Armchair Dragoons Forums
Wargaming => 4X Gaming => Topic started by: Martok on December 10, 2021, 04:11:01 AM
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Not sure what to make of this, but it certainly looks interesting, at least: The developers behind Northgard are making a real-time 4x where you fight for control of Arrakis.
https://shirogames.com/dune-spice-wars-announcement/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1605220/Dune_Spice_Wars/
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Huh. Any relation to the old PC version?
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The old PC game was excellent.
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Huh. Any relation to the old PC version?
Not that I'm aware of, no. Although I'm sure it had to serve as an inspiration for making this one.
The old PC game was excellent.
So I've heard. I never played it myself; I discovered Command & Conquer first.
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Cool. Look forward to seeing more
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Some interaction with a few of the devs. It's nice to see the game actually getting some attention.
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IGN dropped a preview that gives us a little more info...
https://www.ign.com/articles/dune-spice-wars-interview
What probably caught my eye the most is that the game will apparently have Stellaris-like "side stories", that can range from one-offs to multi-stage events. Sounds like a neat way to keep the game from becoming too repetitive.
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I really enjoyed what they did with Northgard, so am keen to see what they do with the Dune franchise. Looks good.
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^ Agreed.
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The developers behind Northgard
That tempers my interest, frankly. Northgard was a bit too abstract and boardgamey for my taste. Still, it's Dune so, you know....
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The game is coming to Early Access April 26:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1605220/view/3226274327488059663
They also announced the Fremen as the fourth/final faction, the other three being Atreides, Harkonnen, and the Smugglers. The last one seems a particularly odd choice, but will withhold judgment for now.
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Sounds great
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Yeah, I've been following this. Looking good so far.
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Part 2 of the FAQ is up:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1605220/view/3226274956649389510
The main points that I took away from it:
1.) The initial price will be $/€29.99, though that could change (go up) during development.
2.) The game will be around 3GB.
3.) A "typical" game will probably take 2-3 hours to play.
4.) Bawb and I should be able to run the game at or near max settings. 8)
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In anticipation of the game's release into Early Access tomorrow, DasTactic and Rob (from Explorminate) both take the game out for a spin:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1466594286
Looks pretty good overall, though it admittedly feels a bit small-scale at the moment. It's a long way between now and full release, however, so we'll see how development goes.
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Yet another, let’s release the framework early and grab some cash situation.
I am sick and tired of playing someone’s WIP. Finish the job to a decent core game and you might get my money.
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I'm definitely interested in this one, but I have no desire to grab it while it's still in Early-Access. I'm content to wait until the full release, however long that takes.
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Review on RPS - not great not terrible - as they would say - a solid 7/10
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From Polygon:
It is also perplexing how the Fremen — an indigenous people who have no canonical interest in space politics — must placate their oppressors using the same language and acquisitive attitudes that have taken hold of their planet. Playing with the Fremen means working within the same colonial design systems as House Atreides and House Harkonnen — grinding to pay Imperial taxes and voting in the Landsraad, even in a limited capacity, just doesn’t make sense. Not only is it the opposite of immersion, but it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of why the Fremen exist.
Eurgh, gross. Another mark against this game.
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The devs playing the game:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1467463439
From Polygon:
It is also perplexing how the Fremen — an indigenous people who have no canonical interest in space politics — must placate their oppressors using the same language and acquisitive attitudes that have taken hold of their planet. Playing with the Fremen means working within the same colonial design systems as House Atreides and House Harkonnen — grinding to pay Imperial taxes and voting in the Landsraad, even in a limited capacity, just doesn’t make sense. Not only is it the opposite of immersion, but it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of why the Fremen exist.
Eurgh, gross. Another mark against this game.
Yeah, that bothers me as well. Hopefully that's something Shiro changes/improves between now and the game's full release.
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The devs playing the game:
Yeah I've been watching people play on-and-off all afternoon. It's just Northgard with a Dune skin, and I didn't like Northgard (although I seem to be in the minority). Between that and the lack of respect for the lore, I think any interest I had is pretty much gone.
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Well FWIW, feedback on Discord and even in the Steam forums appears to be generally positive thus far. However, it does seem to depend somewhat on how much you enjoy games like Northgard, as there are a lot of comments that Spice Wars does, in fact, play out similarly (though Dune is apparently at least a degree more complex).
I've also seen a fair few comments that, whatever its flaws, the game does play out like a 4x, albeit one on a smaller scale. Even that's more than I was genuinely expecting (though I'm still not planning to pick this up anytime soon).
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Huh. AngryJoe definitely likes it:
I could wish he reviewed/previewed more 4x games (I've long known he's a fan), but I realize videos covering them aren't going to bring in the advertising dollars (unfortunately). And to be fair, he does cover probably a good dozen or so 4x/grand-strategy games in a given year; they just get lost amongst all the other videos he puts out.
