Good news! I made it! I got through an entire game without having to go to war with another faction. It turned out the secret was playing on a very large map, upping the game speed to "marathon" and raising the alien aggression. My superior human foresight allowed me to grab enough territory in the early game, while the AIs were dealing with alien attacks, that I was able to keep a dramatic lead throughout the entire late game (apparently the AI will not gang up on you if you're able to take them all on simultaneously).
The strange thing I noticed about the late game is that once you've built all the available city improvements, it's more or less a matter of time before your faction starts to spiral out of control. Your population continues to grow, so long as there is food, but once you exceed your residence limit, you keep accruing more and more unhappiness, which tanks your build times, research rate, and tax income. It's lucky that I was able to win the game not too long after that started happening, because total collapse from overpopulation was basically inevitable.
I'm not sure how I feel about that. Yes it gives the late-game a sense of urgency, but for fucks' sake people, use some damned birth control. Malthusian population growth is a discredited idea in the real world for a reason.
That being said, it only really starts happening once the technological victory is imminent, so I have to shrug. It would be nice if there were repeatable techs that could help you cope with excess population, but that's mostly because I like things nice and neat. You don't actually need a precisely ordered and well-managed populace to win the game, which makes sense when you think about its focus on military conquest, but which, obviously, I find pretty unsatisfying.
Overall, I'd say that Pandora: First Contact has potential. It wasn't too bad, once I got over the learning curve, but if a game is going to try and be a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri, then it needs to bring more philosophical exploration and sci-fi weirdness. Also, its focus on being a challenging game left it little room to carve out distinctive identities for its factions. Yang or Miriam may not have attacked at strategically optimal times, but man-oh-man they were insufferable when they did.
I probably won't play this game again, because I have a lot of better options, but it had some unique ideas and I admire the fact that a small company could produce a game as polished as this one. It's not what I want out of a 4X game, but more aggressive players might find it a worthy and engaging strategic challenge that requires a careful balance of economy and expansion.
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