wowgetoffyourcellphone

"Ritualized Warfare" - All citizen-soldiers -25% xp needed to promote to the next rank.

Yep, this is exactly how every other alpha's release was handled as well. The only reason this one felt different or "unexpected" was the unusually long development cycle. Players were treating the gameplay as a "done deal."

There are numerous threads on this forum discussing each individual civ.

Already implemented in Delenda Est and it works great. Adds diversity back to the Carthaginian military buildings, and may give a reason for the base game to unlock their Archery Range.

Right, and that's why soft battalions (soft anything really) are not the way to go. It's hard battalions or nothing, IMHO. Adding soft battalions introduces more micro, as now you have to spend time building battalions when you didn't before. Because as you said, if they are beneficial, then competitive players will have to use them. If they are a detriment, then competitive players won't use them and then they are a superfluous feature. Hard battalions eliminates all that and gives us greater flexibility in adding combat features (like flanking, charges, shield walls, morale, etc etc etc) that would be superfluous or more difficult to manage with mosh pit units (I recoil in horror at the proposals that we should add morale management for 100s of mosh pit soldiers, while it would be much easier to add such details and management to a few dozen hard battalions). Also, with hard battalions, all players of all skill levels would have to use them and the meta is consistent at all skill levels.

https://gfycat.com/malehonesteagle-shield-wall

You're right. I accidentally added my own 2 cents without directly addressing your comment. The feature is awesome, the biomes themselves are not. It's hard to show someone a video to get them jazzed about a game when the terrains and game world looks ugly, is what I was getting at before. Speaking about marketing and PR here. And yeah, for sure, it's also embarrassing to try to showcase the game to a skeptical community on another site when the game starts to lag so horribly and players have to fight to get formations to wheel around a building without getting stuck. Agreed. I annoys the Hell out of me that everyone plays the ugliest maps. lol Time to improve the ugly maps I guess.

I agree that the game can be quite ugly at times. It's mostly the terrains, IMHO, and I'm (quietly) working on revamping them. But also because streamers need to lower the specs in order to take video at a decent framerate. That is a def a problem.

That should be fine as long as folks are self-starters and resolve to do this without WFG developers, who are not influencers or marketers, needing to prod this along. Say, if you and @ValihrAnt and a few others get together to decide what they want to do and what support they need from the devs, then awesome.

(sorry if I ignore some of your points for now) 1. I think "influencers" is an unfortunate term as well, but it is definitely useful in this context as an all-encompassing term for Youtubers, streamers, bloggers, et al. 2. I think there is no easier way to see what is happening with the development of the game than to just bite the bullet, install SVN, and get the SVN development version of the game so one can easily get the latest updates. 3. One question that needs answered is: Do we need to do a bunch of PR blitzing at this stage of the game's development? @wraitii I think has hinted that WFG has neglected PR because the game simply isn't ready yet. We can debate that point for sure, but I don't think it hurts to amend the standard release schedule to include extra access for a list of trusted influencers. Just some rando thoughts for now.

Right, I think it may be possible with some actor work and no new code (its' already possible with existing code).

Honestly, it doesn't look too bad in DE's UI to have catapults there next to the other buildables. The only thing strange is that the operators rise up out of the ground with the catapult as it's being built. I've done a couple of tests with the actor to stop this with no success yet, but I think it should be possible to make the operators not appear until the construction is completed.

I always thought "Royal Kurgan" would make a great Scythian wonder.

All of that is true, but to have yet another unit type seems overkilled. Could just have a "Siege Engineers" tech that unlocks building field artillery with soldiers.

That's very true, unless you slow everything down, which we don't really want, I presume.

Yeah, you have to make judicious compromises.

I'm talking about how to integrate the marketing/influencing into the release schedule. It's all related.

Or something like this: Day 0: Feature freeze Day 3: String freeze Day 6: Translation freeze Day 6: Commit freeze Day 7: Packaging Day 8: Release Candidate early access to community partners Day 15: Final bug and balance review (based on feedback from partners) Day 20: Final Fixes freeze Day 20-21: Re-Packaging (if necessary) Final Release Candidate released (if necessary) Day 23: Release There you have 15 days between when community partners are informed of the pending release and given early access and final release "to the public." It also has a built-in 12 day window for final "oh @#$%" fixes.

This process here could be updated to include the PR things each release needs. https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/ReleaseProcessDraft I think between packaging and release there should be a 2 week span of time that our community partners get "early access" to the release candidate. We then (respectfully) ask for an embargo until release day. 2 weeks gives enough time for playtesting, video creation, written copy to be made, etc.

Hmm, I guess it depends the exact number of bushes instead of patches.

Here are some examples: Desert/Saharan starting area Expansion. You can see this is an area that would be good to build another CC. On this map it's guarded by creeps. Temperate starting area. The stone mines in the rear are enough for roughly 2 "large" individual mines. You see 2 patches of berries, a boar, and a small herd of deer, with more animals just outside the territory.

It's hard to gauge exact resource amounts in Atlas, as that info isn't displayed, but I would say you'd want 2 large stone mines and 2 large metal mines within the starting territory of each player, then you'd want about 3 of each for each player scattered around the map, roughly equidistant. Berries, you want probably 2 patches of 4-5 bushes each in the player start territories, and then maybe one more patch for each player somewhere nearby outside their territory. Probably 1 boar and at least 5 deer/gazelles in the starting territories and probably at least 20-ish more animals per player around the map. For trees, for a desert map at least 30+ in the starting territories, and then some patches and stragglers here and there, very sparse. For a jungle or temperate map, the sky's the limit on the number of trees you place. More in a jungle setting, of course, but in both biomes trees should never be an issue. Keep in mind, players need space to build, so don't let there be too many stragglers blocking up too much building area. A good idea would be to design "expansions" for the map, essentially areas where there's an "orgy" of resources around a nice open area good for planting a new Civic Center for... expansion. This is a Starcraft-ish concept. On each end of the spectrum, Desert/Polar maps have more stone and metal, while jungle maps have more wood. Polar/Jungle maps have more berries and animals, while Desert has fewer berries and animals. Temperate is the most balanced of all maps for resources. In Empires Ascendant, there's a weird tendency to put a large stone and large metal mine right up next to the starting CC. If you want to continue that trend, feel free. However, I feel it's more interesting for build orders to put those starting mines a little further away from the CC so that the player must choose to build a storehouse or just eat the shuttling time.

"Alpha" is supposed to convey an 'unfinished' state. While Beta is supposed to convey a 'mostly finished' state suitable for final testing. It really doesn't help matters that there are WFG devs who disagree with even this very simple distinction. So, the messaging is muddled, but I personally think the term "alpha" is very appropriate. I considered a more modern term like "early access", but what kinds of connotations does that term convey?