I haven’t played it since I reviewed it. Here is a post where I point out some things about the game and link to my review.
Is the AI still very aggressive? Not a selling point for me so I need to know
The AI is very aggressive if it thinks you’re weak. You can’t have one garrison unit per city and dump everything into infrastructure like in Civ; you’ll get stomped on.
Highly recommend this at $20, much less $7.50. DLC is worth it just because there are some fixes/improvements that didn’t get backported to the base game; I don’t actually care for the new faction/espionage/aquatic nonsense all that much.
This thread on the Steam forums is pretty interesting reading.
The game threw me away big time because of its terrible writing and lore.
If, like me, you go in expecting Alpha Centauri levels of world building, be very cautious.
I dunno. The story/lore are not awful, just someone not as talented as Reynolds et al trying to ape SMAC.
The one thing in the writing that I do quite dislike is the terribly overwritten diplomatic screens. I don’t need (the same) four lines of text for “gimme open borders” every dang time.