I have played Eclipse of Pandora now a few times and I like expansion. The eclipse is a welcome event that prevents the game from becoming boring, the espionage adds new possible strategies. However, I also think that the expansion shows a few negative points of adding features, for example:
- Debalancing: Being able to win on very-hard thanks to spies being extremely powerfull
- AI lacking the intelligence to handle the new possible strategies
This made me actually realise that the game is feature wise actually quite complete now. Certainly it is absolutely possible to create long wish-lists of nice to have features, but does an endless list of possibilities make a good game? Would another game event, new special units, new unit orders seriously significantly improve the game experience at this point? I doubt it. A good game has a well thought out of things that are possible, but also things that are intentionally not possible. I think at this point, it is a good time to take a look at it from the higher level.
Things that would in my opinion improve the gaming experience:
- Do even more with music and audio. Perhaps make the music adapt itself to game events, make the sound effects less trivial etc. Audio is in my opinion one of the most important aspects of game experience.
- Improve the storytelling. The game has lots of storytelling. Only the story is brought to you in a very dry way. There is an intro animation, and then lots of dry text that you have to read like a book in a small window with a scroll-bar. I believe more can be done there to tell the game story to the player in a lively way as the game is progressing.
- Improve the AI. Any 4X game becomes boring if a human player can develop a strategy that beats the AI in any possible game. The AI could definately use some added intelligence against common human strategies.
- Make the game more accessible. If you read through the forums you read that many new users play the game like Civ and don't get that the games economy and combat systems are completely different. A criticism is the manual. I'm neutral to a manual or in-game instructions, but there appears to be a problem here that causes quite a bit of new players to drop out quickly. Language wise, the game is not that easy for a foreign speaker: The longer texts require that the player has an advanced level of understandig English, as many luxury words are being used. This may improve the storytelling to native speakers, for foreign speakers it is exactly the opposite. Translations help here, but there likely will not be a huge number of new languages.
