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Joel Billings -> RE: WitE 2 (2/16/2020 6:27:32 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: uw06670
When Koalas fly?
Sorry, just some humor.
If its in Alpha now (so I've heard) I hope it doesn't release soon. 1 full war match takes a loooooong time to conduct. And without a lot of play time by Alpha/Beta people there are going to be issues that need patches.
Well, given climate change, I think at some point the Koalas that survive may just be the ones that figure out how to fly. [:)]
You make a good point, but also our alpha has been pretty stable for a long time, with the biggest work remaining being making the air war something easier for the players to play and/or providing a good AI Air Assist mechanism. That and completing our interface facelift. We've been holding off adding a lot of new testers because while this area was in flux, we'd just be confusing too many testers for the value we'd get from their testing. Thankfully we have a few very good testers that have been able to give us feedback on the recent work. I'm not saying everything else is done, but we're more advanced in some ways than you might think. We are now very close to having an AI Air Assist that allows for minimal interaction with the air game for those that want to stay focused on the ground game. Although not all features have been added, we're also far along in our use of AOGs (air operational groups) that consist of multiple air units, which makes it easier to move and command large numbers of air units than it was in WitW. The Soviets can have a 15k a/c air force by the end of the war, and although focused on ground support, it would be a bear to manage it without the AOGs. I can see us getting to a point within the next 1-3 months where we can add a large group of new testers and begin beta (or near beta) testing.
We have had 2 player games of Stalingrad to Berlin go from Nov 1942 into mid 1944, but I don't think we've had a 2 player game of the long campaign go past summer of 42. However, I don't think WitP ever had a 2 player test game that got more than a year in when it was released. Same probably goes for WitE. We had to rely on our AI tests to balance, and then only after release were we able to make adjustments based on lots of player feedback. That's the reality of these big games that take months of real time to play. Does this mean the games are perfectly balanced when they are released? No. Does this mean that the games aren't a heck of a lot of fun to play from the day of release. Also no. With these games, it's the journey, not the destination, and we think players of WitE2 will enjoy the journey.
BTW, I've mentioned this several times before, but this is not only true for computer games. The original SPI War in the East board game that was shipped around 1974 had a major problem that was corrected by a rule change that was published in their Moves magazine sometime after release. By that time I had already spent an entire summer playing the game solo. More importantly, I had also spent 4 months playing twice a week with 5 players playing WitE in a team game, with our Soviet team stopping the Germans cold in 1942. It was only after this game that I read about the rule change and realized our game was not a fair fight. Wish I had known about the rule change earlier, but I still enjoyed the journey.
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