Sorry From CA - Current State of the Game and What Happens Next

[CaptainCrunch]

I know it's been mentioned a million times but it still boggles my mind how this game scored so high with reviewers. I guess there are really only 3 possibilities to account for this gross error in judgement.
a) they never actually played the game beyond 3 turns.
b) they are massively incompetent.
c) they where offered '"incentives" to utterly ignore the obvious shortcomings and focus on the few good aspects of this game.
Apologies aside this game reeks of everything wrong in the PC gaming industry today which is to say the souless persuit of profit over professional integrity and just doing what's right for your loyal paying customers.
Sorry to be so heavy handed but I'm just sick of this CRAP.

You said it. Incidentally, my guess is all of the above

CA banked on the 'big spectacle', it was by design that nobody was given an early build of the campaign so they could get into the nuts & bolts of the system and see that it was FUBAR. This is their beta, "now that we're getting real-time metric feedback from thousands of players" says it all.

There's no question that what I saw pre-launch drove my curiosity to overcome my suspicion. The fact that STW2 was so well made also played a big role in my decision making, which I think is true for many others. I felt they were on the right track to make something really special... at least something really fundamentally good that the modding community could take the rest of the way.

Maybe they didn't set out to intentionally deceive their customers, but they certainly set themselves up for failure without realizing it when they gave themselves such a short development cycle for such an ambitious release. They thought they could pull it off... they were wrong. Evidently when they finally realized that, they probably hoped that the grandeur and scale of the game would impress enough to make it a sales winner, and plenty of people fell for it. Hell, there are those out there who think 'OMFG TEH G4ME POWNZ!' Maybe those are the customers they want to attract now? That argument can certainly be made going by their PR campaign and the 2 fools they hired to promote it.

There may come a day after patches and add-ons when the game will actually be more or less finished, but I don't think it will ever be considered a worthy successor to RTW cuz there are just too many poorly implemented and ill conceived core features. Time will tell of course, but this is how I see it at the moment (and the game runs pretty damn well for me on an older machine, which I have to give them serious props for).