Locklear93

[quote who="tetleytea" reply="14" id="2758672"] I still think that by the time you release a product, you need to freeze the code and let QA hammer it. Only bug fixes are permitted. And then your product manager can judge it ready to release when new priority-1 bugs filed slows to a trickle or zero. That's where the problem is--people have decided that time-to-market is more important, so they slash the QA cycle. And then guess who gets to be your new&

Five year veteran of game QA here. At the publisher I work for, we do testing based on actual gameplay, and also do systems (unit) testing. In other words, if the game has a gun, we've got a test plan that goes something like: Get gun X. Examine gun X in inventory. Equip gun X. Draw gun X. Fire gun X at target, using decals to evaluate spread. Holster gun X. Switch perspectives, and draw gun X. Rotate the camera. And o

Well, that's two programmers who've chimed in with the logical reasons for using it. From the QA perspective, there are good reasons too. Speaking as a professional game tester (and one who specializes in certification, where multiplayer requirements can be a nightmare), the amount of testing added to a product by going from singleplayer to multiplayer is absolutely colossal. The time, coordination, resources, and technical savvy needed to do the work on a multiplayer title-

Wow. Just... wow. I'm not sure I've ever supported a game that actually turned around and made my word of mouth of questionable honesty before. Word of mouth advertising works specifically because there's no incentive for the customer. The customer likes it enough to spread the word without ulterior motive. Cause the listener to assume we're doing it for kickbacks, and the word of mouth is useless. What Stardock will get, if the "army" concept sees heavy ad

[quote quoting="post"]In no particular order these are the things that matter: Combat Speed. Your combat speed determines how many “moves” / attacks you get during a particular turn. In the begging of Lord of the Rings, what makes Sauron such a bad ass is that he can attack so many units at once. He has, in game turns, an incredible combat speed. [/quote] Thank you for this. I have now envisioned Sauron zipping around a battlefield, in Benny Hil

I'm in favor of the lore. As much as I value customization (and I do), I want the worlds in which I play to be rich, more than settings for moving my pieces around. I want to have background that allows me to imagine motivations for my sovereign beyond power, and not cut those notions from whole cloth. Give me a world with lore that's solid and complete, and I'll give myself so much fiction my Kindle purchases will drop off for months.

I've really got to applaud Stardock's level of user involvement in the development of Elemental. That said, after 5 years in the game industry myself, I really don't feel this is a good place for that user involvement. Voting on whether or not the game is ready to move into the next phase of development is asking us to say whether or not we think it's ready, and opinion should not matter for this aspect of development. Each milestone has set goals. If you can go down a

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="104" id="2553377"]Hybrids I used these in my example of talents weaknesses. The idea is that not all the talents are only good and that not all the weaknesses are only bad. Two edged swords.[/quote] I was going to post something to this effect, along with a tl;dr apology if it'd already been posted. Good thing I like your avatar and it caught my eye. Anyway, what you're talking about is done elsewhere as "traits." A talent is inherantly

[quote who="kryo" reply="10" id="2322680"]Yea, I had the same concern in my post. The answers here are going to be completely atypical of what the actual consumer audience would say. On the other hand, those here are by definition those most interested in the game, and thus the ones who would be most likely to complain about a later release if at all. Those not here are probably not following the game closely and are probably less concerned. [/quote] Those not here are

[quote who="ckessel" reply="16" id="2243195"] the team looked smaller than I expected Looks pretty good sized to me. I've worked on a lot of commercial apps and teams are rarely more than 10 developers plus an equivalent amount of QA, techpubs, network admin guru, etc. So, 20 folks overall. There are efficiencies in a tight team and when you get larger than the team you see above, the amount of work required just to facilitate meetings and communication goes way up.[/quote]

[quote quoting="post"]If you’ve ever read Tolkien’s Silmarillion you get an idea of just how mighty some of the beings in Elemental will be. For those into that kind of thing, if you’ve ever wanted to know one of the inspirations for the Arnor and Dread Lords you can think of them as Maiar.[/quote] Would that imply that the name Arnor is no coincidence, but a reference to the kingdom of Arnor on Middle-Earth? >_>

[quote quoting="post"]UPDATE: 5/21/2009 Camp #3: The Merchant Reduced 72%Original 788 x 445[/quote] Having read this, I think I find it preferable to camp 1 as described, but I would need, as a player, to have very solid overrides. If something big is going on in the east, and I need swords and shields and such manufactured there STAT, I really, truly, do NOT want any supplies sent elsewhere just because I've got blacksmiths there. I may want smiths in all my b

For me, it depends on how good the AI governors are. I'm all for being ABLE to toy with all manner of little details, but I'm NOT into HAVING to mess with them incessantly. Civ 4 does a good job managing specialists and production without my ever having to look at them--but if I decide that what I really want isn't to grow the city's population, but to work toward a great artist, there's nothing stopping me from doing that. What I like about camp 1 is

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="1" id="2214977"]Let's be clear on the bots: You can have AI players in MP if you CHOOSE. But we won't be inserting artificial players (bots) into games unless users explicitly ask for them. Before, we planned to have bots operating on their own server looking for MP games to join complete with their own chat capabilities.[/quote] Glad to hear this, Frogboy. That's not really how the posts in this thread read (bear in mind I'm onl

[quote who="BoogieBac" reply="10" id="2214420"]What it comes down to is this: People dont play MP to play the computer.[/quote] I certainly do. [quote who="Tridus" reply="19" id="2214720"]Well, I guess the difference is that people don't want to play multiplayer to play the AI when they're *trying* to play humans.[/quote] This. If I'm out to play competitive multiplayer, then no, I probably don't want bots. The way I play Civ4 multiplayer, though, is to cre