Criticisms of CA... again

[therother]

Would I be right in saying that there are two quite separate issues (or sets of issues) that you want CA to address? The first, to my mind, are the bugs. That is, the parts of the game that don't work as CA intended them to, e.g. the constant blinking of trade indicators after you build a shipyard or the occasional save game corruption or CTD. But based on the posts of people from CA, they are most certainly working on these right now for patch 1.2.

The second, it seems to me, basically boils down to playability. For instance, the issues the TW MP community are having, or the increased level of province management required from the player as compared to MTW (*). I read a lot from people who are unhappy with the concept of squalor for instance, and I have personally spend a fair amount of my time trying to explain to people that's it's not really that bad at all. Of course, being the kind of player I am, I welcomed most of the strategy changes with open arms. Many other TW veterans preferred the previous TW emphasis on moving armies and fighting battles. As always, YMMV.

Maybe they will tweak some of these, like putting in some of the old MTW battle commands, with a battle timer option, or maybe they will get rid of squalor, or design an 'arcade' strategy map mode where squalor and discontent are no longer issues. I would certainly welcome that last option, as it would mean that those of us who enjoy the new complexities could continue to do so, whilst those who seem to despise them will be sated by their removal in the games they play. But whatever they plan to do with these issues, you've got to give them more time than 3 weeks!

After all, this game was years in the planning; it's unrealistic to expect them to make wholesale changes on the fly. Plus, if you ask me, their energies are more profitably focussed right now on the bugs, which are a problem to all players. And it may just transpire that people are still getting used to the new system, and that discontent will drop after a while. They will then have wasted months reworking a game the vast majority are now happy with, at the expense of bug fixes, in the first instance, but also more crucially for CA’s survival, the development of the RTW expansion disk they will most likely make and developing the new xTW.

(*) Of this I can personally testify. A general province management guide for MTW would be fairly complete at a couple of pages, scattered with a few tables. For RTW, so far, I've written 1.5 pages dealing with mines, probably the simplest part of city management and the one the requires least actual planning.