Finalizing planning for part 1.0

[feneur]

After some good discussion in IRC it was decided that we need to define our target audience before we can make a good decision about what exactly to include in part 1/version 1.0.

We agreed fairly quickly on the basic: people who most likely have played AoE or a similar game, with a decent level of experience with RTS games, a basic history interest. And quite possibly also an OS/Free Software interest. To explain, it's unlikely we can make the game balanced etc to appeal to the most hardcore players, and at least initially it's unlikely that more casual players will find out about 0 A.D. so it's better to aim at the middle ones for now

Where we got a bit stuck for the first discussion is where on the single player<-->multi player continuum we want to aim for part one Again we should probably aim somewhere in the middle, but the question is exactly where. Implementing a full single-player experience for part 1 is unlikely, since that would require us to spend so much time that we could probably just as well include everything else that has been cut for now over the years and keep turning out Alpha releases for a decade or so (And even if we wouldn't go that far it would still take enough time so that it wouldn't give us any of the benefits of getting to a 1.0 any time soon.) However, we certainly can't limit 0 A.D. to being multiplayer only or we'll risk turning away people who will not want to play multi player. We should be able to have a decent AI for release, and if it's not perfect maybe someone can come along and improve on it, so that far should be fine.

However, the question is if that will be enough single player for most people, and also (since that is unlikely) what/how we the easiest can create a fun single-player campaign experience?

That should summarize where we are so far, but if you want to read the discussion it can be found here: http://irclogs.wildfiregames.com/2013-02-10-QuakeNet-%230ad-dev.log (from about 21:41).