardment to make you re-think your strategy.

I played last night and got that “just one more turn itch” and finished my first victory this morning. That itch is the hallmark of a good game. My first impressions are favorable.

I have some concerns about this game long-term though. I think these are all fixable, some pretty easily. But some of these need fixing before I’ll give it my recommendation.

  • The game needs some more flavor. While I like the Operations, I’d like to see more city specialization (which means needing Wonders) and unique landscape tiles. They’re greatly needed.

  • I’d also suggest either some random events (SMAC had 'em) or just a way to make the game feel more “alien”. Once I was halfway through, the alien species were gone and I could have been fighting on Earth. That’s not good for a Sci-Fi game on an alien planet. The flora/fauna has no chance of survival in this game currently and the planet just doesn’t have the tools to fight back. In SMAC you could strike a balance with Planet and the planet was an extremely tough opponent to take head-on. Pandora is a pushover.

  • The AI and the diplomacy needs some work. Imperium and Divine are simply awful and overall the AI is far too aggressive. A player using someone like Togra is at a massive disadvantage early in the game because some civs are like the Civ 2 Mongols on steroids. At the same time, Noxium and Terra are diplomatic pushovers. Moderate these a bit and provide a bit more clarity as to why civs like / don’t like you. Also, the ability to have one civ attack another would be nice. But the game needs work here ASAP. While Rob said that Togra may be the “one to watch”, that’s not really the case. The tech group is always trouble in late game if they’ve been left alone. But surviving the beginning of the game was incredibly rough because of Imperium and Divine’s hyper-aggression.

  • Players need a manual and more information regarding how they’re doing. I won a tech victory and I couldn’t even tell it was coming. The devs don’t have to do a ton here, but the players need some guidance on the mechanics and some better information as to the winning conditions.

  • The speed of the endgame seems to go a bit haywire. I was researching techs every turn. Buildings were being produced in one or two turns. It was nice to see things happen, but it got old after a while. I’d love to play Pandora on a huge map to keep the exploration aspect going longer, but I can’t imagine how long the endgame would take on such a map because there seemingly aren’t penalties for city spam and unchecked growth.

Overall, it’s cool. It’s a good, solid 4x game. It has issues throughout though. The entire opening third of the game is dictated by the psychotic AI and absurd civ bonuses contribute to this. It doesn’t matter who you are, you better just churn out units to fend off the inevitable attacks or you’re done. There’s just no option. The mid-game gets bogged down because there’s no “alien world” remaining and there’s a decided lack of events and wonders to keep things fresh. The endgame becomes a bit of a slog with city-spam and incredible production speeds. Luckily, many of these things can be fixed with relative ease because much of this doesn’t require new gameplay mechanics (wonders and events would).

If this ends up being the final and complete product, I’ll be disappointed. I’ll get a few games out of it, but I’ll ultimately return to Civ V, DW and other games for my 4X fix. I will get my money’s worth, but it won’t be something I could recommend. However if it continues to get developed (and it won’t take a whole lot), Pandora could be a great one. YMMV.

My 4th game, 3rd as the tech faction finally resulted in a win, and it was a biggy. I simultaneously won an economic and tech victory. The zealot faction was foolish enough to attack me after I had been sitting on a stockpile of nuclear weapons and black holes. The black hole generator is awesome. I used it to erase about 5 cities of theirs off the map without leaving the comfort of my own continent. The military faction was full of bluster a couple times, but never attacked me.

After I set all of my cities to produce wealth, my economic victory progress was going up 11% per turn. I’m not sure how they would defend against that. Would it work for them to set their cities to produce wealth? Who knows.

Erm, okay. So in the first game I started, at the end of Turn 1, four of the five other civs were eliminated. I’m assuming this is a bug of some sort… ?

Seems like a bug. Do you have the save game to give to the devs? It autosaves.

Building wealth is overpowered and leads to an easy economic victory.

I was playing as the nature faction, the religious and economic factions were left. Everything at default settings. When I only had about 25% progress to economic victory, I decided to just have all of my cities produce wealth. I had 9 cities at that point, 5 of them well developed.

My progress increased about 3 percent per turn. When I hit 75%, the religious faction started getting cranky with my - stopped some agreements, public insult, but never got to the point of declaring war. I don’t think they had the time, nor would they have been able to stop me since I was fairly well defended, but not a ton.

I think the produce wealth is overpowered. It allows one to get the economic victory fairly quickly without a good way to stop the player. Maybe it would help if the AI factions started producing wealth as a defense to an economic victory when a player hit the 75% progress towards economic victory. In any case, I think something needs to change with this to balance the game a bit better.

I just posted my reviewof the game, but for you I’ll list some highlights here. SOme have probably been mentioned before in this thread. I feel there is enough different in this game for there to be room for Civ and Pandora. I guess it depends on how much you love 4X games, but I think if you are a big fan of them this is good enough to coexist with the others. I haven’t played Alpha Centauri in over a decade so I can’t make comparisons there.

  • The combination of a random tech tree and the ability to only display future techs close to your current level forces the player to adapt and gets you out of the habit of always researching things int he same order. Also good is that there are multiple paths through the tech tree, some you can bypass some techs entirely without ever looking back. In Civ V is always seemed like you had to backtrack at some point to pick up prior techs.

