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I have been a fan of Civilization for years now and I am delighted by this new offical Civ release. While the core gameplay is still here, the final version obviously needs a patch or two. Since we can not expect Firaxis to support and patch the game forever, all that we can hope is they will work hard on a couple of patches before moving on another project.
Keeping this in mind, our best choice is to ask Firaxis to fix what we define as the most important issues and to develop tools flexible enough so that we could still tweak the game once they dropped support. Think of any gaming company as a city in Civilization if it helps. It has limited resources so we have to be realistic and to prioritize our requests.
For the same reason, any request for the patch has to be doable, which means that any idea requiring a major overhaul of the game engine will me mercilessly trashed. Also, issues that can already be solved by tweaking the text files or using the editor will undergo the same treatment. Why ? Well, because not only will they beget endless discussions but also Firaxis already works on this as reported by Soren Johnson during the chat session that took place a couple of hours ago. Let's see what they have in mind first, then if we are not satisfied we will still have the ability to tweak this by ourselves.
I have seen many good ideas on the forums but it is hard to keep track of all of them so we'd better try to turn all this raw data (ideas) into a nice document that we could submit to Firaxis.
Here is an example of what could be the general plan :
I/ Gameplay issues
II/ User interface issues
III/ Technical issues (mostly bugs)
IV/ Needed tools (for editing/tweaking purposes)
Of course there will be several subparts, each one describing a problem and what the patch can do for it in a few lines. If enough people agree to join the effort, I will post a thread soon on Apolyton's Civ3-General to start collecting ideas.
If everything goes as planned, it should work like this : once the thread is initiated, anyone could start posting ideas/bug report *in the same thread*, then popular ideas will make their way on the draft and so on. The goal is not to build an exhaustive list of everyone's desire but to gather the most important ideas in a short paper (20 pages should be fine).
My job will be to organize the submitted data into something nice-looking and appealing to read. Polls should enable us to overcome the controversies that will undoubtedly rise. If my call for help is successful enough, perhaps Mark would agree to open a forum to host the polls related to the patch.
Unfortunately, I do not have enough spare time these weeks to handle the whole process. So, I need a couple of people to gather data and to start polls to decide whether a questionable request will make its way on the final paper. Timeline, yin26 and korn469 could be interested as they spoke about the patch effort in other threads but anyone motivated with free time next week will be welcome.
Thank you in advance to anyone who wanna help,
Thomas
--
Thomas Le Gallais
the lost tavern, website devoted to Sid Meier's Pirates!
<http://frigate.free.fr>
Keeping this in mind, our best choice is to ask Firaxis to fix what we define as the most important issues and to develop tools flexible enough so that we could still tweak the game once they dropped support. Think of any gaming company as a city in Civilization if it helps. It has limited resources so we have to be realistic and to prioritize our requests.
For the same reason, any request for the patch has to be doable, which means that any idea requiring a major overhaul of the game engine will me mercilessly trashed. Also, issues that can already be solved by tweaking the text files or using the editor will undergo the same treatment. Why ? Well, because not only will they beget endless discussions but also Firaxis already works on this as reported by Soren Johnson during the chat session that took place a couple of hours ago. Let's see what they have in mind first, then if we are not satisfied we will still have the ability to tweak this by ourselves.
I have seen many good ideas on the forums but it is hard to keep track of all of them so we'd better try to turn all this raw data (ideas) into a nice document that we could submit to Firaxis.
Here is an example of what could be the general plan :
I/ Gameplay issues
II/ User interface issues
III/ Technical issues (mostly bugs)
IV/ Needed tools (for editing/tweaking purposes)
Of course there will be several subparts, each one describing a problem and what the patch can do for it in a few lines. If enough people agree to join the effort, I will post a thread soon on Apolyton's Civ3-General to start collecting ideas.
If everything goes as planned, it should work like this : once the thread is initiated, anyone could start posting ideas/bug report *in the same thread*, then popular ideas will make their way on the draft and so on. The goal is not to build an exhaustive list of everyone's desire but to gather the most important ideas in a short paper (20 pages should be fine).
My job will be to organize the submitted data into something nice-looking and appealing to read. Polls should enable us to overcome the controversies that will undoubtedly rise. If my call for help is successful enough, perhaps Mark would agree to open a forum to host the polls related to the patch.
Unfortunately, I do not have enough spare time these weeks to handle the whole process. So, I need a couple of people to gather data and to start polls to decide whether a questionable request will make its way on the final paper. Timeline, yin26 and korn469 could be interested as they spoke about the patch effort in other threads but anyone motivated with free time next week will be welcome.
Thank you in advance to anyone who wanna help,
Thomas
--
Thomas Le Gallais
the lost tavern, website devoted to Sid Meier's Pirates!
<http://frigate.free.fr>
My hope is that Firaxis sees Civ3 as a work in progress and that public opinion (focussed and reasoned) could provide some real insight.
of my first draft FYI. Go here :
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