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I'm still not getting the game until it's exited Early Access, but this guy's take on it encourages me. (It also feels like a major "take that" to those who were -- perhaps unrealistically -- expecting a sequel to the older RTT titles from two decades ago. :hehe: )
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Good to know. I'm also hanging back to see how it develops.
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I think my biggest hangup with the game could end up being its scale, in that it's not "grand" or epic enough. Spice Wars is probably going to appeal more to folks who prefer shorter gaming sessions, and/or want to complete games in just 1-2 sittings. I totally respect that, but is likely going to reduce its appeal and/or replayability factor for me personally.
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Goods points, Sam.
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First major update. Looks like a decent list.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1605220/view/3226278286753805585
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The roadmap:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1605220/view/3302839954737156536
This summer will see multiplayer and a new faction get added, with priority given to MP development. Further development will see the addition of high-tier units & buildings, along with Heroes (called "Councillors") that can be used as double-agents and/or powerful units on the battlefield.
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I was admittedly hoping for just a little more, but the devs dropped a (very) brief clip/tease of multiplayer in action (footage begins at the 0:14 mark):
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I'm not at the point with it where its high on my want list, which is a bit of a disappointment.
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Mutliplayer has been added:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1605220/announcements/detail/3334366421569375901
The game is also currently available at a 20% discount (not part of the Steam sale:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1605220/Dune_Spice_Wars/
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Oh, sod it. I may have my misgivings but I'm struggling to be inspired by much in the Steam sale and my whole body craves for more Dune stuff, so I think I'm going to buy this today.
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I'm still on the fence with this, but it is starting to sound better.
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Well, I did buy it so I'll post my own impressions later.
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Good man, Huw. I knew we could rely on you ;D
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Good man, Huw. I knew we could rely on you ;D
What, to buy every game on Steam even if I don't like the look of them? :silly:
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Well, more-or-less, yes. We'll let you off with the occasional one though. ;D
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OK, well, initial impressions are actually more positive than I was expecting. I've only played for about 50 minutes so far so tip of the iceberg and all that...
It feels like Northgard meets Endless Space. Unless I'm mistaken, there are significantly more resources in Dune and lots of things to keep track of. I didn't play Northgard a great deal but what I saw of it was very much on rails, but Dune seems more free and open in comparison. Lots of units, agents, vehicles and buildings have various traits which all affect a surprising array of stats elsewhere, and I can see a game getting pretty complex, but in a pretty good way.
It feels pretty good to play. Unit selection and orders are simple enough. Map control is fine, and it does that modern thing of zooming out to a certain level unless you "force" it and it zooms out to show the whole map. Units behave well and have decent pathfinding and have nice little speech files that play when you tell them what to do (reminiscent of Dune 2000 actually).
Criticisms so far: when units are fighting it's way too hard to see how the battle is going. Most of the information is either in the unit's banner or on the info box you get by clicking a banner - but in the melee all the banners cluster together making things very confusing. Also I rarely say this but the soundtrack is too understated. What I heard of it sounded alright but it's so quiet. I want it louder and a bit more dynamic to give a game based on Dune the pomp it deserves.
Also the map at first glance seemed small, however it does look big enough to accommodate a large number of regions so I might be jumping the gun there.
Anyway, pretty pleasantly surprised so far! I'd say if you're a fan of Northgard or the Endless games, or a big fan of Dune and real time strategy in general, this is worth getting. I'll post more detailed impressions later.
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:bigthumb:
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I'm planning to put a lot more time into this over the weekend so more detailed impressions will follow, but I forgot to say one thing: it really doesn't feel like early access at all. It's polished to a high sheen and as far as I can tell the game looks fully playable. This seems to be more of an "adding features" kind of early access as opposed to "the game will work one day" kind.
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I really appreciate the write-up/early impressions, Huw. Your words encourage me.
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I really appreciate the write-up/early impressions, Huw. Your words encourage me and no doubt I'll be buying it very soon.
FTFY
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;D
You're next, Bob. I'm going to convince you to buy Songs of Conquest.
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Honestly mate, I don't think I would take a lot of convincing. I certainly feel more positive about it that I did at first.
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I really appreciate the write-up/early impressions, Huw. Your words encourage me and no doubt I'll be buying it very soon.
FTFY
Heh, we'll see. I still suspect the smaller scale and limited number of playable factions will keep this from making my all-time list, but at least now I'm starting to think I won't have regrets whenever I do get around to grabbing it.
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I think the main thing for me will be to see how well it holds up against the old original game, which was a blast to play. The limited number of factions really I don't remember as being an issue since the play was challenging enough anyway, but we'll see.
