Weregamer's Game Musings

This game was on one-day sale on Steam this week, and it had some really glowing reviews (especially at Rock, Paper, Shotgun which is one of the sites I trust most). After playing for a couple nights, I have realized that I like this game a lot but I'm not enjoying playing it. Some of the problem is the inept Windows coding and lack of display settings. No video settings at all - it can only run at desktop resolution, and while it might have been OK in 2010 when the game was first written, that makes things just too tiny on a moderate screen at high resolution. A bigger part of the problem is that the screen is uselessly cluttered for manipulating stuff or watching the details of what happens when there are more than a couple things on screen. If you are used to EVE, or otherwise can adjust to a UI where you see things on the screen but have to use menus to select and manipulate them, it's only annoying (like EVE, but without the good reasons EVE has this problem). But if...

This game continues to hold my interest, despite the bugs, and the latest update fixed almost all the ones that were annoying me most. One thing that the game manual actually says, and the UI for game setup supports, but that is just not true, is that the various races are interchangeable - that you could apply the traits for one race to another one and get an identical result. There are two ways in which the underlying racial choice affects play, and they are both significant. First, each race has three or four unique technologies that only they can research. These generally complement the default settings for that race to some degree (for example the Pollops get a planetary building that reduces food consumption by photosynthetics *only*, by 0.5 food (to zero)), but are of varying utility overall. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the number and arrangement of squares in ship hulls is wildly different for each race. A few of the races have an advantage in number of squa...

Hmm. I went on a short trip with my windows 8 convertible laptop (long story, my good win 7 one died). I was astonished at how poorly the game worked with the touch screen interface enabled. It can't have been tested very well, because key buttons - like the ones to buy up the ship system you selected - didn't even respond to taps. I'm wondering what's going on at Firaxis. When a one man shop like Zero Sum can produce both an excellent game and completely normal windows behavior, how come a place with years of experience on the platform messed up so badly? Perhaps they are losing interest in the PC, and in the rich games that live on it. Although if that's the case, why are they doing so much on iOS and ignoring Android, which is both a much larger market and (in my experience) more attractive to high end geeks?