Like a jaded ogre examining bones for shreds of meat, I nearly tossed it aside with a grunt, letting it plonk down the bone-hill into the Steam refunds ossuary. But then, I would have missed out on the rich, dense marrow within.
You spread your cities across the strategic map, doing all the usual stuff like moving up a tech tree, wiping out rogue NPC settlements, and gunishing or diploming your rivals. And it all works bloody well.
The tactical mode is tremendous fun, the strategic mode is serviceable-running-to-good, and they're tied together elegantly. There's quite a learning curve, but not in the frustrating way - there's just a lot to play with. You'll need to master them, too, as the AI is impressively competent, and will use all its tricks against you.
While I found the strategic mode a little less exciting than the tactical, it soon picked up for me when I began thinking of it as a medium for developing better options on the tactical scale. Now, everything is suddenly connected again, and the various hyperadapted survivors of the disaster are racing to claim what they see as their birthright.
Well, not quite. As you read more of the lore scattered around the game, it turns out they were discovered by humanity as a preindustrial culture, and had their hive minds lobotomised so they could be used as slave labour, ending up like the Prawns from District 9.
