I bought this game during a spring sale after it had been out for a little over a year. Many of the issues from the early reviews of the game have been addressed. There is a mode where the AI follows the same rules that you do. (Admittedly, there's about a 50% chance that their network will implode at some point, so I opt to let them cheat.) As far as players that cannot figure out how to maintain their own networks, I'm not sure what to say. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is tic tac toe and 10 is XCOM2, this game is like a 5. Some of the playabilty features of the various DLC have made their way into the base game. Frankly, I don't think I would be willing to play without automatic switching stations, and am amazed that anyone did. I'm all for a little micro as part of the player agency experience, but I don't enjoy games that become jobs! The UI is dated. It looks retro, which might be a deliberate homage to its predecessors, but did it really need to be as inconvenient as a 1990s UI? Protip: You can pan around the map with the mouse by clicking on the minimap. But, yeah, who doesn't have edge scroll these days? Again with the 1990s UI theme. tl;dr if you like watching numbers grow, buy this game.
The game does not run on a significant percentage of Mac OS devices. The bug is not tied to any particular OS X/Mac OS edition. It is not tied to any particular graphics card. It was a known issue prior to the launch of the game. I imagine the people at Obsidian weighed the pros and cons of annoying the entire community, their marketers, and publishers by further holding back the release of the game versus seriously damaging their brand in the eyes of a significant portion of the Mac community, and decided that the latter was the lesser harm. I feel entitled to suggest that Obsidian might should join that list of publishers where you wait until the game has been out for awhile and gone on sale because they cannot be trusted to deliver on launch.
I usually don't review games, but I'm troubled that the two "most helpful" reviews are factually wrong. I'm not sure what some of these 1 star reviewers are on about. I played in offline, "guest," mode only for the first week that I had this game and was able to use the full features of the game, including saving and changing settings, except for multi-player. It even saves the custom heroes you create on your guest profile. The extent to which it was annoying was that I had to check the "sign-in as guest" button every time. I did enter my serial key, so perhaps that explains the difference. In which case, DRM might matter, but the online account is not necessary for single player.
