Hopefully this community will grow, options will be added, and online play against strangers will become more viable over time. It's taken me over a month to complete a lot of these games - whether that's worth it or not is up to you. Longer games with strangers are certainly possible, but there's only one time setting, at basically 48 hours per move or so, which means that these games are slooooooooThe player is then replaced by a bot, and you're left wondering if you should just quit or go on without them. It's not flexible, and you probably won't want to wait 30 minutes for a game anyway. Getting games with strangers doesn't work nearly as well.įor one thing, there aren't a ton of players, so it's hard to get a live game going, and if you do, it's something like six minutes a move, with an automatic ejection if you go over time. The option for setting up games with friends works fine, and I've had a number or enjoyable games doing this. Multiplayer is there and it's stable, but the options are limited. This clunkiness extends to things like the friends screen, where it took me 20 minutes to find the miniscule 'accept friend' icon. Fortunately, it's all there, and you will eventually work it out, but it adds an unnecessary hurdle to the learning curve. You basically have to hunt around the game's various screens for an hour or two in order to figure out how to do everything, and I say this as someone who knew the rules inside out before trying. ![]() How do you execute the game's various actions? This version doesn't tell you. ![]() The UI is unintuitive and takes a while to figure out. Basically, if you don't know how to play, you need to either learn from the rulebook, or better yet, get a friend to teach you or watch Jongetsgames' excellent tutorial video. There's a goofy animated bird character that appears and sort of attempts to walk you through things, but many key rules are left out. If you don't know how to play Gaia Project, you aren't going to learn here. From what I've heard, there isn't a good AI out there for Terra Mystica, making this a unique opportunity. I've played literally hundreds of games against the AI over the last couple of months, and I'm not bored yet. You can now test every race and strategy against decent opponents as often as you like. It usually does fine with straightforward races, though there are a few it doesn't quite get how to play.Īgain, this may seem like damning with faint praise. It's not so great at the subtleties of choosing the right technology for the right race, or racing for the top spots and tiles and the top of the technology track. The AI is particularly good at seizing territory, getting to key spots before players do, and building a good resource engine via expansion or technology. This isn't usually enough to beat highly experienced players, but it's also not a joke. While there is a cheating mode, the base hard level which plays by the rules is quite competent, scoring about 120-140 points a game. Either way, you just don't get the experience of the real game. Many games of this type have an atrocious AI or one which can only compete via massive cheating. This may sound like a mild compliment, but it's actually huge. The map, buildings, player boards, tech trees - it all looks gorgeous, clear, and true to the original, with the exception of how the buildings show up on the map, but that can be toggled to a retro mode which looks exactly like the board game. My apologies in advance to those who don't know the game, and future posts will return to my usual format. One caveat: while my posts don't usually assume knowledge of any game, this one does when it comes to describing why I like to play certain races. Then I'll get into my five favorite races to play. Since the game is vast, and I wanted to make this review concise and easily consumable, I'm going to adopt the time honored bullet point format of listing pros, cons, and mixed points about the game. What follows is not a review of Gaia Project - there are plenty of those out there - but a review of the Digidiced Steam implementation, looking at its suitability for both new and experienced players. I've ended up playing about a dozen games online with other people and many hundreds of games against the computer AI. I then picked up the new Steam version of the game and decided we should review it on the Two Wood for a Wheat podcast, in hopes of turning my newfound addiction into something productive. We ended up playing 16 head to head games during that week. It began when an old friend ventured forth from Chicago to pay me a weeklong visit, and I suggested we give it a go - while we'd both played lots of Terra Mystica (which Gaia Project is based on), I'd only played 4 games of GP and my friend had never tried it. Over the last few months, Gaia Project has fast become my absolute favorite heavy eurogame.
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