Matrix Games Forums

to get a Tom Chick AAR?

http://fidgit.com/archives/2010/03/avat ... p#comments

That's a good wee AAR and promotional tool for the game...in particular

And although I'm not convinced this intimidating numbers-heavy beast is going to actually work as a game, it has adroitly gotten over its first and greatest hurdle: making me care.

Word of mouth is spreading for this game,but I feel casual players are going to struggle with the learning curve and moan a lot.

Do you think casual gamers will even be interested in DW? Don't mean to sound harsh, just saying it's not the sort of game that stands out to that niche IMO...

The entire 4x market is kind of niche. The sort of player who likes the genre is likely going to check out everything.
 
The real fallout is going to be among those who swear by turn based versus those who don't. Yes, pausing can effectively turn this game into a TBS for all practical purposes (as is the case with Paradox games) but it's still a hump for some folks.
 
This game is deep and does have a fairly steep learning curve. But that deepness will keep you coming back for more. Tons and tons of replayability in this game.

Even if the Tom Chick reviews serves no other purpose than to create awareness among other 4X fans then it's to the greater good. Not all 4X gamers are checking all the forums for that unique game - I know that there are periods where I won't make any effort to seek out any game and then I'll stumble upon some gem...

(Sadly, in his comments, he doesn't recommend DW as of v. 1.02, but he does appear to have an open mind...0

Interesting...it's a good thing this is what most people see because in The Quarter to Three forums he states that in it's current state quote "I absolutely don't recommend Distant Worlds"

I'm interested in this title but it's almost overkill really...I mean it's cool but does it need it all to have fun....it's just seems that MOO, MOO2 or Birth of the Federation(with mods), etc would entertain me just fine...it might be a case of too much is too much. Will have to wait and see.

DW smokes them all if you take the time to learn the in's and out's.........I have been around Matrix for a long time and cannot think of the last non-Matrix game I bought since I joined them way back when. As far as I am concerned, if it does not say Matrix, I don't buy it.

DW will just get better and better with improvements.......I have seen every title they have and I own about 15 of them just get better and better.

I know it is my opinion and all, but I was scalded along time ago over MOO3 and vowed to find a company that backs up their games all the way. I found Matrix and have been here ever since. You are missing out IMO.

Actually, a thread at QuarterToThree is what got me interested. They're doing an "Interactive AAR," in which forum members take on names of ships, planets, and captains in the game world. Check it out here:

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk ... hp?t=58537

To this thread I respond: Who is Tom Chick and why should I care?

ORIGINAL: LitFuel

Interesting...it's a good thing this is what most people see because in The Quarter to Three forums he states that in it's current state quote "I absolutely don't recommend Distant Worlds"

And a few posts down he then proceeds to provide a list of things that supposedly 'don't work', that nobody else seems to be having trouble with, including me. [&:]

ORIGINAL: forsaken1111

To this thread I respond: Who is Tom Chick and why should I care?

Tom Chick is a fairly well known game reviewer who currently blogs about games on a site for the SyFy channel. He also runs QT3, which is a pretty interesting message board if you want to see game industry people interact with gamers in a casual but relatively mature manner.

As for his opinon of this game, Chick is more of an RTS fan then he is a general strategy game fan (at least he seems more excited about RTS games). That sometimes colors his view of things.

Edit: And Chick has put up a detailed critcism of the game at QT3. As I don't have the game and since a few early responses there seem to think he has some legitimate arguments, I'll just post it here and see what the response is (these are responses to particular statements made earlier by a defender of the game):

If you tell a ship to explore a system, it will do no such thing. It will park on the sun and stay there. I can send you a saved game if you like. You have to manually move it to different planets. Are you saying this isn't what happens in your game?

If you turn fleet automation off, fleets will still mysteriously disband. This has been my single biggest problem with the game so far. I have no idea what's going on with the fleet management stuff. It's hard enough trying to keep ships repaired and refueled. It is nearly impossible trying to keep fleets together. Whatever is going on in the game, it's an enormous mess trying to manage lots of ships.

Again, I can verify that fleet automation is switched off. I can verify that I group ships into a fleet. I can verify without every hitting "A", the fleet will scatter into component ships when I'm not paying attention. Whether it's peeling ships off to refuel or repair, or whether it's deciding it doesn't want to be a fleet is beyond my ken. All I know is that manual fleet control is no such thing.

