Naomi -> RE: News From the Beta: Optional Rules (9/29/2005 10:29:23 PM)
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ORIGINAL: Ralegh Currently in the beta, the only truly optional rules (ie you can choose at the start of the game to play them or not to play them) are: - guard commitment - changed winter land movement (There are also some PBEM settings and per-user display type things.) The following rules are currently implemented as mandatory: a) artillery b) economic manipulation c) ship building locations d) some new political combinations e) cavalry superiority f) detaching and absorbing minor free state factors (ie. allowing it outside the minor) g) leader casulties h) In addition, I suppose the EIH rules like privateers/privateering and light/heavy ships Bearing in mind that making any of these truly optional would require both alternative coding and increased complexity of the code, as well as coding the AI to know what to do both with and without various rule combinations, which (if any) of these do you think should be truly optional? Please give some idea of the degree of your feeling, so Marshall can weigh up the strength of feeling. I am glad to see the testing effort is getting ever more focused as such. Having read all of the instrumental threads as above, I would love to elaborate a bit on the debatable issues you guys made efforts to highlight. It seems that most of us are concerned about leaders casualties, followed by non-EIA add-ons - with naval-force variety topping the roll. First, the notion of leader casualties is fine with me, as this was exactly in the EIA designers' minds and through so many years of testing and playing has proved far from the make-or-break issue that may put players off the game. I am not opposed to its inclusion. For those less so, that it has to take 216 battles to finish a leader's career may be a comfortable thought. Even so, if too many would-be customers do not take it to their liking, the devs had better simply leave it out (and will then have one thing less to bother with [:'(] - a win-win case - rather than trying to tweak the odds since the modified probability may yet be open to argument). Second, I haven't played with any ex-EIA rules. But if chances presented, I will not refuse to take on such new things as an expanded variety of vessels, and who knows they may not be an improvement on the game playability? (Or in fact someone knows it [:'(].) However, if such features adds to the complexibility (and bug-proneness) of the game design and thus impede the product in the pipeline, I recommend minding them less and leaving them to expansion packages, unless the devs have more than EIA in their heads. In short, I hope the devs will always put the core issues (I assume EIA's set of rules and regulations, both mandatory and optional) first beforing paying heed elsewhere. @(~,~)@
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