V1.15 BETA Release

[microbe]

Originally posted by Yeti
.. that Firaxis is doing us a favor by making available for early use / testing.

Saying Firaxis is doing a "favor" is a bit ironic: they are fixing bugs in their software, and we are testing for them, so who is doing whom a favor, really?

That said, I think Firaxis is doing a good thing and I value this level of communication very much. It's a fact that every software is buggy, especially those marked as 1.0. Since we already bought the game, we want those bugs to be fixed as soon as possible and I personally think an early beta patch is much better than a late final patch - it has to be, since you have the choice not to use it.

 

[Padma]

To be honest, we are doing each other favors.

They needed beta testers, and we've been clamoring for patches. This way, we can both benefit.

 

[Salamandre]

IF ONLY IT COULD WORK!!


I have french version and after installing 1.15 I get error settler.ini missing

Anyone installed succesfull a non USA version of the patch?

 

[Asamat]

Hi,
long-time lurker here. I'm in awe marveling the quality of this forum and the abilities of several of the top players. Thanks for all I learned from the Academy.

Didn't try 1.15, but 1.13 works on my German version. Apart from one translation problem (a 'knight' is called 'retreat' after 1.13) everything else works as described in the sticky threads.

 

[Yeti]

Originally posted by Yeti
.. that Firaxis is doing us a favor by making available for early use / testing.

Originally posted by microbe
Saying Firaxis is doing a "favor" is a bit ironic: they are fixing bugs in their software, and we are testing for them, so who is doing whom a favor, really?

You have a good point there that Firaxis is benefitting from our testing (at least I hope they are!). But yes, I do consider it to be them doing us a favor as well They are doing something that makes me happy / increases my fun. Now... that may not apply to everyone, and for those folks, I certainly hope they don't feel compelled to install and test beta patches!

 

[Commander Bello]

Originally posted by Yeti

You have a good point there that Firaxis is benefitting from our testing (at least I hope they are!). But yes, I do consider it to be them doing us a favor as well [...]

You may be pretty sure that they do benefit! Otherwise, they wouldn't release beta patches.
After all, Firaxis, Atari, whoever is just a commercial company. I surely don't blame them at all for being this. But they have to make money, that shouldn't be forgotten. And be sure, at the very moment they wouldn't no longer expect to get any money from the Civ-series, they wouldn't release anything anymore.

OTOH, at the moment we benefit from those beta releases as well. I like it very much that it didn't take too long to make the game playable again.

So, it's a mutual benefit or a "win-win situation" (ahh.. I hate this new economy blah blah... )
And that is, as it should be. So, no need to bow in awe... but definetely no need to blame them for releasing betas either.

 

[akots]

Originally posted by Commander Bello
.. After all, Firaxis, Atari, whoever is just a commercial company. I surely don't blame them at all for being this. But they have to make money, that shouldn't be forgotten. ...

It might be that Firaxis/Atari is a commercial company and Sid is just a board game designer. However, Civilization is a game of games since Civ1 then through Civ2 and now to Civ3 and to C3C which is a very different game from Civ3.

I would say that all the players have greatly benefited from Sid making good money on Civ1 because it enabled creation of Civ2 which is another interesting game. The same goes for Civ2 which brought enough money to create Civ3. So, now we are talking about getting good money from C3C which might enable creation of even better wonderful Civ4.

What a major concern is that AI has to be improved. This is obvious. And also it is obvious that AI is stupid now and not a challenge for a human player even badly handicapped. So, it is not a question of "service-you-get for money-you-spent" but would the great team of developers which has Firaxis now be able to create Civ4 which would have smart AI. And this apparently requires major investment.

So, what can we do, Firaxis, to make the sales go up? Load an alpha-beta-omega-patch, test it and write a comment? -Happily. Talk and write to everyone I know that this is great game and probably the greatest of recent decade PC games? -Happily.

Just make sure you dont drain the money down the sewer but invest them in Civ4. Prior experience with Civilization tells that this is the most likely what is going to happen.

 

[HellboundHeathcliff]

If they hire extra programmers do the job right, i will gladly pay $100 USD for civ4 (after the first patch is released).

 

[akots]

There are some old threads which were sticky about previous beta versions with excellent points and all this discussion which seems to be repated again:

beta 1.13

another thread about 1.13

1.12beta with very interesting discussion

 

[Salamandre]

Did anyone installed succesfull 1.15 non american language? On my french version it crashes, error settler ini. By the way, 1.13 came with all label/text/civlopedia in english. Can they be gentle to make a translate, since not all Europe bought this game only to improve its english mastery...

To all that think Firaxis makes us a favor doing all those patches, I just bring again that we payed to have a valid product. Of course, we respect them and they give us a lot of fun, but we contribute with our money to it. Could you imagine you go see a movie and the director stops the movie before the end; "sorry, we didnt find any idea how this film end, so could you please go home and come back 2 months later to see the end"?


They sold a non finished product, thats all. All is about money today, everywhere. And we are so stupid addicted that we will accept this, while in real life marketing we cry at anything that suck our money.


4 months after I bought Conquest it still not working as intended to do. Is this acceptable for you?

 

[Salamandre]

Originally posted by Padma
To be honest, we are doing each other favors.

They needed beta testers, and we've been clamoring for patches. This way, we can both benefit.

I disagree Padma. Our money goes to Firaxis , and they have to use it to improve the game. that means ALSO hiring beta testers, paying them and selling at the end a respectable product.


