Just finished my first full game as Nubia (first DLC for me!).
Turn times seem much faster to me now, although I haven't played for a few months. I see SIGNIFICANTLY faster turn times on my rig. Anybody else experiencing that? I don't think it's just my mind playing tricks on me.
Also, there are a lot of subtle Ui changes. Aqueducts having little blue highlights on legal hexes is a good example. I think we're seeing a glimpse of the expansion's direction. I dig it.
When they first announced thw DDE would be getting two ore covs, I wondered if maybe they were taking two expansion civs and pushing their timelines forward. Whether or not that happened, I think it's clear that they began expansion work after Persia/Macedon.
The UI and diplo changes we're seeing are giving an early glimpse.
Don´t they have testers? Don´t they see that all these bugs make them look bad? Is it that hard to fix this basic stuff? These are not rhetorical questions, I am really wondering. If somebody who knows of the gaming industry could tell me, it´d be welcome..
I'm a lead programmer/technical artist in the game industry. Bugs like this could have many causes.
1) The most likely scenario is that the DLC simply isn't high priority. Since it seems this DLC wasn't originally planned, they may have a very small team on it. That team may also be completely separate from the patch note team. The livestream gave the impression that the scenario was very rigorously tested, but the patch might not have been.
2) On any project (especially digital ones) it's easy to make one tiny mistake right before launch that completely breaks everything. For all we know, one employee working on the expansion did a git merge into the wrong branch five minutes before release. In my experience, a loger timeline rarely means a more stable release. This is why soon (TM) is a thing. If they don't give a deadline, they leave themselves open to a delay if something goes wrong at the last instant.
3) Compatability. While Nubia may have been included in their test builds, we know there was a patch (probably developed separately) and cross-platform multiplayer in the works. Any of those could have caused a compatability issue with the others. Merging several different upgrades from multiple workers has always been messy. We have better tools for that these days, but it's still incredibly easy fir a merge to blow up in your face with three self-contained upgrades being worked on separately.
4) Regression testing is usually automated to ease the tedium of testing jobs and save on costs. Very few automated testers can detect visual bugs though. Those that do probably aren't robust enough for something like a Civ game. This means it could pass every regression test and not detect font changes or scaling.
5) In the modern age of games, it's nearly impossible to produce something completely bug free. The sad truth is that QA commonly finds every bug, but the devs only have time to fix 99% of them. They will usually prioritize them and leave the ones that are either too difficult to fix, or too minor to be worth the effort. Given the long timeline though, this seems unlikely for this patch.
I'll leave it at that. I'm even boring myself. It's also important to remember that Firaxis has proven really bad at testing patches in general so far. We got the alert mode that didn't work and a swordsman buff that made no sense and made the generic swordsman stronger than the UUs. I suspect the resources available for testing the free content is very limited.
+50% production does not cut production time by half. To cut it by half, you would need +100% production, i.e. double production. +50% production will cut production time by a third, i.e. 33,33%.
