Pandora basic survival guide

I have played quite a few turn-based 4X strategy games in my life but I really got beaten badly in this game. After more than 40 hours and lots of scouring the net for tips, here is what I should have known...

INTRO

Well Toto, we are not in Kansas anymore.

Pandora is tough, Pandora is brutal, Pandora is not for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥! (kittens)

How tough is it you may ask? Well if you look at the Steam achievement stats this is the percentage of players who were able to achieve a science victory.


So my friends, you are in for quite a challenge. This guide may help a bit.

FACTIONS

Togra University in my opinion is the most interesting faction. Most of my gaming experience has been as University. The faster you research things, the faster you can earn respect from the dangerous predators ( human or alien ) roaming this planet.

Imperium is the militarist faction and they have a +25% to attack which can help a lot in the early phase if you like to bully aliens and other factions.

I recommend non-agression pacts, trade treaties, science treaties, open borders with Noxium corporation ( capitalists ) and Terra salvum ( ecologists ) and maybe Solar dynasty ( communist hive ). Good diplomatic relations will allow you to trade maps and they will get friendly, then generous and will actually give you gifts of gold every few turns. I don't think it is possible to survive all-out war with everyone and aliens at the same time.

Divine ascencion ( religious fanatics ) and Imperium ( militarists ) are real psychopaths and you should take them out at the earliest opportunity. They will destroy you if you don't. Trust me.

Keep an eye on the diplomacy tab every few turns to see how other factions feel about yours and see which treaties are active and get an estimate of their overall military/research/economy status.

COLONIZATION TIPS

The early game is all about bug hunting and expansion of your cities.

Population is power. The more cities you have, the faster you can progress. Cities can be built 2 territories from their borders not from their centers and it will be easier to defend them with your early pitiful military if they are not too far apart. A mistake I kept making was planning for each city to have a full radius of 3 hexes but I was always stuck with being unable to expand beyond 3 cities. Keep in mind the ressources are shared between cities in this game ( this is not the Civ you know, remember what I said to Toto earlier ) One city may have minerals, another lots of food and they SHARE. Try to expand to 4 cities or more while keeping a good defensive army.

In one game I traded maps with Terra and saw a beautiful coastal spot with a nearby special resource and started planning an epic city in my mind. I sent a colony module with an escort of 4 troopers ( never ever let a colony module travel undefended ) but they all suffered damage travelling through hexes of fungus and the fungus slowed them down. There were alien bugs waiting for us past the fungus. The rest is too painful do describe.

Lesson learned: don't try to colonize far-away lands that will be difficult to resupply with troops from your most productive cities.

Never leave a city un-garrisoned EVER. Aliens will just walk in and eat the population and buildings or an enemy will just capture it and sit there with a defense bonus that will make it very tough to recapture. A boat or sea alien can capture a coastal city but flying units can't.

Resources you absolutely need to progress: food and minerals tiles with at least +2

You will soon notice that interesting colony locations often have a nearby alien hive that will keep breeding and attacking you untill you clear out the damn bugs. One word: flamethrowers ( 25% bonus to attack against biological life forms ) Using sniper rifles or artillery may also help because those units do not suffer enemy retaliation if they have the initiative but they have no defense if they are attacked first. If you use them, put them in a stack with regular infantry attack with ranged units first to soften up the target and use your regular units to atttack last. You heard right, stack units in the colonization phase. Later in the game when other factions get nukes and black hole generators, think twice about stacking.

BASIC PANDORAN ECONOMICS

CITIES

In a new city assign the first citizen to be a worker and build growth; you will have a second citizen in 2 turns instead of 6.

Remember: Population is power.

Before making buildings make sure you have a sufficient garrison and build military units if not.

The earliest buildings should improve military farming and minerals.
Do not risk building structures for production, science or economy before military farming and mineral needs have been met. Factories, research and credit buildings should be last.

Factories increase production speed (how fast or in how many turns an item is produced) per worker and allow you to use less workers for production of a given item and reassign some of them to the science labs or farms or mines but production will grind to a halt if you run out of minerals.

