Game News Pandora: First Contact Beta Preview at Space Sector

[Mraston]

Tags: Matrix Games; Pandora: First Contact; Slitherine

Pandora: First Contact is shaping up to look a lot like Civ5 in space. It was announced last year but I can't seem to find a release date as yet (hopefully soon). Adam Solo at Space Sector was lucky enough to get his hands on a beta version and posted his thoughts here.

There's some interesting points of note outside of the normal "it's a 4X, it does 4x stuff" observations;

In Pandora, you do have an idea on what each tech purpose is, and what sort of outcome it may unlock. But, while each tech describes what future tech it leads to, it’s somewhat hard to have a sense of what needs to be researched in order to reach a certain more desired and more advanced tech. It’s not the same as going with Alpha Centauri’s blind tech progression, where you can only choose a research area but not the tech itself, but still a somewhat more mysterious way to unlock new techs.

As a person who can deliberate over tech tree decisions ad nauseam, the vagueness could be a good way of quickening my decisions and it's also a interesting way of presenting the unknown in scientific research.

There is also the ability to customize units;

This is done through the game mechanic called “Workshop”, and you can create and customize your own designs by choosing from a pre-defined set of classes and then choose your favorite weapon and armor configurations. Each weapon comes with its own modifiers, which makes some units more suitable to fight biological, mechanical or airborne enemies, the types of units I discovered so far.

The new screenshots from the beta also show that the game has moved from a square to hexagon based grid and also looking a bit more spiffy in general.

Slitherine is also looking for more people to help beta test the game if your're interested.

 

[kris]

Seems to be the Civ5 version of alpha centauri. Except the aliens are more like just another cilization instead of "Gaia". Hard to tell if they made something interesting out of this.

It is hard when you get compared to AlphaC. Especially when it looks like just another similar game to Civ5. I'll reserve judgment though.

 

[Yeesh]

Yeah, this one sure looks and sounds extremely samey. I mean, I hope there's a more compelling end to this sentence: "It's like Civ and SMAC except..." than "...production works somewhat differently." But what can we do but cross our fingers and dip into our deep, deep wells of optimism?

And can anyone identify the particular breakthrough in programming or in computing that finally made it possible for hexes to start appearing in mainstream games?

 

[Yeesh]

Wait, what? Why are hexes ever a problem? AOW had hexes and it had no problems.

Not a problem, I welcome them. But in mainstream games they used to be very, very rare. Well, outside of Panzer General and co. AOW was one of the few, and AOW wasn't all that mainstream.