I'm playing my first campaign now. Only a bit disappointed with the early game so far, the DDs made it seem like the first X was going to feel really exciting, like playing star trek or something, but surveying systems is just business as usual and I'm yet to find interesting anomalies that give anything beyond a couple of events(one upon discovery and another on completion) and a small bonus in some resource.
Now if I may bother you people with questions:
- What is "culture" callled here? I mean, the thing that determines how far your borders extend. Can I hoard lots of it and do peaceful takeovers like I can in civ?
- I built a couple of border outposts in order to be able to mine on some systems, but now they are very well inside my borders. Is it safe to remove those outposts so I can claim systems farther away? Wiki says removing them "may affect the outer border unpredictably", which is as scary as it is vague
- Can I automate science ship surveying somehow? Being able to order them to survey whole systems at once is nice, but not enough.
Yeah it is a bit disappointing - some of the event chains are interesting enough, but it's all just 'choose option a and get x or option b and get y, sometimes with a random chance of it going wrong'. I think they had good intentions with it, but failed miserably to get it any more exciting than random events in other games - there's no tactics or strategy with it, or any other thinking required than just 'pick what sounds useful'. That 'micro' aspect also doesn't really fit with the rest of the game, so it just sort of doesn't work - ignore it and just click through the events.
1) 'Culture' isn't really defined in the same way as other games, your border range extends with planets, spacestations and a few repeatable techs you can research to extend the radius. It also fluctuates on just general empire power, but i'm not sure what the exact calc is. You can do peaceful takeovers of a sort, but it doesn't really work well - it's not like in other games where it's a viable strategy to conquer an enemy.
2) if they're very well inside your borders you're safe to take them off, just be careful as it can shrink the borders in that area. It's normally not too weird though.
3) There's a tech which you should come upon in not too long to automate it. I think it's stupid to have to research it, as it's never an exciting thing to do. Again, it comes back to them wanting to do an exploration game within a 4x but just failing.