  • The city model is a bit different than the Civ model. Global food and mineral resources. Minerals being required to keep up production. Cities can specialize more due to the faction resource pool. It is missing strategic and luxury resources, so that bit of excitement is gone. Love finding those deposits. No wonder buildings either - boo.

  • Operations are awesome! Discover the right tech, build the right building and operations start getting generated automatically. These range form the more mundane - satellite scans, to the awesome - rain down death with a localized black hole generator. Wipe cities from the planet - bam!

  • Unuseful lore-only manual (boo). Useful tooltips and hint messages (yea!). The good UI makes most things easy enough to discover but leaves some unnecessary holes.

  • You kind of need to design units since the default ones are bare bones (boo). The unit workshop is very easy to use and allows creation of new unit designs in less than a minute!

  • The unit model is rock, paper, scissorish (boo), but with unit classes, weapon choices, armor and devices that can be added it does become a bit more than that (yeah!).

  • Units can stack (yea!), it felt good to play without 1UPT. It felt like a strategic game instead of a tactical game forces on a strategic map. Stacks can get large, so some battled can get a little tedious but still for the best I think.

  • The AI actually beat me at the default difficulty (gets very minor bonuses) for my first 3 games in a row. As you raise the difficulty, the AI gets a morale boost which affects worker production. The AI seems to be able to put together an attack although it does sometimes attack with less than adequate forces. It also doesn’t seem quite as adept at using operations enough. Still seems like it will maintain more of a challenge than Civ V.

  • Diplomacy is opaque (boo), but at least it is clear what they think of you and they don’t seem schizophrenic (yea!). Basic Civ V type of diplomacy options. Limited economic / research pacts. No resource trading (boo). In general the AI seems a little easy to mollify, except for perhaps the religious zealot faction. Factions didn’t seem to care when I halted agreements and attacked someone I was friendly with (boo). I should be seen as untrustworthy - at least if they were friends of the one I attacked!

  • Clean visual appearance, good UI.

  • Zero crashes even with alt tabbing out a lot.

  • Fast AI turn times (yea!).

OK, I’m sure I’ll find it eventually, but how do you check your progress to victory?

In tooltips for the military, tech and economic buttons at the bottom of the screen. It took me a while to stumble across them.

Thank you for the well written review. It sheds a lot of light as to the game. My biggest query is how far are the developers willing to commit to improve upon the features that you consider light. Its one thing to commit to bug fixes but fleshing out new features, can we expect that from the developers?

Thanks for the compliment! All I can say about future improvements is that the devs on the forum state that still have a lot of ideas on where to take the game. Not sure how much will be in free updates, paid dlc / expansions, etc. I don’t have any concrete info about what they want to improve, but someone on the forums mentioned diplomacy might get some attention.

Thanks. I had clicked on them thinking that screen would have the info, but hadn’t thought to hover.

Your review looks great. I’ll definitely be reading it tomorrow. Your synopsis above parallels my views pretty well.

I feel that this game is worth revisiting after an expansion gets released buffing out the features. I’m content to wait and just enjoy vicariously through your reports here about the game in the meantime.

I just got done reading the review on your site, and quite enjoyed it.

I had an easy time of it my first game, because a major exploit on a huge world is too start with the Scientists. Their ATV got me off to a fast start with exploring ruins. Quite a few ruins rewarded me with Drones, and those Drones went on to find more Drones. It was exponential growth at its finest. In between was scattered plenty of financial finds to fund the Drones. Exploration led to an explosion of my faction and really cowed the AI. It would have been nice if that would have led to them teaming up on me, but I picked off a couple of them without any complaints from the others. Another one was lost to the mid-game surge in alien attacks. I even lost a city to that surge, which was a nice change of pace.

I’ve heard others complain about the lack of response to their Economic Victory run. I didn’t bother producing Wealth, as I was mostly interested in exploring the techs. However, even after repeated warnings to the other factions that I was getting close to the economic win and a tech win, they kept giving me money. The Corporation was making some Nuclear Launchers, but never used them on me. They just offered me some more money whilst building their asernal.

Like your review, I see that my comment was a little more critical than I intended for this game. I would certainly recommend it as well, and am looking forward to starting another run tonight with the Tree-Huggers, upping the difficulty and Alien Aggression.

Thanks for reading the review :-)

Yeah, the AI faction response is inconsistent in how they respond to impending victory. I reloaded a save several times right before I went for an economic victory. The first time there was no resistance. Another there was some late resistance, but not enough to impede me. Another time the religious faction came and attacked right when they got the 75% to victory warning. It is good that there is some variability, but it doesn’t always make for stiff competition. I tried another game where I essentially just grew a city really big and they all ganged up on me and killed me.

I was really kinda disappointed by this as a $30 game. It comes off as so very bland to me. The tech descriptions are nice in that SMAC way, but the techs themselves are super generic: Basically upgraded farms I, upgraded farms II, along with about 9 tiers of armour that are just… slightly improved on each other with no interesting mechanical differences. It’s a little like the awful GalCiv2 tech system of Laser 1/2/3 with slightly more interesting fluff descriptions.

Where is Brian? I expected him to share his opinions with us by now.

Probably crying quietly in a corner after X: Rebirth.

He’s waiting on his graphics card right?

This really isn’t a space game. ;) I played the beta, thought it was meh. Same as other folks. ;)