I rest my case on this one then. It's bad enough that refueling stations constantly run off to refuel. It's doubly bad what a mess it is trying to move a fleet long distances between fueling points. And I have no idea if it's actually supposed to take a year to refuel a large fleet, but I'm guessing that wasn't an intentional part of the design.

It's largely a matter of broken fleet management. Obviously, the game is built for players to control "state" property, namely fleets during wartime. But managing a large fighting force is next to impossible with how fleets fall apart, and how damage repair and refueling is so chaotic. Also, considering how the AI uses ships piecemeal so often, fleets don't seem to work very well for the AI players either.

And all this is before getting into the nitty gritty of ship settings and the interaction of different components. Based on the mad random confused shuffle of battles, I don't have a lot of confidence that battles are working smoothly. If you have a saved game of a grand battle that you think shows off the system, I'd love to see it. For me, Distant Worlds does not survive contact with the enemy.

As for beta testers, I have no idea what they did and didn't do. I have no idea what's going on with the forums. I don't know what's being tweaked. I only can speak from my experience with v1.02. It's limited experience, but it's enough to know that I have no interest in playing this game in its current state. I love what Code Force is trying to do, but the operative word is "trying".

Now assuming you're not going to call me out on any of these specifics, in which case I'd be happy to provide saved games or screenshots or whatever, then it seems to me our main difference is one of semantics. I think the game is broken, or unfinished, and still needs a lot of work. You say it only has rough edges but is playable and fun. Neither of us is necessarily wrong.

He then goes on to make a statement about how too many gamers are letting ambitious strategy games get by on half-baked releases. He loves the ambition but thinks if a developer can't deliver a game that pulls off what its trying to, it should either be scaled back or delayed and points to HOI3 and Empire:TW as recent examples of other ambitious games that were released before they were ready.

Well he hits some points but we're all here to help get them over that last hurdle! We've got the wishlist and a good chance of these improvements coming.

Do you still play botf!!?!

Not sure if that is directed at me but I do still play BotF (Birth of the Federation?)

I'm waiting for my account on QT3 to be activated to respond there, but in the meantime let me post my response here. One of you can feel free to repost this at QT3 if you want.

First of all, I take responsibility for any issues that made it into the release version. I don't agree with everything Tom reported, but he has some valid points. I think the game is actually in pretty good shape and I also think it's worth noting that we are one week past release at this point and we're expecting the next update due in a few days to address the bulk of the reported concerns, with the rest addressed in another update the week thereafter. While I wish these quick updates had been unnecessary, I do think that it's abundantly clear that a lot of people are playing, enjoying and completing the game and giving it high marks. It still has severe issues on a few systems and some remaining bugs are severe for some playstyles and not others. We're working as fast as we can to smooth out all the remaining rough edges.

As far as Tom's issues go, I can confirm that, as the testers have said, we did not see these pre-release. I believe that for the vast majority of pre-release, the issues did not exist (I'm sure you've heard that story before, sort of like everyone in jail is innocent, but it's true in this case). While some of the instability in the original release was system specific or specific to unique setups or events that we didn't encounter, things like the resupply ship issues we should have caught.

To give you a brief history, the game itself was stable and virtually bug-free for quite a while before release on our systems. Fairly late in the process, we added the multi-threading/multi-core support. This introduced a LOT of new bugs and we found and fixed them until we felt we were back to where we had been. We (I and Elliot) then made a decision to make some further tweaks and improvements and performance optimizations while waiting for the final art and I'm afraid that's where some of these release issues likely appeared. We did not catch them in the remaining testing time and we should have.

I'll take full responsibility on that - I did personally test the game quite a bit before I signed off on the release but I allowed myself certain assumptions based on two years of prior testing and stuck too close to my own playstyle, which missed some bugs. I think the testers ended up doing the same, in other words we didn't re-check enough of the things that we knew were working in the last few weeks before the release.

As to the specific issues:

If you tell a ship to explore a system, it will do no such thing. It will park on the sun and stay there. I can send you a saved game if you like. You have to manually move it to different planets. Are you saying this isn't what happens in your game?

I've confirmed this - this is actually the first such report, which tells me that most people are not playing this way. Leaving your explorers automated means they will work fine to explore nearby systems without micro-management. Similarly, ordering them manually to "explore a sector" works fine. Only manually ordering them to explore a specific star system leads to this result and we plan to fix this in the next update. Thanks for the report and I'm sorry this bug caused frustration.

