But it does give me the feeling of having been in on the game since early days, and to be honest it gives me a certain (almost certainly totally unjustified) proprietary feeling about the game. I'm proud of CEAW, dammit. It's a good game, a damn good game, and I helped a little tiny smidgen of a bit to make it that way.
So, yes, I am proud. Aware of its limitations, yes. But proud.
And part of the problem that CEAW has is with compromises. Every game makes them. Every game. They are necessary to make a game playable and fun. CEAW makes fewer than Panzer General did, and PG is widely recognised as a blockbuster classic of a computer game.
No, CEAW's compromise problem isn't that there are too many of them, or that they are the wrong ones; they're not.
CEAW's problem is that while the compromises themselves are obvious, (to anyone who looks at a game with a designer's eye), the reasons behind the compromises are subtle and complex.
One can play the game for 3 days and think, "Well that was dumb, why did they put that clear over there?"
Then one can spend 3 weeks trying to find a better way to do things, and finally realise that the method in the stock game really was the best solution, but for reasons that were not at all apparent until all other solutions had been tried.
This also means that the same issues keep coming up over and over and over, with the same alternate solutions proposed over and over and over...
Patience is a virtue, Possum!
