I am very interested in what people here think about this - this looks honestly like it is waaay to complicated and likely to fall under the weight of its own ambitions to me. Things I have noticed watching PotatoMcWhiskey and Perun. The alien actions seem to make zero sense. While this can be understood to some extent as they are actually alien (this is one thing I love actually the developers made actual alien aliens with a massive different mindset, philosophy, and biology), it quickly becomes obvious they could destroy us very quickly if they wanted to. Why they don't seems to be less clear and how they react to you fighting back at all seems much to random.
This is a small complaint though to the first one - this is a MASSIVE MASSIVE game that seems like it would take FOREVER to play where something you did 100 hours ago destroys your chances of winning and you won't know until 70 hours later. I suppose this shouldn't be a surprise since this is the people who looked at the Firaxis XCom (which is why more complicated and long than Civ) and said this isn't long or complicated enough. The above is just playing one game. To get good at this - understand it have any change of winning at all even on normal. Thousand hours playing/strategizing. I mean from what I have seen I could spend hundreds of hours just looking at the tech tree and planning out possible tech paths. Then after you do this for one faction there are five other factions each who seem to be VERY different both in philosophy and play style (which as a creative achievement is amazing. Even more so when each faction is so realistic...I can see earth in the presence of an alien invasion breaking apart into these factions each is very believable and I can understand where each is coming from - though if I ever played this every protectorate/servant agent I saw I would kill. Death before enslavement). I mean maybe if I was 12 I would have time for this, but even when I was 12 I read, played other games (loved my genesis), worked hard to do well in school, swam competitively (though never very well). I loved the original xcom but never finished a game. Honestly find firaxis's xcom better but have only completed one game of it as it just takes so long. I am just not sure who this game is for.
This is getting long and I haven't even touched on the space warfare aspect - which is like a completely separate game - that seems incredibly impossible to understand.
What I would be really interested in - stories in this world. So budding sci-fi authors. I would buy books talking about this universe. The story of a resistance ship leader becoming frustrated at the resistance leadership as they don't attack the aliens enough then flipping to humanity first. A political thriller about humanity first and the resistance fighting over control of the US government. The story of the founding of the Servants and the religious conversion of their leader (would have to write this almost as a horror story/tragedy).. I would LOVE this.