If you turn fleet automation off, fleets will still mysteriously disband. This has been my single biggest problem with the game so far.

I cannot confirm this at all. There is a known issue if fleet automation is on that causes fleets to disband (though it's intended that the AI be able to do that, but it's not doing it as intended). But when I turn off fleet automation, and create a fleet of manually controlled ships, they perform exactly as expected. I just tested this again in v1.0.2 to make sure it wasn't some kind of new bug introduced in the last update. Every ship I put in the fleet stayed in the fleet and the fleet did exactly as I ordered, through multiple missions of various kinds and a minor war and several skirmishes. If there is a bug here, I cannot find it or duplicate it to date and the only other reports I've seen like this involved automation still being on.

I have no idea what's going on with the fleet management stuff. It's hard enough trying to keep ships repaired and refueled. It is nearly impossible trying to keep fleets together. Whatever is going on in the game, it's an enormous mess trying to manage lots of ships.

I think if you are playing with fleet automation on and trying to manually control fleets, there are issues that sound like what Tom describes.

Again, I can verify that fleet automation is switched off. I can verify that I group ships into a fleet. I can verify without every hitting "A", the fleet will scatter into component ships when I'm not paying attention. Whether it's peeling ships off to refuel or repair, or whether it's deciding it doesn't want to be a fleet is beyond my ken. All I know is that manual fleet control is no such thing.

I'm not seeing that. Are your individual ships automated or also on manual control? If they are automated, perhaps the issue is hidden there as I was testing with everything on manual control.

I rest my case on this one then. It's bad enough that refueling stations constantly run off to refuel.

Resupply ships do have a bug and will sometimes fail to deploy (and other times they will work) and instead head off to refuel. This has been reported, confirmed and should be fixed in the next update.

It's doubly bad what a mess it is trying to move a fleet long distances between fueling points. And I have no idea if it's actually supposed to take a year to refuel a large fleet, but I'm guessing that wasn't an intentional part of the design.

How large a fleet is this? I just re-tested fleet refueling with planets, ports and deployed resupply ships. In each case, it took my fleet from 1 day (when they were all together) to a few days (if they were a bit spread out) to refuel once they got to the vicinity of the refueling point. This was testing with fleets of around 10 ships. Taking a year to refuel is way beyond anything I have ever seen - I can only imagine some kind of resource shortage. If the refueling location runs out of fuel and the ships are manually ordered to refuel there, they might wait until more fuel was available.

It's largely a matter of broken fleet management. Obviously, the game is built for players to control "state" property, namely fleets during wartime. But managing a large fighting force is next to impossible with how fleets fall apart, and how damage repair and refueling is so chaotic. Also, considering how the AI uses ships piecemeal so often, fleets don't seem to work very well for the AI players either.

Automated fleet management in the release version does need work and we're working on it. Repair and refueling seems to be working fine, except in terms of resupply ship deployment issues. Fleets on manual control also seem to work well for me and I've seen AI fleets mount very effective operations.

I guess my main point here is that mileage does seem to vary. I'm sure there may be issues that I'm missing. The only thing I can say there is that there may be playstyle-specific issues we haven't found yet, but we are moving very quickly to fix and improve any rough areas and bugs that have been reported to us. I think you'll find that DW will shape up very quickly in these areas as we were used to them working much better during pre-release as well.

I hope Tom will stick with us for a few more weeks to see if the updates we have coming out will make the game much more enjoyable for his playstyle.

Regards,

- Erik

Erik ,thank you and please keep up this open, two-way communication with your customers going. It's great to see such an investment from yourself and the developer. It shows you have great faith in your product!

OK that's enough butt-licking for one day

Thanks, Codearchitect, we do not intend to change how we communicate and we hope the updates will also speak for themselves as we go forward.

I'm glad to hear your response, ER. 

Mr. Chick is a favorite reviewer of mine - not that I always or even mostly agree with him - because he explains his opinions well and generally doesn't rely on emotional appeals, snarkiness or assume we concur with his points already.

Your answers make his objections seem less daunting.

That was a very constructive, honest yet optimistic response to the review. I understand Tom's frustrations (and I agree with many of them) but Erik's eagerness to support customers (he does a remarkable job) and confidence in the product Distant Worlds that Elliot has created (who has also has done an amazing job) diffuses much of what Tom has to say. Will also stop brown-nosing now. [:D]