While I am becoming quite addicted to this game, I share some of the same consternation as the first poster. When I started playing Civ4, the game design was intitially intuitive - especially to those who had played previous versions; however, the manual and built in civ-pedia were extremely helpful in understanding PRECISELY what each improvement did, how each tile upgrade operated, what each tech gives, which buildings come with which techs, etc. Now if we examine DA, the manual is really pretty useless after you have played the game maybe twice. Like when I get an resource starbase on an econ node, I get an econ bonus. WHOOPI! that means I get more money, but how does is really work? Is the bonus number a percentage to the aggregate taxes I get? That is my guess, but I can't really say since I have no idea where that is written. When I get a morale +10 from a tech, what does that do? I mean, what exactly determines how happy my people are? In Civ series, keeping my citizens happy and working is pretty easy - because I actually know how to do it! In DA, on my commerce planets, I build farms to get citizens, and entertainment facilities, but I cannot say that I actually know how many entertainment facilities will get the job done with the various morale boni I have accumlated, so each game I have to take a heuristic approach. I mean, I can play the game, and intuitively understand that this is beneficial to get, but I dont know what it exactly does. In regards to this in game information, I would have to say that the Civ series has DA beat by a huge margin. When I started playing that game, I can say that I would end up looking up facts in the manual after pretty much each game, and each time refined my strategy or tested out new ones. In fact, the preface to their game manual says that this is how they intended it to be in the first place. Now, in my opinion galciv is just as good a game, but not being able to learn how the game works from the in game documentation is probably going to make me switch back to Civ4 as soon as the Beyond the Sword expansion pack is released.
