Firaxis announces "Sid Meier's Starships"

in games where the player's mistakes are clearly communicated back to them, players tend to learn from mistakes and increase their skill. not everyone! I know.

a great example of negative feedback are mistakes in a tactical battle in a game. a game like... Starships.

agree with you if we consider FPS or RTS like Starcraft.
When considering TBS, I expect the game dev to have some level of proficiency with the game. He designed the game and he knows how the systems interact.

 

It lives.

 

There is a vast difference between composition (or direction) and performance. A composer or a maestro can't necessarily pick up an instrument and begin cranking out tunes at the same level as a member of the symphony; an architect or a construction foreman can't pick up a welder or electrical tools and begin putting up girders or wiring; etc. Excellence in one area doesn't automatically grant excellence in the other.

Given that Sid is the composer/architect (and may or may not also be the project director), I wouldn't expect that he has time or inclination to be a good player, and certainly probably doesn't participate as a playtester. Besides not having time, that would interfere with his other role, remove objectivity, and all in all be a bad idea, not a good one.

 

2k/Firaxis need to adopt an open beta principle. Many mistakes would have been avoided that way.

 

Weird thing is, they employed MadDjinn to basically do a mix of this and marketing, and he actually highlighted many of the issues with Beyond Earth during his public streams (autoplant trade routes and ships killing each other in a single hit, for example) and the game launched with both issues intact.

It's a bit like how they made a whole bunch of characterisation for the Beyond Earth leaders and chucked it out instead of adding it to the game - they did a lot of the work, but the game didn't see the benefit for one reason or another.

 

Weird. Why ignore good advice?