My initial Expriences with Pandora

[neverlord]

My first experience with Pandora: First Contact was smooth with the installation process however, when I first loaded the game, the aspect ratio/resolution was skewed, as a result the title menu and image were contorted making it difficult for me to enter my beta product key. This matter was farther complicated by the fact that I could not access any options before entering the key nor paste the key directly from the email I had received. I entered the key manually, and had to set the resolution oddly to the same setting the game said it was already running: 1920x1080

Once I got the video issue resolved experience improved drastically, the game has run smoothly for me about 99% of the time with the exception of one crash bug: I have sometimes crashed to desktop if I have several units stacked near an enemy unity, select them as one group and order them to attack.

Gameplay wise I have found Pandora fairly intuitive, having played similar strategy games in the past, most notably Alpha Centauri. I have greatly enjoyed the research system and how it affects gameplay, however I was disappointed to find that I was unable to set a world shape that is a realistic sphere, where the north/south ends of the map are not linked. The doughnut shape that the game currently has does offer a unique set of strategic challenges and is also enjoyable. Another minor annoyance is that I did not find an option to make a stack of units into a permanent group, this would be helpful when units with different maximum movement speeds are in the same stack and the player does not want the fast units to outpace and leave the slower units behind.

Overall the game plays well and is fun, I have not really had a chance to explore what the AI does mid to late game, so I will be looking for that next.

[Wildfire]

Please look to the stickies to see how to post crash reports. The forum won't take the .savegame file, you should .zip it up with the logs (2 different directories). See if you can fit your save and the Autosave1 with the logs to see changes between one turn and the next. This will help the devs check for continuity issues and see if they can pinpoint a problem area. They've so far have been really great with this since I've been w/ the beta and the savegame and log uploads really help everyone out.