ORIGINAL: pasternakski
You obviously haven't been listening.
I don't hear any "whining" from the design team, and I think that this is an unfair characterization of their attempts to keep the potential customer base informed about progress.
As a tech professional, you must realize that there is far more to game design than just "coding" the rules...
So let's have some patience and see what the actual product is before criticizing it or labeling it as a failure.
What's the point of this post?... I haven't been listening? I got sick and tired of people tip-toeing and writing 'goody-goody' posts after an "update" that goes on like "we're almost there" and after two years a basic thing like TMR pops out of the blue. Stuff that.
Besides, you've got trolling from people that provoked me to reply in this manner who obviously don't have a clue what is this all about. If you haven't noticed, my post had two parts, one directed to ardilla, the other for Marshall. 'Whining' was reserved for ardilla blaming "messy" EiA rules for the delay; not for design team informing us about progress - although if they keep informing us in the same manner they shouldn't bother really.
Yeah, I know it takes a lot more to make a game, thank you. My point was that if you have a tested system like EiA with anal-like rules that are actually a very good form of user requirements, it is a half of the job done. But some tend to think if the rules are complex it takes "exponential" time to develop the game and you're gonna make errors along the way (implying you're going to spend a huge amount of time to clean them up, so we're all fine and dandy and "we're almost there").
That's bullshit and I know that from experience, because when you put something on the paper and start cracking it's just a matter of time and in how many chunks you're actually going to finish it. When you start changing the scope that's when the things like TMR start to raise their ugly heads.
And yes, if I may humbly offer my .02, you should be able finish it two years afterwards, unless you're under-resourced which seems to be the case here. Why don't throw an extra resource on it and raise the price of the game to cover it up? Because nobody knows how much longer this will actually take and perhaps it won't be wise to spend more money on it, perhaps?...
And for AI... It's a nice little essay you wrote about and I applaud the common sense you've unleashed on us, but that's sadly not the point. Of course they have to go through the motions and release some sort of AI. But you're implying it's one of those things it's taking them a long time to finish because it's a hard thing to develop (it is, BTW), hence the frustrating wait.
On the contrary, I don't think they have spent that much time on AI, nor they would at all. I think they have (or will) develop some basic heuristics that are not time consuming to code & test and leave it at that. I can place a sizeable wager that they won't bother at all with tweaking it so it actually plays grand campaign even remotely close to a human. As long as it does the battle and have some half-assed strategy about collecting VPs, it will be fine.
And rightly so, because if they start chewing on AI, judging by the time spent so far, I bet Matrix EiA will be a huge hit in the nursing home when I retire. If I was in Marshall's place AI would be the last thing on my priority list when there are issues with TMR and PBEM play - as I gather from some post elsewhere. I would even scrap it for campaign type play and enable it for scenarios only - it's a smaller scope to manage (only the military aspect vs diplomatic/economic ones).
So no, I'm don't have any more patience, and yes, I want to criticise how the project goes because the longer it goes, the greater the chance it would never finish (that is from experience as well). Mind you, I never criticised the product itself or labelled it as a failure. How could I, as all we've got is a vapourware screenshots so far, full of those ugly fuzzy counters?...