Consider a population growth center; it has the advantage of giving you more scientists, workers, farmers but it may cause morale problems if your population grows too fast and you don't have the tech to offset habitat morale and pollution problems.

If morale problems cannot be solved with current tech you can lower the tax rate.

I found myself in a game with more cities but running out of credits because of lots of troops and buildings. I found it was a good idea to build income buildings in cities with large populations. If you have enough credits you can spend spend them to buy production to be completed in one turn only or upgrade existing obsolete military units.

I haven't experimented what happens when you run out of credits but I imagine buildings or units get sold off. On old earth you could enjoy government deficits, debt, inflation but remember what i said to Toto.

After each turn check the status messages to the right of the screen. You will often see "city name" has grown. If you click on that message to check your city you may see the new citizen has been assigned to science instead of food/minerals/production where he may be more useful for now. You can fine tune your economy if you keep an eye on what your citizens are doing.

On Pandora you walk a fine line balancing food, minerals, production, research, credits, morale, habitat, pollution,

TILE IMPROVEMENT

You will need to build formers for that

Formers will need you to research tech to unlock terraforming actions

Once the tech is researched you need to build that project in one of your cities to enable the formers to perform that action.

The earliest and most important terraforming tech allows formers to clear fungus and travel through it without taking damage every turn. Your regular units will always take fungus damage and suffer penalties to combat and movement in fungus.

Early former priorities should be building farms on +2 food tiles to get them to +3 and mines on +2 mineral tiles to bring them to +3. Building roads will allow your military to travel faster to points of conflict in your territory. Building suburbs decreases morale penalties of overcrowding and purifyers help with pollution. Construction bays give +2 production in a city but you do need good mineral production first. I only built farms and mines in the game I won but I captured an enemy city that had a construction bay on a observatory tile giving research and production bonuses.


You will learn to love fungus!

As you can see in the image above my cities are enveloped in a cozy nest of fungus in the later game. This slows down enemy units and damages them every turn. With the more advanced research and projects, fungus produces astounding quantities of food and minerals. ( +4 of each for only +1 pollution ) Your formers also get the ability to plant fungus.

I was stumped for a while because on some tiles my formers were unable to perform that task. Then I found out that fungus and roads are incompatible. You either destroy roads to plant fungus or you destroy fungus to build roads.

Other interesting things you can do with formers is raising or lowering the land, clearing radiated and infested land.

In the early game mountains are some of the best tiles you can have around a city because of the minerals that can be mined. Some terrain is very unproductive. Once you have the proper tech just raise that land into mountains and profit. Oh yeah don't forget that on Pandora your units can cross over mountains. I mean if Hannibal was able to do that on old earth with elephants and armies, with all the advanced tech we now have we should be able to do just as well eh?

Another former ability is to build a fort in a strategic point that could be a choke point on the map or a mountain for greater visibility.

It is strongly recommended to deploy formers only when you have enough laser tanks, otherwise the bugs and the abovementioned psycho factions will get them.

STRATEGY AND TECH

Military research and production is your first priority.

That lesson was painfully learned.

Expand your territory and colonize as much as you safely can. Turtling is not viable.

Each game has a randomized tech tree so the order of discoveries will vary each game.

There are 3 ages of tech: Colonization, Mechanization, Transcendence

Each age will bring better unit versions, weapons, armor, devices.

Units can embark and cross water (research and project required) in amphibious craft to colonize or battle on other land masses but crossing water makes them incredibly vulnerable to flying and naval units human or alien. If you plan to send valuable advanced troops across water it would be wise to have a good escort of planes and boats.

Planes and boats can attack coastal cities but planes cannot capture cities. Ground units can attack planes.

Planes can remain airborne and never run out of fuel ! Unlike some other games they do not have limited range and will not crash after finishing their movement points.

Ground units can attack boats on the water from an adjacent ground tile. I had one game where a boat simply sailed in an undefended city and my puny military could not defeat that boat! Like I said it's definitely not Kansas. Get used to it Toto.