It takes us 2-3 days to test each "patch" and find the bugs in it. Is this SO hard for Firaxis to recruite pleb or moonsinger or whatever a few days and give us a decent game? Come on.

 

[Cabbit]

Just installed the patch, got some really wierd main menu options, in addition to the normal ones. Program crashed when I picked the second, saw a blank screen for the first

KINGO of the CIVNOUN! killed in DATE2

CIVNOUNO <0:captures:capture> a princess in DATE1

got the screen after i exited out of user created scenario in Civ-content

 

[Cabbit]

Just checked, main options back to normal after loading a FIRAXIS civcontent scenario... might be a problem w/ the scenario I was playing

 

[PorthosdPirate]

Originally posted by Salamandre



I disagree Padma. Our money goes to Firaxis , and they have to use it to improve the game. that means ALSO hiring beta testers, paying them and selling at the end a respectable product.


It takes us 2-3 days to test each "patch" and find the bugs in it. Is this SO hard for Firaxis to recruite pleb or moonsinger or whatever a few days and give us a decent game? Come on.

I totally disagree with you. Firaxis can employ who ever they want for however much they want to test the game and they will not be able to match what this community at large can do. Firaxis employees "testers" or "QA" or what ever they call them to test the Alpha version and in Beta we, as Beta testers can confirm or deny an issue is still present. Most Beta testers are not hired to test software. Most Beta testers are asked to do a favor to the developer and run the software and provide feedback. The benefit to the Beta tester is he gets the software to use.

If you or anyone has an issue with the idea Beta patches for use by the public at large then I suggest that you do use them. Wait for the final.

Personally my test game has shown an improvement in corruption. From the save point of the game to the next I go from corruption of –275 to –190 using the latest patch. I would say that the corrections to corruption are defiantly improving.

One last thing, Beta patches not only provide bug fixes, they also let you get to see the new stuff.

 

[PorthosdPirate]

Originally posted by Cabbit
Just installed the patch, got some really wierd main menu options, in addition to the normal ones. Program crashed when I picked the second, saw a blank screen for the first

KINGO of the CIVNOUN! killed in DATE2

CIVNOUNO <0:captures:capture> a princess in DATE1

got the screen after i exited out of user created scenario in Civ-content

As I understand it some of the older scenario's for CIV, PTW, and C3C 1.00 will not run in the patchs due to the script and Label files having changes.

 

[kring]

Originally posted by Ekmek
I have noticed that turns can still take awhile on my 2.4GHz. Do this patches have the no AI patrolling code that came out in a later PTW patch?

Mike B Thread on ini

Add this one to your Conquests ini file:

NoAIPatrol=1

Can be 0 or 1. If 0, the AI will use it's units to randomly patrol if it has no specific task for them.

 

[Bamspeedy]

I disagree Padma. Our money goes to Firaxis , and they have to use it to improve the game. that means ALSO hiring beta testers, paying them ....

If they 'hired' somebody, it would probably be someone who lives in the vicinity of where the company is. And most likely that person has never played this game and isn't going to find as many bugs (they most likely wouldn't know what is a bug vs. what is programmed in there for game balance/feature, etc.). If they hire some guy off the street, the odds are that he hasn't played this game and would have no idea on what is balanced for game play. On the other hand, you have thousands of people here on this site who have played this game for 2+ years, many of whom have also experimented with modding stuff, so they know what works for game balance and what doesn't.

You could argue that there may be a few things not perfectly balanced now, but if only you could have seen some of the proposals in the beta that didn't make it....

If you are saying they should hire a Sir Pleb or Alexman, then I agree with you there. However, 1 or 2 people isn't going to catch everything, no matter how much they test (they need some sleep!). The more testers you have, the more likely you will find bugs and game imbalances. Why would you want to turn down letting thousands of people test it, so that only a few does?

 

[ETO_Peregrine]

I second Salamandre. The last time I was invited to beta test a product, I was given a free copy for my time. Beta testing can be a fun experience, but it is not worth paying for the privilege.

Firaxis' letting the community in on its development process is a good decision, but I'd much prefer that they finished their development process before they sold the game. I buy Firaxis products because I love Civ, so I am nailed as part of the target market. And I will play the patches as they are released because I want my Civ to work.

However, I still resent that I was sold a product that was DoA and that I am now part of a conscripted QA team. I waited to get C3C until Amazon ran its special, and future Firaxis products will also have to go through the bargain bin to my shelf.

 

[Antinea]

Just as Salamandre I can't run 1.15 patch on my French version of Conquest.
The patch install correctly but when I start a save game it give me an error (can't fin Art/Units/Worker Moder/Times/Workermoderntimesdefault.flc or something like that).
After I chek my files in vanilla civIII, all my folders names are in french ).
I think that the error came from that.

Antinea

 

[USC]

Originally posted by Louis XXIV


Can the same be said of the corruption of the United States if you were looking at it in the mid 1800s?

No it can't, true. In that period you'd have an even greater percentage of the corruption lying in Washington

Actually, your comment points to what many have said, and what is basically true: ideally, corruption calculations should be strongly influenced by a Civ's transportation technology and by the transportation infrastructure leading from a city to the nearest capital. However, we can forget about this happening in Civ III.

Perhaps the best approximation one could make of "the wild west was wild, and then wasn't" within the confines of the Civ III engine is the many-FP's model. The wild west had no FP, and then it got one.

USC