we ended with spar's and wedges points last time. here they are respectively
"some" and "everything" are two very different things. and seeing as how I'm one of their first sponsors, I think I still have a right to something here.
This is a first time venture for them as far as I know and it is very important to their company so there is bound to be growing pains; such things are par for the course. Like you I'm somewhat PO at the lack of information but in all fairness they do provide us with most of the specific info that we post about. So they are trying to be transparent to some degree. Moreover I'm not saying you/we dont have a right to comment about such things just that we should allow them room with slam comments.
and do you think that when they are adressing the final "bitch" list that they will accept "the whole empire system is broken" as a valid thing to change? I dont think so.
I like to think that if a strong argument can be made for something that they would take it very seriously and change plans if some major issue happens within the community. Otherwise this whole process has been a colossal sham and we have been suckered. I dont think this is the case given my experience with SD for well over a decade. Brad simply would not do business like that or with such a company.
Isn't that the point? I just threw out a number and it is, of course, up to the balance team to make the final decision but it should be expensive. The idea is to allow you some more freedom but still encourage you to expand your empire as the primary means of acquiring more stuff.
now I'll adress them, starting with wedge
1) the point of the exponential relation is that its supposed to grow quickly, but if you do a doubling system it becomes unwieldy in one single purchase, and will become economic suicide to purchase more than two. that brings us back to the original point that its not enough.
and why would a monstrosity of a combo of the two systems make any sense in the first place? all your asking is to duck tape my idea onto the first one so it fixes the first couple of problems. its always better to build the system from teh ground up first.
thankfully the empire building is rather detatched from the military costs and the expansion system, so fixing it wont cause huge tears in the rest of the game.
and spar's comments:
if the devs commented as much as you seem to advocate they do, I wouldnt have an issue. but they dont, and they only really comment on out-of-the-way ideas or cool new concepts, not on CORE concepts of the game that need tweaking, and thats really where the gamer community can be the most useful.
second: theres a difference between being suckered, and being in a single sided conversation. right now I feel more like they listen to everything we say, incorporate a few things, but otherwise let us drive blind without knowing what we are saying is even being listened to. that personally really pisses me off, because I want to know if someone is going to dismiss my point out of hand, rather than me elaborating on a beautifully constructed system only for it not to be even looked at. I know there are plenty of ideas on this forum which can fix many of the difficult issues in this new style of gameplay, but I rarely see them incorporated into the game!
take for instance the 3-D arguement, the Devs said long ago that they planned on incorporating 3-D "fully", so we ranted for a larger portion of a year thinking THAT system was what was to be used, low and behold we get blindsided by a "2-D +++!" system instead, and a ton of useful rumination has gone to complete crap.
