Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: RayKinStL

Thank you Marshall.  I certainly appreciate your respectulf reply.  The thing is, I simply am looking at things from the Matrix perspective.  I want EiA to succeed.  I want it to get popular and more people to come back to the game.  And of course, from a business standpoint, you want to do that as well so you sell more copies.  The problem with tackling the PBEM market is that you are concentrating all your efforts on a very  small niche.  That nniche is the market share who play PBEM games, like EiA, and are willing to pay money for a more managable streamlined interface.  In that regard I believe you have somewhat succeeded.  Except for teh lack of original EiA rules as an option (which you said is coming), this is superior to cyberboard play for the most part.  That said, I think you are targeting the wrong market.  With a strong AI, you cuold bring in new players who would get a challenge from the computer, and thus a level of competence that the rest of us attained from getting our teeth smashed in for 1-2 full campaign games in someones basement for 2 hours a week.  I think the true potential in this game is that you can severely reduce the time input for the learning curve.  I can get through a whole Grand Campaign game in a weekend against the AI.  If you put 2 or 3 of these under your belt, against competent AI, you re reayd to jump ni the pool with the big boys.  As is stands, beating the AI right now doesn't mean much.  Most of my PP and thus VP is attained from careless AI moves or inactivity and indifference.  I think if you had a truly worthy AI that could teach new players the nuances of the game, then the natural progression would be IP play which could potentially create a whole new community of EiA players.  As it stands now, you are mostly limiting yourself to getting current PBEM players, and a few nostalgic ones to try your game and realize it only offers a little more over traditional PBEM play.

Sadly though, I fear it may be too late to change the course.  I believe you are hunkered in for the fight.  You have committed so much time and resources already to making PBEM the ebst it can be, that I don't know when you will be able to truly point your efforts elsewhere.  I just think there are bigger prizes out there, but it would require a shift in strategic thinking at Matrix as far as how and where to apply the limited reources available.

And although thats a lot to say and comes off more negative than I intend it, I really do applaud your hard work.  You are always courteous and professional on here.  You work diligently to resolve issues and bugs submitted through the Mantis tracker.  I don't doubt your efforts for one second.  I just fear that every day that goes by fixing problems on an area that should, in my opinion, not be your focus is jsut another day wasted.  But we shall see what the future holds.

P.S. - Sorry for the business jargon in the first paragraph.  That was the MIS degree coming out of me.

quote:

ORIGINAL: NeverMan
You still have to click on every corps "in the box" once, so you are only saving time on the back end of the move. It's hardly a minute, it's more like 5-10 seconds. It's really not worth the development time.

If this game was perfect and Marshall still wanted to tweak some stuff, then I would probably agree with you, but there is still so much wrong with this game that 5-10 second speedup ONLY when you are moving large stacks from one place to another place just doesn't seem worth it to me.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Jimmer

quote:

ORIGINAL: NeverMan
You still have to click on every corps "in the box" once, so you are only saving time on the back end of the move. It's hardly a minute, it's more like 5-10 seconds. It's really not worth the development time.

If this game was perfect and Marshall still wanted to tweak some stuff, then I would probably agree with you, but there is still so much wrong with this game that 5-10 second speedup ONLY when you are moving large stacks from one place to another place just doesn't seem worth it to me.

No, this is incorrect. You don't just click once on each corps. After every move of a single corps, you must right-click to clear the rest of the movement, and then click the pile in the other location. Finally, unless the one you want happens to be on top of the stack, you have to find the right corps and click it. Only then can you move the next corps.

IMO, this qualifies at tedium. However, I'm in agreement with you that it is only worth development time (now) if the development cycle is really short. Otherwise, many other things have higher priority.