Getting priorities straight
About the game as I see it.
First out, I bought this game at Gamersgate, and be aware that the review there is merciless, as I gave 2 out of 5 stars. I could have given it 4 out of 5 if the execution had been decent. The game is of great design and premise, and to some extent quite competitive with the Paradox series, including the Victoria game, in terms of historic feel. To make it easy for the game developers, not to do everything at once in the forthcoming patches, I will come up with ten main priorities, in ranked order, for you to get good feedback from me, and maybe some others.
1. Work on game stability, without game stability, we are unaware of which other problems we need to have a patch on. Right now its really bad.
2. Work on game processing speed. Right now, watching the AI process the decisions is like making paint dry on the wall. Please give us some more speed, as we can see from excellent games out there that high speed is quite possible. Your brothers in Paradox got the same programming problems, and quite possibly some of the same programming culture.
Speed is essential to improve the gaming experience.
3. Work on the phases, there seem to be a hick up with two poorly explained successive diplomacy. Make it crystal clear to the player what is to happen for each particular phase. Also have a counter over diplomats and so on.
4. Please provide a clear colored range for movement like what we saw in the excellent Panzer General series, this would ease the movement of troops much. Right now we are guessing how far we can go.
5. Work on the naval battles, there are several bugs both on the routing of the navies. I tried to move the German pacific fleet to Namibia, but always ends up in French Western Africa. makes no sense. Sometimes the naval battles simply hangs up, and ends the game as I need to go windows mode.
This is very very frustrating.
6. I think you need to improve on the tech here, read up what research, development and implementation issues they had in WW1, and work that into the game. Right now, we get techs at a more arbitrary speed. You can learn from Hearts of Iron 2 tech tree here.The tech teams worked excellently.
7. I think you need to add a sort of process bar in the main window, so all of us know how many phases there are in that particular month. Maybe even a paramount bar for showing the season ahead, or year ahead.
8. Include random national events drawn from a separate deck of cards, to semi-randomize the events changing the war. This would allow for some surprise in addition to played cards.
9. Make a better presentation of the budget system, right now its too confusing, you can learn from HOI2 here, but make your own.
10. Finally, remember what you did right, so negative criticism does not get you. solidify your software, protect your IPR and finally work on the most critical things first, then the fancy stuff and the manual. I never needed a manual for my strategy games, its half the fun to figure it out.
What is done great, which makes this game stands out is:
1. The map. Surprisingly so, flipping the map is the only way to do justice to the Western and Eastern front problem, with the widescreen for the PC, because the European map is farther East-West distance, yet, the bulk of the fronts were near Germany and Austria-Hungary, making it logical to flip the map to allow for a better understanding of the fronts. Normally, this is counterintuitive ,but worked excellent here for WW1 (but never do so in other games).
2. I really liked the interplay of National Will, events and the doctrinal battle plans. This is how war games should be done, by making a choice of 4-5 General plans like in the real world, and then adapt the plan with 2-4 options.
3. I really liked the game balance, makes for a long war.
4. I really liked how the diplomacy model is worked out, except for the confusing initial dual round, which is not announced properly.
5. National policies is really well done.
6. Units and generals well done.
7. Map is elaborate and like the way colonies are abstracted
8. Good work on the reaction to policies and outcomes of various nations.
9. Well abstracted historical events into game mechanics
10. Again, very good preparation for the first round with the warplans. Maybe the warplan component can be built into later years of the war, for major offensives and so on.