Pandora - First Contact

[SephiRok]

Windows, Mac and Linux.

[kevinj]

Thanks for the speedy response. I was hoping for iPad, but you can't have everything!

[valamelkor]

We're currently getting ready to make a video.

Besides other things we've reimplemented citizen allocation. Before only one colonist could work on the same resource type per tile, now you can have as many as desired, but with diminishing returns. We also changed the interface from a percentage allocation for citizen jobs to dragging actual citizens between the jobs like in MOO2.

At the moment we're making cities, farms and mines dynamically construct from building meshes, and reworking our internal build infrastructure, which you probably don't care about.

Stay tuned for the video!

Cheers,
Rok

How about promised (? ) video?

We've noticed an update and couple of new screenshots. And release date finally. That's great!
May be you could share some more information on what are your team doing and actually done since December?

Kind regards,
Melkor

[SephiRok]

I've been told the video will be released a little bit later.

Let's see what I can remember from the top of my head. Not sure there was anything too exciting to talk about. We've done some balance tweaking and polishing, adding more event notifications, tweaking the UI, such things. We have also added more exploration rewards, also some negative effects, but threw them out again because they weren't fun. We still have work to do on the exploration part, it's not yet what it should be. Oh, and we're going hexes.

[Maniacal_Man]

I'm not sure if I'm doing this properly, but I've tried to click on the link for the Pandora Beta test (its a link entitled "Pandora PC") and ... nothing happens.

I think we have a case of a broken link here; I figured I'd bring it to someone's attention.


Regards,

Maniacal_Man

[valamelkor]

Thank you for the update!

Oh, and we're going hexes

Awesome! Hardcore is great

Could you please tell us a couple of words about general difficulty and AI? How and when it calculates it's moves?

And what about maps? How large could they be?

[belliott]

I too signed up for the Beta test this morning but when I clicked the link underneath the Pandora box shot nothing happened. Any ideas whats up?

[SephiRok]

The next beta wave hasn't started yet. You will receive an email once it has. Shouldn't be too long.

Could you please tell us a couple of words about general difficulty and AI? How and when it calculates it's moves?

It's too early to talk about the difficulty and the AI; those will be one of the main focuses during the beta.

And what about maps? How large could they be?

Maps can be as big as your heart desires really. At the moment it goes from 22x22 on tiny to 62x62 on huge, but it's easily moddable via xml.

[TNSe]

I hope you guys rip off all my ideas (that you have never heard of) for this game.

[Wildfire]

Looking forward to Pandora: First Contact. I love playing the Civilization type games, and always wanted them to go towards endgame launching and then being able to continue directly into Alpha Centauri like game, or even the old Outpost / Outpost 2 games (as glitchy as they were - I love them). Looking forward to this one. Hope it goes Steam or Gamestop Now for distribution just to be able to transfer it from laptop to home computer as I travel a lot - and the Steam save game thing is awesome for that.

[valamelkor]

The next beta wave hasn't started yet. You will receive an email once it has. Shouldn't be too long.

Great news! eagerly looking forward to it!

It's too early to talk about the difficulty and the AI; those will be one of the main focuses during the beta.

Khmmm... Ok, I see that the AI requires lots of time for polishing. But may be you can share some general concepts? Like is it multi-threaded algorithm working on the background once puny humans do their actions or something simpler?

Maps can be as big as your heart desires really. At the moment it goes from 22x22 on tiny to 62x62 on huge, but it's easily moddable via xml.

Good to know. And how many different terrain types are available? Will it be possible to have air/naval/orbital units and structures?

[Vicarius]

We're still catching up from the event but screens and product pages will be available soon!

Some info from one of the journalists with some screens here: ......

Looks nice. Although wonderful for making fleets vanish in Master of Orion, I'm curious to see how a black hole generator works on a planet.

[valamelkor]

Hey SephiRok!

Any updates?

[SephiRok]

Yeah, sorry, been pretty busy. We'll be letting in the next round of beta testers tomorrow and hopefully more soon after that.

Khmmm... Ok, I see that the AI requires lots of time for polishing. But may be you can share some general concepts? Like is it multi-threaded algorithm working on the background once puny humans do their actions or something simpler?

Currently it's multi-threaded code kicking in once puny humans end their turn. :-)

Good to know. And how many different terrain types are available? Will it be possible to have air/naval/orbital units and structures?

There's plenty of terrain types. You have your standard ecoregions like arctic, tropical and so on. Then you have plains, hills, mountains and of course coast and ocean. And on top of that you have special features like forest, resource boosting features (hot springs, gaia forest, ...) in multiple tiers and more.

Thanks for all the interest guys! We're very excited about the beta and look forward to all your feedback!

[VonLowe]

Sounds fantastic. Let me know if I can help in any way.

[valamelkor]

hey people. Still no updates on progress
How the beta is going? Any reaction from testers you can share?

[jpwrunyan]

Oh, and we're going hexes.

Can you give some more information about this. The reason I am excited about hexes is because it will allow a much more accurate spherical model of the entire planet to play on than an orthogonal grid would. The thing that bugged me about the Civ games (including Alpha Centauri) was that the polar regions were way too big and didn't wrap around. So basically the "world" was a cylindrical tube. If you guys go with a hexagonal grid meshed over a sphere this will put the game into my *absolute kidnap-babies-and-sell-them-must-have* column. It would be totally awesome to zoom out into space Google-Earth style and see the big picture of global domination. It appears from the screen shots that you have already done the heavy lifting of implementing a 3d graphics system, so...

Please say yes. PLEASE SAY YES!

[Casaubon]

whata screenshot are you talking about? link?

[jpwrunyan]

From the press-release you can go to product info and see some:
http://www.slitherine.com/games/PandoraPC

There are also some reviews online that have screen shots.

All screenshots I have seen have a grid mesh and not a hexagonal one, though.

[jpwrunyan]

No reply to question makes me a sad panda.