2 months to release and the game feels like pre-alpha and is a letdown. Please delay the release.

...and we know none of it.
That's a good thing.

Under promise, over deliver.
I like what they are doing

No,

I don't say that the game would be awesome the instant before it gets released. I say, thats the way I would proceed in the project of getting the game ready for shipping.

Btw: That is just my opinion. And its also my opinion that the game is a nice one already. I like it. That's why I bought the Beta.

My past experience was with the Starcraft II beta and alpha which both lasted around twice as long as PA's are projected to. I think people will understand if Uber thinks the game needs to be delayed some months.

We know they're working on some features of UI, server side scripting system, interplanetary interactions etc. It's a kickstarter project, so of course there is some basic transparency.
Like Garat said, everything are iterative. So don't expect a big overhaul of one aspect of the game come out of nowhere. The improvement of the game is gradual and won't suddenly progress much faster than it is now.

You have my undying respect, 10/10, calling my congressman to nominate for medal of honor right now.

OMG, i realy tried to read every post in this thread and after page 6 i, erm, my scroll weel must had a damage, posts came down to the buttom a little fast

Ok. So what we exactly know is... they work realy hard on it !
What else we need to know ?
Right, nothing. They working, so let them do their work, don´t punish or bother them. We all believe in their talents, cause we see a very nice game coming and playing every day with our commander (not in our pockets pfff) and working WITH THEM !!!
You guys doing AWESOME, and the most of us will test until you say: Now play people and have fun.

UBER allways said: It´s done, when it´s done !
Nothing more, nothing less.

Happy working.

I've been pretty quiet of late, and the core reason for it is ultimately confusion.

I don't know the direction that many aspects of this game are going in. I don't know why some aspects of the game are progressing the way they are, when there are a lot of carefully thought out, well reasoned, and as yet unrefuted posts about things such as unit balance, interplanetary gameplay, technology levels, nuclear weapons, and various other aspects. Despite this, Uber have, in the past, shown that they are fully capable of engaging with the community, and that they are extremely technically talented when it comes to making games. However, the history of this medium is littered with games which are technically brilliant, yet do not reach their potential in terms of design.

For every problem I have with the aforementioned subjects, I see tremendous potential in other areas. Yet still, to me it still seems as though a number of relatively quick and easy changes would be steps in the right direction, and i wonder why they haven't been taken. Ultimately, this leads me to the conclusion that I just don't know enough about the development of games at a mechanical level to fully contribute to the discussion. Hence my recent period of silence (along with other RL reasons).

I'm of the opinion that there is a way to silence a lot of the criticism being directed at uber (regardless of how accurate or inaccurate it is). That would be to prioritise the release of modding tools to the more talented members who have signed up to the official modding application (of which I most certainly do not include myself). A lot of people would like to see various different alterations to the balance, pacing and unit roster of PA. This would give them the opportunity to test out those ideas themselves, and explore options that Uber simply don't have the time to do. I can foresee three different options arising from modders being able to experiment with different balances and various ideas:

1. They realise that what they want to see is harder to implement than they had imagined, and that there is a reason why things are the way they are. The critics are silenced.
2. They can implement some of the changes they wish, and they find they don't work. The critics are silenced.
3. They implement the suggested changes, and find that they improve the game experience. These changes can now be incorporated into the game as soon as feasible. The critique was validated by actual evidence instead of pure theorycrafting.

To me, all these options seem positive. However, I understand that Uber wants to wait until release for such tools become available, although it is still a massive credit to them that they intend to provide such functionality at all. I know that there are a lot of implications to releasing such tools early, even to a limited group of applicants. There is concern of a leak/piracy. The game is in such a state of flux that modders' hard work may be invalidated in an instant, and Uber has already stated that they have important, yet unspecified, plans for the modding community. Despite these issues, I still believe that such tools would allow a massive number of different issues to be explored from angles that Uber simply doesnt have the time or resources to explore. I am convinced it would lead to a better game on release day. .

Ultimately, PA will be a fantastic game which revolutionises many aspects of the (slightly stale) RTS genre. To me, the only question is, will it be at release or will it be 6-12 months later after the modding community and Uber themselves have had the chance to refine the initial offering. The former is an awful lot better than the latter. It means the community is bigger, and more people enjoy the game straight out of the box (or rather straight off the download), without having to go to the trouble of fixing it with community mods. The alternative, is a game which never reaches its potential, in terms of the number of people who enjoy it. The kind of game which garners a loyal cult following, which still plays it ten years later, but never breaks through into mainstream acceptance. Always an underrated classic, that people will read about ten years from now when placed highly in "top 100 RTS games of all time" lists, yet never reaching the audience size that some of its peers reached. We already know this story. It's called TA and Starcraft.

This game could be the best thing to happen to this genre since the original C&C. But it won't without a number of important changes. At least not from where I'm standing. There's a loyal community here that wants the best for this game, despite the occasionally arrogant and abrasive criticism. Why not put that community to good use?