Early research I found useful are:

• Colony ship dismantling: quick boost in food, minerals, credits for a fledgling economy

• Military training facility: units built in this city gain 3 levels of training. You will be amazed in later game how powerful units can become with training. They can gain levels with combat too if they survive it.

• Field training: This is like brutal wargames. This operation is built in a city and unleashed on a stack of units injuring their health. After healing, experience levels are gained up to lvl 10 if I remember correctly. They require time and resources to produce and should be used on more advanced and powerful units, not wasted on the basic grunts. Some players claim they use this strategy with great success.

• Satellite scan: As the name says, explore Pandora from the comfort of your city with satellite scans, spy on your neighbors or other armies or monsters

Operations
Each city can build operations such as nukes, drop pods, EMP, nanotech repair and the fearsome black hole generator that can absorb whole armies and cities in a singularity. I was about to attack an Imperium city when I saw my ally drop a nuke on it killing all the units and most of the population, Very cool!
I read that the faction with the most black hole generators wins the endgame but I have not used this yet.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I wrote this guide because Pandora is unforgiving and reckless actions will bring vicious punishment. I read the 3 other Steam guides and they are excellent. I feel they helped me a lot. I used some of their information and added some of my own observations and experience.

Despite playing on ''easy'' mode it took many spectacular defeats and more than 40 hours to achieve this:

According to Steam stats only 3.4% of players have won as Togra university. I hope my guide can help increase those stats.

Pandora is a surprising complex strategy game where you need to balance military, expansion, city growth, food, minerals, production, credits, habitat, morale, pollution. I find the expansion phase to be extremely exciting due to exploration and discoveries of ruins that may give you credits or tech and surviving where everything is out to get you. Not quite as polished and balanced as Alpha Centauri but something that will become more fun as we understand the game better.

I am far from an expert on this game. Consider this guide a work in progress and feel free to write some of your own tips, strategies and observations to help fellow spacemen/spacewomen. I will try to update it periodically but of course I prefer gaming than writing walls of text.

Time to stop reading now and go make some of these brutes:

OTHER USEFUL INFO

I will add to this section additional info and discoveries I make.

I will also add some content from players who leave helpful comments on the game or useful stuff I may find on the web.







If you are low on credits you can sell obsolete buildings. You get some credits grom the sale and reduced maintenance costs. In the example above I lost a bit of science but reduced my expenses to get a positive credit balance. It would appear that benefits from older buildings stack at least in some cases. I do not know if they stack for defense, production, minerals, food, pollution, morale yet.

Victory conditions

Hover cursor in the bottom of the screen: Military have 75% of the population, Wealth have 75% of the wealth, Science have 75% of the science. You can check your progress periodically there.

Diplomacy screen

You can check out the other factions to see their attitude, your treaties and their approximate military strength and economic performance

Feel free to share your experience in the comments section.

[Obsidian Shadow]

Good to know thanks for the info.

[Hans Lemurson]

The ability to develop ocean tiles opens up the settlement game a lot more, though at a small cost of making the land feel a bit more "generic" since anything can go anywhere. That said, it's not available until the 2nd era and so feels like an achievement to be able to develop previously out-of-reach tiles.

The Eclipse of Nashira expansion also contains AIL's enhanced AI, which is really quite potent. He had to give it extra penalties just to make the easy levels still be easy, and I've never beaten the highest difficulty level since the last major exploit got patched-out.

Your advice and observations here all hold true in the expansion, though.

[Obsidian Shadow]

@Hans Good observation. My guide was based on the vanilla game without DLC. The DLC seems to have good reviews, maybe I will try it out someday.

[Hans Lemurson]

I notice a lack of water improvements in your screenshots. Was this all played without the expansion?

[PCGamesRule]

Thanks for making this guide. Because of it, I'll try Pandora again.

[vondraco]

> I mean if Hannibal was able to do that on old earth with elephants and armies

And vinegar. Science rules.

[Emberbuck]

I do believe they stack but you can only sell one building at a time.