Thinking about buying PA?

What are its downfall and really great stuff like gameplay, etc. Its Pro and Cos? Anything else?

Just read this http://culture.vg/reviews/videogame-art/planetary-annihilation.html

biggest con most people mention is the lack of an mid-game save feature (it'll have one eventually, just not yet) and no interactive tutorial.

It is also very resource intensive, especially on RAM. If you have a reasonably powerful computer though you won't have any problems

As for pros, Uber is an excellent development studio, providing continuous information and new (and significant) builds.

The scale of the game is beyond anything ever made before, and you can play at whatever scale you want (1 planet for a small fast game, 16 for mind bomb).

You can find plenty of game videos on youtube if you want to see it in action.

It's an excellent multi player game. That's it's main strength- if you like player vs player and team games it's superb. It also has a very good AI .

The main downsides to it are a comparatively weak single player campaign mode (Galactic war). Also it does require good hardware and is finiky (it runs well *once you get all your drivers and such up to date* but it can take a bit of fiddling to get there).

Edit: With respect to hardware it's not *that* hard to run if you have the ram.
To put it in context I play on 2 systems:
1: A Core i5 (first gen) laptop with 8gb of ram and a Gt 420m graphics card. This is quite an old machine but it runs well on low settings.

2: An FX 8320 desktop with 8gb ram and an R9 280. This runs the game on medium settings at 1080p fine (I can run with higher settings but I find it can slow down late game).

The key point is though you really do need 8gb of ram to play well, otherwise you'll face long loading times and lag on larger maps.

general cons:
only one unitpool, factions are only lorewise

no skripted singleplayer campaign like starcraft or command and conquer

missing savefeature for ingamematches ...


what you may like:

streaming economy that supports neverending production

spherical maps where you can attack from any direction aswell as from the oribital layer around them and you can have multipels of these maps ..

due to one unitpool you have the same options as your enemies

random generated planets that can be further edited to your liking

fast challanging pace of a esqualating war ...

when playing with muliple planets you can build halleys on marked planets with halleysymbols to send them on a collision course with other planets ...
if your system has metalplanets you can build catalists on them to activate the planets gameender annihilasor to instantly vaporize other planets ...

if you dont have interest in online multiplayer you can player galactic war which generates a random galaxy which you can conquer starting with a commander of limited tech collecting additional technolgy or buffs as you conquer the galaxy ...

normal skirmish against ai or players has all tech available but obviously no buffs

If you want a life.... don't, I've clocked over 100 hours in the last two weeks because I'm addicted, on the other hand...ITS AN AMAZING GAME!!!! the learning curve is a little high admittedly but it's so worth is and the community is great, there are heaps of clans and heaps of amazing people willing to help beginners =D so you shouldn't definitely give it a go =D 10/10 would do again =D hehe

That's only 3.6 hours a day. Meh.

Depends on what you want from it. The single player is kind of a second-class citizen contrast that to multi-player. If you like TA style of RTS you should like it or SupCom too. Also it can be resource intensive you need at least 8 gb of RAM and 2 gb of VRAM depending on radius of planets in the map. Hopefully this is helpful.

W

What what..... but I like play all night and all day.... like I didn't sleep tonight playing pa..... I'm depressed... Ahaha oh well =P

Stuart your maths is terrible... It's 7 hours a day?!

shhhhh .... psychological manipulation ... never heard of it ?

Not my maths, my equations.

That's roughly 30% of your day being spent on PA, which is pretty good.

Omg I can't believe I was ticket into believing that.... I majored in maths in high school.... sigh. =P

Thank you for all the replys.

I have a ATI Radeon 5000 series with 1gb gram will that work?

which 5000? that makes a big difference

That should be ok so long as its a reasonable model (eg hd 5750 or higher, lower models may work but you'd be on minimum settings).

Also you need a reasonable dual core cpu (quad preferable), 8gb of ram and a recent 64bit operating system (e.g. Windows 7, mac os x, or a current linux distro. Windows vista kinda works but has issues).

I was skeptical and I'm really enjoying the game. Not only the gameplay but the feeling and atmosphere are great. Definitely recommending it

there's really no question possible.

wait for a sale (which is like all the time) and then it's 5,59€

so basically the price of a frisbee.

then it's up to you to decide whether you like what you experience or not.

"is it worth it?" is really not a valid question at all. No. it's worth way more.

is it a good game would be a much better question. ...in which case I would answer [CENSORED]

Its a ATI Radeon HD 5670 with 1gb vram. All other spec are okay.

I don't like this "reviewer" who is trashing (almost) every single indie game he (tries to) play for no valid/objective good reasons (even though some of his articles are very interesting like this one).