Preview 2 Likely Arriving Soon

Should we release preview 2?


  • Total voters
    6
  • Poll closed .

Quintillus

Archiving Civ3 Content
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IMO, it's probably the right time to release Preview 2. The poll on Preview 1 indicated a 50:50 split on preference for a similar size versus fewer, larger, so my interpretation is "slightly larger, slightly less frequent" was the right balance.

I've written up a detailed summary at https://github.com/C7-Game/Prototype/discussions/294, but the gist of it is we have two major user-visible features:

- Combat improvements, made by @Flintlock
- City production improvements, mostly made by myself

In addition, there are a host of behind-the-scenes improvements made my the entire crew. One of the challenges of knowing when to release this preview is that a significantly higher number of the improvements are behind-the-scenes, but it was inevitable that would happen at some point if we wanted the project to be sustainable.

Mathematically, we're at an estimated 44% of the way through Carthage, versus 20% at the last preview. The size of Carthage has also increased from 70 items to 89 in that time.

Finally, it's been almost 3 months since Preview 1.

Please only vote at the CFC poll or the GitHub poll, but not both!
 
I'm still in favor of more releases, especially while it's still pretty trivial to make them. :)

And so does everyone else who has voted! I think the only question is, do you/someone else want to look at https://github.com/C7-Game/Prototype/pull/290 and potentially merge it first? It's the only user-facing item that's near completion.

Disadvantage: Might take time, not worth it if it'll delay by more than a day or two, or if it needs changes.

Advantage: Makes the city placement much more like Civ rather than ICS.

I'm also thinking it might make sense to go ahead with the release now-ish, and have another one in a few weeks that focuses on polish, also known as reducing the number of known bugs. We're at 19 now (I've added 6 or so in the past week), and while it's a mix of bugs with how things work and "bugs" in that it doesn't match Civ behavior yet, I think it's a good idea to try to reduce that now and not have C7 become a Paradox game with 657 open bugs, even after fixing 1000+. I've also been debating whether we should categorize those bugs and "bugs" separately.

(The other thing we might need to change is the background art, which has the version integrated as art-text. I wrote that up as #299, since it appears not to have been written up previously)
 
SUGGESTION :scan: - Two new threads for all Release Items, one for techno-speak, and the other for game-speak English. One long, single thread, without digression to GitHub for the game-speak English.one.

- Just sayin' :coffee:
 
Could you be more specific about what you would suggest changing relative to the most recent one? I see three areas that could be interpreted as "techo-speak":

- The AI section. But there's been enough consternation about the AI that it seemed like people would be interested, and it's essentially mechanics of how it works. And as a player of other games, I always find the generic "AI updates" in change logs to be unhelpful.
- The Statistics section. The last paragraph could definitely qualify as techno-speak; I looked those stats up mostly out of curiosity and so we have a comparison point for future release sizes. The rest of it I think of as the "are we there yet?" part of the update.
- A passing reference to improving documentation at GitHub

But I'm also close to a lot of the updates, so I may be overlooking something else. Or are you saying we should have another thread with more techno-speak? That could probably be arranged, but I might recommend whoever is interested simply check the GitHub project page every week or so to follow things in a bit more detail.

I'd probably also want to do a poll to see "did we have enough detail, too much, or not enough?", similar to the poll we had on release frequency on Preview 1.

Other thoughts on what's useful/not useful/missing in the updates definitely welcome too, they're only worth writing if they're worth reading.
 
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