Pandora First Contact, and what CIV BE can learn to do better/avoid from it.

Pandora is focused on warfare with action from the start while civilization games are slower and focus more on development.

Unlike in civilization, technology in Pandora play less of a decisive role, it is very possible to defeat an high tech enemy with swarms of low tech units.

The global population growth system is very nice.

Pandora also have alot of emphasis on city specialization.

Pandora also has aliens overload especially in the beginning. I understand they wanted them to be a threat but it's to much.

The game feels bland. The leaders have copy and paste personalities from SMAC. I also felt the interface to be confusing.

I saw it for a while already on Steam and and it had peaked my interest and so when it went on sale I thought why not try it out.
I did try it out and couldn't understand why it got a higher rating then CIVBE.

-The factions are a copy and pasts of smac. But without the beautiful graphic sets belonging with them.
-I hate the bright pink, yellow and light blue everywhere.
-The whole game is a continuant fight against aliens and your neighbors who all hate you after a while.
-The tech tree is very militaristic and there is hardly anything that makes you feel you are building a civ.
-I like to build up a civilization and mostly go wide. Thats basically impossible in Pandora. Go Tall and build your (huge) army or you'll be overrun.
-Diplomacy is a farce cause no matter how good your relation is in the beginning they always betray you (at least in the games I played) and stab you in the back.
-Stacks are back in, which depending if you like them is good or bad (for me it was bad).
-Really hated the espionage system of Pandora
-It uses the same hexagons as CIV(5 or BE) but they are fully filled with water or land which gives it a very unnatural feel.

Not long before I played Pandora I played SMAC for a while again and I must say I liked that still more than Pandora.

SMAC was game-play wise even better than CIVBE when it came out.
At the moment I think they are of the same standard. Wonders (incl movies) and the background story in-game was way better in SMAC. SMAC had its inbuild faction maker which was very fun to play with (it even gave you the picture of Sid Meier which you good use as a leader and a Firaxis building as an extra Towngraphic).

In CIVBE I like the beautiful planet Graphics (and the rest of the graphics as a whole except the wonders), how the leaders look in game and how they change (though they could have gone more extreme with that though). Also I'm amazed that I actually like the espionage system in CIVBE (for the first time in a CIV-like game, cause I still turn it off when I play CIV5).
The diplomacy isn't the greatest in vanilla so I'm happy they made a whole new system for the expansion.
I dislike the uneven (or boring to do) victory conditions some of the ideologies have. (hate the every turn picking up of a settler for 20 turns or sending a soldier unit through the gate every turn) and especially the based on luck contact win (so I always turn that one off).
Also do I hate the Stations with a passion. Always popping up at the exact spot (or blacking where) you want to build a city and everyone hates you if you destroy it. So I use mods to turn them off as much as possible.
I like to play on huge maps so only 8 civs in vanilla was a huge let down. Trough mods I can now play with 12 factions (hard coded max amount at the moment) on a huge map.

At the moment I personally still think CIVBE is the best option of the 3 (for sci-fi civ games) which only can get better with the Rising Tide expansion. Though I had hoped for more factions than the 4 we are getting.

I should also mention that Pandora's bugs is pretty good at wiping out civs in early game. There is games where a civ or two gets wiped out by bugs. And there is games where noone gets wiped out. And then occasionally there is three or more civs that gets wiped out by bugs.

Exactly how SMAC does it. Pandora does very little, if anything, that is actually new. I found myself replaying SMAC back when I was beta-testing the game.

My impression of Pandora is that it has mostly good foundation in its mechanics, but the content, the "flesh around the bones" is very lacking. The tech tends to be same military or production things in 3 tiers. This also makes the otherwise interesting unit workshop blander. Victory conditions are very lacking, and the fluff and diplomacy writing are bad. I like the stacks and the way they are handled here. Don't like the early civ style air units. Might be ok for flying aliens, airships and futuristic giant antigrav vehicles, but not for fighter planes and such.

Borrows heavily from SMAC, but you are better off just playing SMAC. The only thing Pandora has over the old game is that it has interface that is less painful to use, and that only really matters with the unit workshop.

Kissamies said:

Borrows heavily from SMAC, but you are better off just playing SMAC. The only thing Pandora has over the old game is that it has interface that is less painful to use, and that only really matters with the unit workshop.

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That's a mater of opinion. At the moment, Pandora is the better of the two, but with Rising Tide, that might change.

He said SMAC, not BE. Rising Tide won't improve SMAC, sadly

And of course it's a matter of opinion. So is all of this!

Gorb said:

He said SMAC, not BE. Rising Tide won't improve SMAC, sadly

And of course it's a matter of opinion. So is all of this!

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I hope RT improves Civ:BE.. I soon hope it does. I also saw what he said, but to me, the graphics of SMAC are too dated.

Don't get me wrong. I think Pandora is a pretty decent game. It's just that "pretty decent" doesn't cut it. Dated looks on SMAC bother me too especially when trying to play it with modern resolution, but not so much that I'd prefer BE and Pandora over it.

And shouldn't this thread go to "Other Civ-Related" or are there conventions I am not aware of?

Anyways, I haven't played this game and I probably won't since I personally think CIV BERT will fix enough of the current game to be better than this PANDORA game.

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It depends. Pandora has a far stronger mechanical base than Civilization V/BE in my opinion, but a really terrible faction lineup and boring technologies.

Another point where Pandora fails hard is the everything not directly related to industrial-military development: diplomacy, social engineering/government systems are barebones or non-existent. This is probably one of the reasons why the game feels so military, a bit like a giant turn-based RTS instead of an empire builder.

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Pretty much this. Civilization isn't exactly the greatest diplomacy game series in the first place, but everything outside of Pandora's military-industrial system is like that: barebones.

At the end of the day though, both BE and Pandora are pisspoor substitutes for Alpha Centauri and the only thing keeping me from just playing SMAC is that I can't deal with SMAC's dated UI. CivBE and Pandora are just desperately competing for second place.

Planetfall for Civilization IV is a better SMAClike than either CivBE and Pandora could ever inspire to be. I recommend that over either of those two games.

I'm kinda sad that noone here even mentioned "AI".
I thought that this is important for 4x-players but doesn't really look like actually being the case.

Over the course of the last year I've been working on the Pandora-AI as a hobby free-time-activity and I'm confident enough about it to claim that Pandora 1.6.5 has the strongest AI of any 4x-game out there.
Players who need to go up to Emperor or even Immortal in Civ5 will have a similar challenge by playing Pandora on the "Medium", non-cheating-difficulty.

The AI's expertise in city-specialization, tile-improvements, population-distribution and building-evaluation is at absolute expert-level.
The AI also has an understanding about what consequences their diplomatic actions will have on others. They consider things like back-stabbing and getting help from sympathizers when they go to war.
There is no real way to exploit their behaviour. They make their decisions based on what's best for them.
Outmaneuvering them tactiacally should also be pretty hard. They know how to properly use their units and how to combine and deploy them for the most efficiency.

Even the slight bonuses it get's on hard are enough for me, so I can no longer reliably beat it there.
The moderate bonuses on very-hard make it unbeatable for anyone but maybe a handful of elite-players.

I really wished it had some more fame so there would be more about it on youtube. I get a lot of enjoyment out of players stuggling against my AI. ^^

I was so hoping that Beyond Earth was a SMAC remake, but.. while SMAC got so many hours of gameplay from me, Beyond Earth just seems.. like an annoying toddler in comparison. Pandora: First Contact seemed promising too, but I don't know if any game will ever replace SMAC for me. It was just.. almost perfect?