Pandora: First Contact...Now featuring good AI!

[Mardoc]

You are right in your observation that Population is the primary bottleneck, because Population = Power.  However you are fairly limited in what you can do to increase your population.  Building new colonies doesn't expand your population (unlike in Civilization), it just gives it more room to spread out.  

There are only 3 ways to enhance your faction's population:
-Producing "Growth", which converts city production into population.  Requires Minerals.
-Building growth-buildings, like the "Gene Therapy Clinic".  Requires Minerals.
-Conquering a city, which requires that you build an army capable of overwhelming a city's defenders and holding it against counter-attack.  Requires Minerals.

Your population growth is like a big heavy wagon that you can shepherd and guide, but you can't really change it's direction without some major effort, which requires minerals.

Minerals themselves on the other hand, you have much greater control over, since you can allocate population, build mines, build city improvements, choose how your territory expands, and choose your new city locations with an eye to maintaining a steady supply of Minerals.  Thus, mineral acquisition is the primary "lever" you have for controlling how your Faction grows.

Once you have enough minerals though, then the game's strategy opens up, and you have to consider how to balance all your resources while maintaining defense and morale.  But you can't sit still, because your population is always, always growing...and so is your enemy's.

I follow your argument. I have a feeling that tech is also a sort of bottleneck, given the levels of multiplier buildings available, but I'll have to play more before that's any more than a feeling.

Oh, I forgot to ask: What difficulty are you playing on?  I forgot that the AI difficulty levels were renamed, so "Hard" is where the AI fights with no handicaps or bonuses.

Started on Medium, so I guess that's part of the missing challenge. Although I hate fighting both to learn the interface and to survive at the same time...realistically I'll probably go a while further then restart at a higher difficulty.

[HansLemurson]

I follow your argument.  I have a feeling that tech is also a sort of bottleneck, given the levels of multiplier buildings available, but I'll have to play more before that's any more than a feeling.

Tech is definitely a bottleneck in the beginning when you can quickly run out of useful things to build. In the 3rd age, the tech costs are high and the multiplier-buildings are intense, nearly doubling the power of your cities.

In the 1st age, I tend to build the multiplier buildings more for their flat yield than for their +25% bonus (which requires 8 base-production of the given resource to overtake the flat +2), but since you can only build 1 per city, I tend to like building multiple cities in the late 1st age. They have a good return on investment (eventually), but use a lot of minerals, which probably contributes to my perception of continual shortage. If you postpone settling and can com

Started on Medium, so I guess that's part of the missing challenge.  Although I hate fighting both to learn the interface and to survive at the same time...realistically I'll probably go a while further then restart at a higher difficulty.

I played my very first game on even footing with the AI, and thought I was doing pretty well, but ended up getting overextended, attacked, and overrun. I thought I was doing fine, until suddenly I had more on my plate than I could handle. I had to learn the hard way that "more cities" means "more places you must divide your strength between".

[Mardoc]

Started on Medium, so I guess that's part of the missing challenge.  Although I hate fighting both to learn the interface and to survive at the same time...realistically I'll probably go a while further then restart at a higher difficulty.

I played my very first game on even footing with the AI, and thought I was doing pretty well, but ended up getting overextended, attacked, and overrun.  I thought I was doing fine, until suddenly I had more on my plate than I could handle.  I had to learn the hard way that "more cities" means "more places you must divide your strength between".

Oh, don't get me wrong, the restart will be only partially to bump up the difficulty level - it'll also be to be able to play with a better perspective on what I'm doing. Didn't realize until this discussion that I should be trying to claim a chunk of ocean tiles for the food. My Civ instincts made me think 2 food/no minerals was a bad tile, when actually it's a pretty solid tile, just specialized. Similarly, I didn't realize that the food and mineral yield of a tile require two separate workers until I'd already built two cities, so I probably have way too many forests when I should have been going for more extreme land.

My current theory on escaping the minerals trap is to specialize cities more - building a city for working coast with a food-booster building and no other multipliers, to work mostly coast, and then a different city with a mineral-booster to work mostly mountains, and so on. Now that I think about it, forest cities are probably best for just piling up workers and building all the units you need for the rest of the empire. Is there a way to transfer tiles between cities? I'd like to be able to have the city with the food-boost steal all the coast from its neighbors, for instance.

But...at the moment this is just a theory, it probably can't work that smoothly in practice.

[HansLemurson]

Yes, Pandora is odd in that its output yields are harvested separately. Every worker is a single-minded specialist. What this means in practice is that dual-yield tiles are generally useless. A Grassland-Hill is indistinguishable in practice from a Desert Hill: both yield 2 minerals when mined. (I think Sid Meier was on to something when he made Citizens eat 2 food per turn, instead of just 1.)

It also means that Forests are nearly impossible to balance. At 1/1 their yields are useless, and they serve only to absorb pollution until they can be cut down and replaced by Purifiers. For the Terra Salvum faction though, they have a 1/2 yield, and suddenly FORESTS ARE GOD. You don't need to build any mines, just Forests Forests Forests. Limitless mineral production, and enough pollution absorption to never worry about your factories. The AI knows this, and so Terra Salvum bases get surrounded by forests and are a pain in the butt to assault.

City-specialization is interesting in Pandora. The bonus resources seem to lend themselves to this activity, but all the 1st-Age buildings are cheap enough and have enough flat yields that you want to build everything everywhere. It's not until the 2nd age with the doubled prices and +50% multipliers that you have to prioritize which cities get what. But the terrain is such in Pandora that the city you built to capture the Mountain range is also on the coast and so contains abundant food as well.

I find it easiest to specialize in Production or Science, since those have multiplier resources (Xenite flowers, Observatory) and you can assign citizens to that task without regard to the surrounding terrain (except for the pollution output from Production). Super-science cities work out pretty nicely if you can find an Observatory.

It is often Pollution that I find to be the main limiting factor in city specialization. You simply can't put all your mining or all your factory-work into a single city without suffering nasty morale problems. You have to spread out the pollution load. Furthermore, when cities are small and they work only the valuable bonus resources, the multipliers are small too. When cities are larger and the multipliers are larger, they tend to be working a much more diversified set of terrain, making overt specialization hard.

If you can work out a scheme to specialize well, then the results can be quite good. You can build cities close together and swap tiles between them so that they are each working on their preferred yield, but you'll need to give extra land to the city with the higher pollution burden. Any city can claim land within its 3 tile range, provided that that land is not directly adjacent to another city. When a city is claiming land from its neighbors, this must be done in a contiguous fashion, but if a chain of claimed tiles gets cut off by the other city's counter-claims, this does not cause any problems. You can thus mix-and-match tiles between cities more or less as you wish.