Pandora: First Contact - 2/20 hours

I was warned in the review section of the store page. It was a complaint repeated in the negative review that sometimes even showed up in the positive reviews. The AI in this game is absolutely cutthroat. But I thought, "surely easy mode is going to give me a break here." I found out I was wrong the hard way.

I was completely peaceful and yet every damned faction at once declared war on me. It's because the AI is programmed to act aggressively when it senses weakness. And, of course, in a war you lose units, which makes you weaker, which provokes even more of the AIs to pile on. It was kind of a shitshow.

It's a real disappointment to me that my usual pacifist play-style isn't viable, but it's not the end of the world. I see a few possibilities for how I can adapt. I can just spam military units instead of selecting the economy focus when I'm out of stuff to build. I can be more aggressive in the positioning of my units, so as to take out the enemy quickly when they declare war. I can, overall, be less trusting and more opportunistic. I don't like it, but I have options.

The real shame is that I could grow to love Pandora's infrastructure management. At first, I was deceived by its superficial similarity to the Civilization games, so I built my tile improvements out of habit, and was kind of confused about what I was getting out of it. But once I did some research and started experimenting a little, it turned out to actually be kind of a clever system.

Unlike a lot of other 4X games, your resources in Pandora are global. In, say, Civilization IV, if you have a city with a population of 10, that requires that you have farms that produce 20 units of food surrounding that particular city. It doesn't matter if you've got another city that's producing a surplus. If New Byzantium (or whatever) isn't producing enough food to feed itself, it will begin to starve.

In Pandora, by contrast, the farmers in your first city can support miners in your second city and scientists in your third, which really changes the way you look at terrain and settling and building up your cities. Or, at least, it should. I actually just dicked around far more than I should have, which is probably what led to the AI dogpile.

I'm a little diffident about the game, going forward. I don't much care for the idea of having to constantly prepare myself for war, even on easy difficulty, but I do want to experiment more with city specialization and worker micromanagement. I think what I might do is set up a custom game with only one other AI, just so I can work out my build order and learn the nuances of the tech tree. Then, armed with greater knowledge, I can make a run on surviving a true cutthroat arms race.