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Hmm. On the one hand, I'm finding Pandora to be about 70% of what I hoped to achieve with a SMACX 2.
Yitzi,The character, story, and atmosphere aren't as good as SMACX by a long shot, but they're light years better than BE.The factions themselves are basically SMAC clones--scientist, religious, ecological, military, diplomat, etc. And that is integrated fairly well into the diplomatic conversations--other factions will accuse the scientist of dangerous experiments whereas if you're the scientist you get to speak very condescendingly to the other factions. The bit of flavor missing there is no character is given to 3rd parties in conversation--the religious leader will talk about sin and converting the world as well as what she specifically likes or doesn't like about your faction, but if she asks you to declare war on the ecology leader she just gives that leader's name rather than calling her a crazed tree huger dancing naked under the stars.There's no grand unifying story like the world you're on achieving consciousness, but there are a couple of storied events that drastically affect play--a gradual eclipse that drives the native life mad, and a world wide invasion by the former inhabitants of the planet that tends to suspend all wars while everyone cooperates to survive.It's clearly meant to be a SMAC clone--it's got the same unit workshop, fungus, etc.It has an interesting mechanic that randomizes what techs are prerequisites for what (within limits), so you have to come up with a different tech strategy each game.It's missing wonder and victory/defeat movies, which is a big negative for me as I find they add a lot of atmosphere to games. But BE and Civ 5 don't have those either.It's also missing the sense of climate. You can raise and lower terrain, but you're just changing whether that hex is plains, hills, or mountains like the Civ games rather than pulling a 3D grid up or down, and I haven't noticed that doing so has any affect on rainfall.I'd definitely recommend it, and it's the closest modern game to SMACX I've seen--it's about 70% of the way to what I'd want SMACX 2.0 to be, which is a lot closer than anything else has come.
Yeah, I was taking SMAC unchanged except for a modern GUI and graphics as 100%.I've actually really been enjoying playing it the more I understand it.Currently it just has the original SMAC factions (I mean, literally identical down to the sex of each faction)--I hope they add the SMAX expansion factions soon. Apparently players can make factions, but it's mod management is non-existent.I don't like it's pollution system at all. Pollution in SMACX is as it should be--it damages the planet, infuriates native life, and pisses off the ecology faction. In Pandora, pollution does nothing but increase unhappiness--and fungus, native to the planet, causes pollution! Pollution is more toxicity to humans than ecological damage.I do really like the randomizing of tech for each game--it makes for very different strategies depending on what techs are earlier in the tree and what ends up as a prerequisite for what. Techs are always in their tech era, and it has code that insures within an era improvements on the same tech come later than each other in the tree--so 50% bonus armor is always further in than 25% bonus armor, though 25% may or may not be a prerequisite for 50%. And you can only see 3 steps down the line from the techs you've discovered.To pull that back into SMACX would require turning on the option that lets you choose your tech and adding a display of the entire tech tree--probably too much to do.
