Now This is a Manual

[Johnus]

Printed the manual today at my office. Over 250 pages, at first blush, professionally done, comprehensive and well written. Reminds me of the old days.

The Original COG, FOF and now this; you guys are working on quite a reputation.

[timurlain]

I second that. The manual is nice.

[tgb]

And to think...it actually came with the game, not 3 months later

[ericbabe]

Thank you for the kind words.  Kudos goes to Mike Zeddies, the manual producer and writer, and Marc von Martial, who did a beautiful job on manual layout.

[sw30]

If you read it as a manual, i.e. how do I operate this game, this is a great manual.  If you read it as a rulebook i.e. what are the effects of X on Y, this could be improved... For some exmaples, see the thread entitled "Random Questions" that I started a couple of days ago...

[Kipper]

I hate to be a nit picker but the plural of "causus belli" is not "causus belli" but either "causae belli" or "causae bellorum" depending on the sense.  Apart from that it's a great manual!!

[Mr. Z]

ORIGINAL: Kipper

I hate to be a nit picker but the plural of "causus belli" is not "causus belli" but either "causae belli" or "causae bellorum" depending on the sense.  Apart from that it's a great manual!!

It turns out that "causus belli" is not the correct usage at all, but "casus belli", i.e. "case for war". We're told by our in-house Latin expert that the plural of "casus" is indeed "casus". I think we changed all references to "causus" to "casus", but let us know if we missed any.

[Kipper]

Stand corrected! It is now the perfect manual!

[Mr. Z]

Thanks! [:D]

[ericbabe]

ORIGINAL: sw30
If you read it as a manual, i.e. how do I operate this game, this is a great manual.  If you read it as a rulebook i.e. what are the effects of X on Y, this could be improved... For some exmaples, see the thread entitled "Random Questions" that I started a couple of days ago...

There could be (should be?) a separate strategy guide or something that went into greater depth, but as it is, our manual was 60 pages over the size limit, so we couldn't really squeeze much more into it. We wanted to have more "tip" and "note" sections as we had in the FOF manual, but they simply wouldn't fit.

[Gil R.]

As the in-house Latinist, let me elaborate... "casus" is a 4th-declension noun, so its plural is "casus" (with the long 'u').

During the manual-editing process I discovered that Mr. Z had done it the wrong way and corrected it, but he didn't know that I had made this change and used a different (unedited) version of the file instead. Luckily, we have Latin-redundancy, since Eric caught the mistake. Otherwise, I would have had to resign from the American Philological Association...

[Kipper]

ORIGINAL: Gil R.
As the in-house Latinist, let me elaborate... "casus" is a 4th-declension noun, so its plural is "casus" (with the long 'u').

Eh, Gil, you didn't have to reverse over me after I had already been run down.