A Note To Planetary Annihilation Fans About Human Resources

I understand why you are thinking like that, do you think Uber could do anything within the next week or two do prove they have not lied?

Nordic is not a publisher for PA. Nordic and Uber just have a partnership deal for the physical distribution of PA.

Maybe Uber should say wich of the promised PA features are stil being worked on.

Things I am still expecting:
- 40 player games
- Some promised commanders models (why is this taking so long ?? )
- Filter locked games out.


Things I know other people are still expecting:
- Offline mode.
- Save games.

Bugs fixes for:
- Unable to join server
- Game ssking for a reconnect to my last played game every time I start up PA.

Suggestion:
- A reconnect to last game button for players who had a disconnect, not requiring a restart of PA

That partnership deal is exactly what a publisher does, handles distribution. AFAIK, there is no reason to assume this partnership is any different from a traditional developer-publisher partnership, Nordic is not in it for charity.

I think most Kickstarter funded games have some form of additional funding.

I'd wish they would put one game designer onto balance, have him play games on a daily basis with the community, make a balance thread in the forums, be there on a daily basis to discuss etc. That for a 2-3 month at least. I'd say that would be well invested money.

No that is not what a publisher does. That's what a distributor does. Publishers finance the development. Nordic are just handling the physical disc copies of PA.

Also, fun fact, here's the PA team:


Here's the HR team:


They're two totally different, separate teams with different people in them, right? and this won't remotely slow down PA development?

Just go here on Facepunch. PA got a LOT of backing and support from FP. Now look at that.

Really, it's just adding more fire to fire.

A picture of the full team at Uber would be interesting. Pretty sure they have grown quite a bit. Maybe they could make a team picture of the current PA staff. According to @sorian that team is bigger than the current HR team.

I guess you are probably hinting at offline play and savegames, and while this is important to have, I never really had problems with the server connections.

Now I don't expect all major missing features to arrive within the next one or two months, but I would very much like if we can expect them at all.

What Uber could do is what they have done in the earlier days: Show work in progress of much needed features, tell us which features are likely to be added at all in a completely honest way (Are we gonna see the Unit cannon, asteroid belts, 40 player games,....?), and if a feature is scraped for good this should be accompanied with an apology and the reasons why it didn't work out.

Sentences like "We got the game we envisioned" is a straight punch in the face to each and every player out there, since they were promised better than this.

Publisher in the traditional sense handles distribution. Just used to be so that since they handled the distribution, they got all the money/risk as well. But let's not get into this now.

An option would indeed be nice.
Maybe @Mereth (Save Filter Mod) or @mikeyh (Faster Server Browser) know how to do it (filter <span class="glyphicon glyphicon-lock" from what I've seen but I'm a noob)

There's two mods which can help you

• Faster Server Browser Mod
• Reconnect Button

Basically, the second one is included in the first one.

I love how you compared a dated pic to a very recent one. Uber has grown since PA's kickstarter you know?

ballsonfire: I agree want to see what ct cooked up with war gaming. Hopefully it's more like sup com than pa is. One thing ct did say is that multiple battlefields all taking place at once just can't work to well. Starting to realize what he meant by that with pa

I love how you completely misunderstood the point of the picture. The key point was that half of the dev team of PA is also in the dev team of HR. Different teams - same people.

If you add in the 4th dimension that becomes a possibility. Question is who is on the PA team now. They did hire quite a few people during PA's development so far, we just dont have pictures of them (?)

Erm.. Again, Uber has grown since that picture was taken, the people you see in the picture for HR is not the whole of the company, I believe John is still with PA, could be wrong, but I know Varrak and Sorian are still with PA.

It's two separate teams with separate people.

In my opinion there shouldn't even be a balance discussion, at this point. All damage and defense stats, etc. should have been settled long ago. I feel units begin to loose their identity when re-balancing starts to happen. It's one of the reasons I feel Starcraft 2 is a semi-failure - there aren't many. Several years after launch and there are still balancing patches.

If this is the case for PA then I feel it's a sign the team has been bogged down and there is very little hope for both Uber and PA, beyond an endless stream of patches. The PA team should settle the stats once and for all and move on, to more important things.

---edit---

Unless of course the current team does settle on some final stats. Then they can move on to fulfilling the original promises - offline mode, LAN, DRM status, and the rest other people have mentioned. The team should set a date and mark their calender and notify everyone that that day is the final day for all balance patches, until all other features are in the game. All balancing issues must be settled - or reasonably acceptable - by that day because they won't be touching them again until such time as PA is complete. This is what I think the team should do, and I believe that whole "service" mentality is preventing them from setting up a schedule. Otherwise they would post the schedule, right?

This must be your first RTS.

@InstantMix: I see a lot of aggressive language and rather contrived posts from you.

Why? You say you understand programming, but you don't seem to understand software development (or engineering). You use dated photos of Uber's PA team to presume that therefore the HR team is the same (or similar).

You say that putting less people on a project won't necessarily improve the product, but you use this as a semantic foil to distract from the general rule that adding more staff doesn't make a product better.

You say that you have no issues with PA working on multiple projects, but your posts have mostly been about proving that they're sharing teams. So you do care about them working on multiple projects?

Additionally, you rate PA as "half-finished" on a personal metric (you are not reviewing the game in any official capacity) . . . without demonstrating that selfsame understanding of programming you said you possessed? You slam the pathfinding (I don't doubt the pathfinding isn't perfect, but you're saying it's barely-functional / "GOD-AWFUL") . . . do you understand the maths behind pathfinding in RTS games? Yet this is the only feature you take issue with with the "half-finished" game. Dodgy pathfinding. That's it.

While I'm sure you and others can come up with things that Uber still need to address, so claim that the product is half-finished bearing in mind Uber have specifically said that features will still be built into the game post-launch is . . . well, contrived, as I said.

But they did it, it was day of RELEASE, from uber pov. PA is finished product. All they do from now is maintaining game, we maybe get some features that are nearly complete now, but not much more.