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It's not really comparable to Dune 2000 to be honest. It's a bit more boardgamey, whereas 2000 was a pure RTS. This game very much revolves around the regions into which Arrakis is divided. You capture a region then have an arbitrarily (but expandable) limited number of buildings to build there.
So for example, say you need more armies but you're running out of manpower. You conquer a neighbouring region then build a recruitment office there which increases manpower. Regions have natural bonuses too, so one might give a bonus to manpower production while another might have a plascrete bonus for example. And some have spice of course! It's up to you to exploit them or not.
Balancing resources is fundamental to the game. Many of your decisions are driven by resource shortages, because the resources limit your armies, ornithopters, buildings etc.
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Some further disorganised observations.
I've restarted a couple of times due to being steamrolled because I haven't learned the game well enough yet. Evidently this is a bit of a rush game. You can't really turtle. At the start of a game you're pretty limited in the types of buildings and units you can make, and only through research and gathering resources can you get anything decent. Therefore the number one spot on your list of goals is permanently occupied with "expand". The slower you are, the bigger the advantages your opponents will have over you. For example, in the game I just abandoned my closest opponent came at me with a group of 7 or 8 armies, which I simply couldn't counter because my maximum was 4 and my only defensive structure was a missile battery which frankly doesn't really do a lot. Research can get you higher unit caps as well as better units, so it's incumbent upon you to rush up the tree to keep up with your opponents.
There seems to be a number of options available to you in general. You can invest in four different research types, only one of which is military, and I've seen more than one building providing similar bonuses, so hopefully that means you can tailor your approach to suit your playstyle somewhat. Crucially though, I don't have the experience yet to say whether you can significantly achieve victory by focusing on espionage rather than military might, for example. In fact I don't know how you even win at all - the game hasn't bothered to explain that to me.
In fact that's a criticism in general - lack of explanations. I've learned a lot of what I know by carefully examining tooltips and following breadcrumb trails. There's no tutorial at all. Since it's in early access I'll give it some latitude here but if this doesn't change by 1.0 I'll be pretty disappointed.
Another criticism is the lack of strategic zoom. Yes you can zoom in and out easily using the mouse wheel, but it doesn't follow your mouse cursor. This one is unforgivable; we've had that since, what....the original Supreme Commander? It's not a dealbreaker but it annoys me constantly and I really hope they fix it.
One final criticism for now is that all things military needs to be fleshed out a fair bit in my opinion. There's no control over armies except telling them where to go, no formations or anything like that. So once the order is given they just move in a blob, and combat occurs when one blob meets another. It's pretty graceless. And my earlier point about it being difficult to see how combat is going still stands. There's a Paradox-style outliner on the right of the screen in which you can monitor unit health, but 1) that's only your units, and 2) if you are using any more than one group of units this gets much less useful, obviously.
Overall though I'm still enjoying it, and it's still better than I expected it to be. I really need to take a game to completion, or at least a lot further than I've done until now, so that I can comment more on the fairly complex set of Landsraad intrigues, espionage, and the deeper parts of the research tree. Stay tuned!
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I have to say that at this point, its not calling to me as much as I hoped it would :-(
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Thanks, Huw. I'd read about needing to "rush" for resources (which isn't my preferred style of play), as well as about the lack of strategic zoom, but I'd forgotten about them until now when you said something.
To me, Spice Wars continues to feel like a game I'd pick up when there's a decent sale, but not otherwise.
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Yeah, there's definitely more to the game than I currently realise (espionage seems to be a whole minigame in itself and I've barely scratched the surface), but there's no getting away from it being a rush game. You simply get trampled if you rest on your laurels at all. I definitely understand why that's off-putting, in fact that's usually a deal-breaker for me too. But there's a lot to enjoy about the game and this style of gameplay at least means you should get to finish more games than you would in the more languorous strategy games. By the time the devs finish adding features and implementing community feedback this could even be a top-tier game (of its type).
I continue to be surprised that I'm enjoying it as much as I am. Maybe I should revisit Northgard...
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So apparently there's a way to set victory conditions, AI difficulty, map size etc. It's a half-dimmed settings button right next to the very large and bright "START GAME" button so I will forgive myself for not noticing it sooner.
Restarting on easy then, just while I learn my way around, the AI is definitely less aggressive. What is not less aggressive though, is the constant raids on my bases by the locals. This happens all the time - it's a common complaint I've read elsewhere - so unless you're prepared to spend staggering amounts of gold and manpower fully equipping every conquered village with militia units, you're constantly playing whack-a-mole with your armies.
