I am partly through my first game.  Overall its good.  I am still getting used to the race specific tech tree, and discovering all the new techs.  If you played the Beta, be sure to re-read the descriptions.   A lot of the techs and developments got tweaked in significant ways.


As Riftborn its been fairly easy so far.  The development costs seem higher (or base production lower, I haven't looked) so its taking longer to build up the colonies.  I have noticed though that in this game at least, the AI didn't spread very well, so I have 3 clusters all to my self (sort of seems like the Empire got leapfrogged by Sophons and stalled out?)  Right now I hit the happiness wall due to having too many colonies, but my score is alreadty double of the other 4 AI so its going to be an easy win most likely.  Seems like the luxuries got reduced while resources are more plentiful (I have multiple of each type of resource in each cluster but only 1 luxury).   No much of the valuable luxuries been put on the market, so I am actually feeling luxury shortages for the first time.  Still not seeing the point of the ground troop luxuries though.  And I never had a manpower shortage due to wooing 3 sub-races (I think, I am not really clear where all my manpower came from)


Leader xp seems to be wonky though.  My main leader hit level 27 already, as has my 2nd leader (seems like he got assigned just as a big Wonder got produced, he jumped from level 2 to level 7 all at once).  Fleet XP seems to be a bit higher, though I haven't been in any wars so hard to tell so far.


I like the new missions.   Still skipping combat animations (no point to it).  


The only major bug I ran into is the Riftborn production.  I had a turn where a spot got filled by natives before my riftborn got produced, so it turned red and inactive - but I couldn't re-activate them (in the past if you deleted the production que down to the allowed number, all the riftborn would reactivate).  I ended up having to delete all riftborn in every que that turn (but has been fine since then).

Plus I get the occasional "sticky" ship, where I click on it and the ship sticks to my mouse pointer and generally quits working until I ESC out or otherwise break out of the ship/fleet boxes.


But still fun.  :)


Poliorcetes