Just thought I'd pop in to say that if you've got any feedback, or you spot a bug, or a line doesn't make sense ( :shock: ), please post it below and I'll have a look at it. "I(We?) can think of nothing pleasanter." is not proper grammar. It should be "I(We?) can think of nothing mor...

Certain worthy trying and if they dont get enough submissions they like no harm done. Mightly defeatist attitude to shoot down the idea before trying it. I think you're making the mistake of assuming that it's a binary thing: either a submission is good or it's bad. But there are going to be dozens...

Printed manuals seem like a bit of an anachronism (I'm assuming the .pdf is the same one that was sent to the printers a week or so ago). They need to be ready a long time in advance, and anything you put in it is basically fixed from that point. The way that strategy games are constantly tweaked af...

The problem is surely reliability? You can't pay winners for their work (bureaucracy nightmare) but if you aren't paying you also can't compel them to keep providing voices for future expansions. And at this stage it seems like the problem is also time, not just money. Organising a competition like ...

Well. The issue with informative text is striking a balance between disambiguating confusing cases and overexplaining. So something like Usually an attempt to impose dominance. Demanding or refusing tribute both harm faction relationships. is brief, but is it sufficiently clear? That could be taken ...

I understand your thinking, but I think semicolons really need to be used accurately.They're a rare enough piece of punctuation that they stand out, so there really needs to be a tangible benefit for using one. Same with dashes and brackets. Sticking a smacking great pause in the middle of a sentenc...

I agree that's a candidate for rewriting, but I'm afraid I don't like those proposed corrections much. (Especially the semicolon one. Semicolons connect two independent clauses; there's no verb in that first clause, so it should just be a comma.) Sorry to be a prescriptive, but there's no point repl...

Yes. It's not cheating to let the player's imagination do much of the work. Actually it's better; pre-scripted stuff in games can break immersion. More importantly, it really doesn't take much detail before the player's imagination takes over. As you rightly point out, the very thin world-building i...

"By coders for coders" is a very pithy description! (I'm not sure I understand the Red Alert comparison, though, unless you just mean the jokiness of the dialogue. Red Alert had a lot of the asymmetrical fun people seem to think is missing.) It's certainly a very strong foundation, as you ...

As a lot of commenters have noted, the lack of any sort of game-spanning narrative is really hurting things. After the initial early game excitement, I'm afraid I find it a bit of a chore to keep playing. This is a problem in a lot of 4X games, but I think this is especially pronounced here because ...

Not sure if this will have been spotted already, but there's a duplicate first paragraph in two of the ruins reports (first seeing a ruin and first exploring a ruin). It's very likely that you'll see these on consecutive turns, so it's rather distracting.

Thanks for the reply. Sorry, in my excitement to play the game and help I didn't realise just how long the beta test has already running. (I only recently heard about it, and stupidly thought it was just beginning) If I'd known how soon the release date was, I'd have kept my thoughts to things that ...

Ah okay. Well that does sound better. Although as you say it's still not much of a story event. It sounds like you could research "fungus tech No 9" and somehow trigger becoming a being of pure energy! Even with a warning, how would you stop someone? Presumably they'd have to be completely...

Ah. Makes sense. I have a fond memory of printed manuals from when I was young, but I haven't seen one in a while. It's awkward that they have to be available for the printers so far in advance. It seems to hamstring a lot of potential change. Oh well. Check it carefully! I remember my Caesar III ma...

I didn't particularly notice an imbalance. But then I didn't see any of my political/religious/scientific views referenced or lampooned, and I read it pretty quickly. Which bit did you think people might object to? Normally I'd be more gung-ho, but I think it probably is best to play it safe in this...

As I mentioned in my first impressions post, there were some issues with the flavour text. I've made a new topic so as not to clog up the dialogue/backstory thread. In general I like it, and I'm glad there's so much of it, but it definitely all needs tightening up. The extent to which this is possib...

Surprisingly, I managed to get the game running on my old laptop. It runs very smoothly, considering, so kudos there. I played for about ten minutes before restarting (I was hemmed in on a weird isthmus, and hadn't really clocked how to play). In my new game I played for about fifty minutes before l...

Thanks for the reply. I think the wackiness is well-written, and would be a great design choice in certain contexts, it just doesn't fit THIS game. You'd need wacky, faction-specific buildings and traits, and a lot more events and faction-specific dialogue. To be honest, that's a game I'd love to pl...

My concern is that the victory conditions aren't at all interesting. They also don't really make sense in any context other than as a game mechanic. For me, victory ought to be a single event which caps off the story of the game. Even if it's not clear-cut, it should be an obvious transition. This s...

Ah. I see the "offer and demand"/"supply and demand" error from Noxium's quote is fixed in the lore pdf. I guess the in game version got out of sync somehow. (Or you've updated the pdf since I pointed it out.) I'm enjoying the lore document so far. It's quite well-written, I feel...