This well put most of you off even more, but I'm finding Dune: Spice Wars rather stressful to play. Besides the raider whack-a-mole you have to be on constant lookout for worms. If a worm appears near a harvester you have (I'd estimate) no more than ten seconds to realise - not easy when you're busy - and recall your harvester[1]. Similarly, worms will appear in the deeper desert too, always suspiciously right underneath my armies. Thus you lose armies for no good reason on occasion. It's not a particularly common occurrence but very bloody annoying when it does happen, especially since in early game at least it's very expensive to hire and maintain armies and they're slow to get where they're going too.
To add to the stress, you never have enough of things. With four distinct research paths, eight different ways you can split your spies, etc it's all too easy to be jack of all trades and master of none. You never reach a point - at least I haven't yet - where you can say your economy is ticking along nicely. If you're in positive rates for all your resources, you'll undoubtedly want to hire more armies which will deplete manpower, but you don't have the plascrete to build another recruitment office, and so on. It's never ending.
To a certain kind of player this is probably bliss. It probably would have been for me 20 years ago too. All I can say is there's never a point where I can just sit back and watch my empire. You have to just expand expand expand expand expand. If you want more plascrete for example, what are you going to do - research some tech that gives +1 production in each village, or conquer the next region which will give you a flat +40? And if you don't, your opponent will.
It's a conquest game really, and I'm willing to bet that even if you choose some other victory condition it won't make a lot of difference. Expansion is by far the best way to grow your empire.
[1] Actually you can set your harvester to auto-recall, but that decreases its productivity for some reason. This is silly. You can attach an ornithopter to a harvester but all that does is increase productivity - why doesn't it act like a spotter instead? You know, just like in the lore. Especially considering you can also add crew to harvesters which - yep, you guessed it! - increases productivity! Seems to me that if you're willing to spare a precious 'thopter slot on a harvester you should get the auto-recall for free. Gamifying it such that you have to keep a constant eye on it in readiness to hit "recall" with seconds' notice is lame.
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Thanks for that Huw, its very informative.
Its made me more determined to hold fire and see if the devs address some of these issues.
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Thanks for that Huw, its very informative.
Its made me more determined to hold fire and see if the devs address some of these issues.
hes able to work all this out by ignoring his next PBEM turn ;)
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Oh shit I thought I was waiting for you! Sorry! Will send later.
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:ROFL:
It’s cool buddy - I just thought you were busy
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It's because I'd read your email but then forgot to mark it unread again, making me think I was up to date. Whoops!
Bob: Yeah I've tried to balance my impressions with good and bad, but ultimately what I'm trying to demonstrate is that it's a specific kind of game for a specific kind of player. I still maintain it's generally a pretty good game, but there's no getting away from its build and rush nature, so I wanted to make sure everyone was clear on that.
I'll finish my current game and report on anything else I find, then I think I might put it away until the next major update, or even until 1.0.
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Well, shoot. After that most recent write-up, Spice Wars is starting to sound like it might not be for me at all, at least not in its current form. :-\ I echo Bawb's sentiments in hoping that the devs will address (at least some of) the issues you've mentioned.
Thanks again for sharing with us your thoughts & impressions, Huw!
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And now they are going to add House Corrino, which could be interesting.
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^ Heh, I was just coming here to post that:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1605220/announcements/detail/3328738190607959594
It'll be interesting to see how Shaddam and House Corrino will be balanced so that they're not over-powered. I'm wondering whether part of the equation will be that the Sardaukar are stupidly strong, but also hideously expensive to recruit.
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I remember the dread of the Sardaukar arriving in the old game. Purple devils............
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Community Update #2 is now out:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1605220/view/3407554354308648748
Looks like a ton of balance work, with the Fremen perhaps getting a bit more attention than the other factions (hopefully to make them feel more distinct).
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The Padishah Emperor is coming...
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1605220/announcements/detail/3260064003793942780
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I have to say, this is pretty cool. The devs added an update focused almost entirely on accessibility options:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1605220/announcements/detail/3416569163136327034
Stuff like this is great to see. Adding accessibility options for games -- including strategy games -- has been an increasing theme the last couple years or so, and I'm all for it.
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I'm still on the fence about this one. If it ever come on a sale then I may go for it.
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I'm pretty much of the same mindset. The game doesn't look like it's really my cup of tea, but I like what they're doing...so I'll probably get when it's on sale at some point.
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Conquest Update has dropped:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1605220/announcements/detail/3680051300624700227
Looks like the two major new features are the addition of both the Conquest mode (natch), along with actual tutorials covering the basics of how to play the game. The devs have also added a bunch of new buildings, and have done a bunch of rebalancing work across the board.
I wonder if they've done anything to address the game's pacing, or if it still feels more like an RTS than a 4x.