Hey, I've read quite a few of your threads and I don't think you should get discouraged. Its honestly hard to take customer feedback and immediately implement in the game and hope it functions the way people want. You have to remember that as users on this form that there was 50,000 backers + (plus a ton of pre orders) but less then 1000 users on this form that argue opinions and ideas to be in the game. Is it a good sample size? Maybe. Do we have game development experience ? A little to none at all. Do our opinions matter? Definitely since were the die hard fans who will play this a lot and want an epic game. Every little opinion has a chance to sway a developer to think a little more on each strategic subject here and if it gets a lot of discussion its worth looking into.

Keep discussing so we can get intelligent and well thought out responses to issues that people have about this game so the rest can play the final awesome version.

EXACTLY!!! Please make this the new topic for the forum I'd say the most people don't mind few months in either direction - they just want an _awesome_ game.

That's a ridiculous thing to say, no one ever played 40 or 81km maps and rarely played 20km maps. Playing 40 players on multiple huge planets is much larger scale than supcom ever was and won't suffer from the performance issues of the p2p architecture.

Actually in terms of game contents, a top notch modder, a free game developer or a pro player can have more experience than a commerical game developer in some aspects, all three types of people can be found in this forum.
So far the feedbacks don't have much influence on PA other than planets being sphereical, I know Uber has a clear vision of PA and want to stick to that vision, but it seems some parts of that vision are already failing, like units being more distinguishable in a zoomed out view than SupCom.

I know for a fact that a lot of people play 40x40 or even 81x81 maps.
I also know for a fact that nobody played a 40 players game on PA ever

Well, that is because we literally can't.......

What I still dont know if you will be able to host your own games without uber`s servers. I`d like to know the estimated bandwidth requirements for such games.
Either:

• Everyone has his own limited view - only visible units + projectiles need to be transfered. Should peak somewhere for each player
• Everyone can see everything (minimaps on multiple planets?) - worstcase scales lineary with number of units + projectiles.

Not dissing the choices made, but I dont know what kinda usage scenarios uber is expecting. The first makes sense but puts a dent in the scale of action you will ever see at once.
"Synchron" games have rather low requirements on bandwidth, but other downsides like the slowest computer limiting speed. The main issues is that its still cheaper and easier to up your cpu than getting massive upload bandwidth.

PS. there were 40km or 80km games in Supcom, for example Gentleman's Reef, which was popular for FFA and Phantom games. There is still to prove that PA`s model can keep up with this or leave Supcom behind in the regard of large scale action. I surely hope they will, but so far smaller games than this get laggy fast if action with lots of units happens

I don't like this topic. The title is very negative. The first few pages show a lot of doubt and then there is basicly panic. Doomthinkers start to appier but there are still players the see the light and have faith.

Neutrino already put a topic out that everthing will be alright. So this topic has lost it's use.

Still it creeps me out that this ball of negativity is still rolling, so please just let this topic die.

So should I make a new thread of "negativity"? If I cant voice my concerns or curiousity question then what I am supposed to do on a beta forum.
From a technical PoV alot of choices are tradeoffs, the server-side model is nothing new, it has been used in every FPS since UT. It has known up and downsides just as the synchron model used in many RTS`s. Im interested in the big picture behind it - what kinda game PA will turn out to be.

How is this worse than asking uber to implement multiple suns or multi-unit transports...

Uber was constantly yelling about awesome, now they only promise the game will be finished.
I could put my hope in post release iterations, but then I would worry about Uber's budget for post release development if the launch is horrible and the game sells poorly.

The main reason large scale games still feels controllable in SupCom is the strategic zoom, which isn't doable in a PA, and it's unlikely PA will have another UI feature that's awesome enough to compensate that.

Well there's your problem.

so you telling me that 40 player matches battling on multiple different size planets across space isn`t awesome? the strategic zoom IS what allows this to be even barely possible ... from how i understood the whole thing the strategic zoom wasn`t meant to allow 100% over watch on a planet or a whole system ... there IS no way to control multiple planets and battlefields at once but only a comparably small portion of the whole system ... it might have been possible in SupCom and SupCom2 ... but this ISN`T SupCom or TA on one flat map anymore ... even on one planet you WON`T be able to oversee the whole battlefield anymore unless you use additional and different viewoptions ... i realy feel that this is peoples biggest issue ... that they lost control they realised that planets play entirely different then the afformentionet games and now got pissed at that and seem to not want to addapt to it`s difficulty ... instead they expect the devs to throw out the tools for 100% oversight ... i understand that people just want to battle their opponets and not the game... but like it or not in this case it is part of the challange ... pax imperia and imperium galactica weren`t different to that ...

Maybe, maybe not.
Like 81x81 was supposed to be awesome in supcom, but at the end, way to slow and unbalanced tech-wise.

But it has to be a thing in the first place, it isn't for the moment, and nothing indicate it will be in a near or distant future.