Please no further (expensive) expansions

So you want them to work for free ? Are you really serious While patching the core game is of course part of support and could be expected to come for free (however just consider how many companies keep delivering support for nearly a year or more), new additional content (big features, units, maps) can legitimately come with a price to pay. Uber is indie dev studio. They need money. Are you working for free ?

That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm striving to become a game developer myself when I leave school, and I'm in full support of developers getting paid.

What I'm saying is, I've spent a lot of money on this game already (some people even more than me), and I want some confidence that I'm not going to have to fork out more money to have a reasonably complete game when there are other equally-deserving developers who already have a complete game for me to support them through.

I have said I'm happy to pay for further expansions if the price and value of them is adequate. $16 for this one was questionable in its current state. But as they seem to be intending to continue adding more content to this, I'm okay with that.

The things is, a kickstarter just can't produce a game like supreme commander. What did it get, like 2.5 millions, maybe a similar number in EA? SupCom was afair 10+ millions w/o inflation and like 5 years, all the while with full support from a big publisher.

I might be biased as a backer towards them, but I feel it's kinda unreasonable to expect so much more from a game. The release was ofc unfinished, but after a few months the game was just fine IMO. PAs issues with unit variety can be easily attributed to the budget.

Personally I'd like to compare the Titan with Sins of a Solar Empire, as I did already: SOASE was unique and I loved it, but it brought a notable number of flaws, especially the endgame wasn't really there: You had so much money at some point without anything to spend on. Planetary upgrades generally were very limited.
Then the entrenchment dlc came for afair 13 bucks. It brought a small number of buildings and units, but most notably added complex modular starbases and completely reworked the planetary defense systems. While it might not have looked this way at first glance, it was a literal game changer, completely breaking apart what we'd come to expect from the lacking endgame. That thing was what made SOASE feel like a complete game.

I guess at the end it really depends on what you expect from a game. Or rather less what you expect, but what you find to be reasonable to ask for. To me, it was always clear PA just couldn't be what i might have dreamed off, so I dropped my expectations after the kickstarter - stuff like double fines later trouble made that quite easy. So i've had an easier time accepting that PA had lots of issues. Truth be told, I'm happy that the game gets something like the Titans addon, moving the game more and more to what it can be, just as the continued support from Uber did until now. Not many games get that chance.
Guess it shouldn't come as such a surprise that building something on nostalgia and old games, while having to reduce scope in some elements, really screws up all expectations. Especially compared to a Sins of a Solar Empire, which was really unique and didn't really have a concurrent it needed to hold it's ground against.

i say bring on the next paid content. With no free gifts or discounts.
I want this game to continue to be worked on, and developed. No just free updates and then abandoned.

I still don't view classic PA lacks that much compared to TA . I think a large part of the disappointment comes more from the sup com side imo.

I've thought about this a lot actually and I wonder if much of this comes from different visions driving the earlier games. I always liked the large scale, expansion and lots of units play in TA, which I think is in line with Jon Mavors vision of at the time TA and now PA. I think Chris Taylor on the other hand had a somewhat different vision which culminated in sup com 2, focusing on bases, shields and specific unit / terrain interactions and less on scale. I think PA (especially titans) has a little of both but is obviously very much in the Mavor camp given its origin.

I paid over $200 for this game since Kickstarter and have still yet to see anything I paid for. Instead I've got a semi-working game which doesn't pay any great homage at all to Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, or indeed Total Annihilation. This game is more like a Total Abomination. A cash-grab, with TITANS being a further cash-grab. Why should I pay, even 66% of the retail price, for a game I've already spent $200 on, and not seen anything I paid for, with broken promises and lies from the development team?

The fact that "TITANS" even exists before the game is actually playable or finished is extremely suspect. A respectable development team would at least make sure their game works before shipping out the "Paid Patch" that TITANS is. I'm very disappointed in the developers shameless move to be more like EA-Games, and if they allowed refunds I would gladly take back the money - considering I haven't seen any of the additional content I've paid the $200 for.

See, that's one of these confused posts. You might be surprised, but there are people who are relatively happy about the game. And that basically invalidates your allegations of the game being a 'cash-grab', which doesn't even make sense btw. Nobody makes an old-school RTS to make lots of money.

If you really dislike PA that much, then it's not because it's a terrible or broken game, because it really isn't at this point. There is a very solid core to it, with the only bigger issue being a relatively small unit pool, which is to be expected for a small game (Titans does fix it a bit). It's probably just not the game you wanted, and Titans will probably not change that. Which is sad, but that's the risk with Kickstarter and Early Access, and, why these systems are deeply flawed, even if they produce great stuff from time to time, things we might never get otherwise.
I can only recommend to never spend money on KS if you're not 100% ready to live with the idea of having burned that money.

edit: As proeleert says, if you didn't play the game recently, just try it. At release the game was indeed kinda bad, but it basically got a third year of development time to polish everything up and add new features. Much better now.

When is the last time you played PA? Cause there have been a lot of patches since release. Some of them adding a lot of new content so you can't really compare PA-Classic now to what it was at release. What additional content are you missing?

The last time I played PA was about 5 weeks ago when I went back to see if it had improved at all since when I first started playing it.

Whilst I was happy to see some changes, other changes were much less of an excitement. That, and the game ran even more poorly than before. There were numerous bugs, rendering glitches and artifacts, and a wobbly, unstable frame-rate that made the over-all experience of the game feel bad.

People are happy about Dungeon Keeper Mobile, and The Crew - and they are blatant cash-grabs, working to target specific fan-bases and milking them for every penny. How can you say that because a select few people don't mind paying more for the game they've already paid far too much for in the first place, that the game isn't a cash-grab? It just means those people are A: Too rich, or B: Don't care about the game's state.

I don't dislike PA - Let me make that clear. I wouldn't of backed it with a fat $200 if I didn't like it. But what I have received just feels like all our money was put to use on something we'll never see, as the base game we've got doesn't show nearly the kind of dedication those early videos of John Mavor shown.

I dislike the development team, and their thought process behind the marketing of their product. I dislike that they're charging more money for what feels like the game they initially shown off to us. TITANS adds the units that we were discussing, as backers on the backers forum, with uber, that should of been in from the start.

Here, here.

I am very pleased with TITANS, the gameplay is much better. I'm happy that a) It supports Linux and b) they can continue to support it like this.

I would happily keep supporting them with future expansions.

A full single-player campaign expansion rather than a standalone would be awesome. They could use the existing galactic war feature, build upon it into a static campaign with a bit of story and some other stuff fleshed out for it = gold mine for me

I disagree. Please continue to deliver amazing affordable expansions at whatever price point you see fit. I will glad buy any and all of them.

Changed the title to reflect that I'm not against paid expansions entirely.

Having played a bit more of the new content, I'm getting happier and happier with my purchase, but for me to buy another expansion it would have to have a higher contentrice ratio.

Just my opinion. Everybody is welcome to disagree.

The game is running better than ever, for me.

You would be surprised how many performance issues are due to your own computer - even if they only show up in games like PA.

If you are going to go into games development, I urge you to listen to me. I might not be wholly right, but this is the experience of a software developer who does games development (and interacts with the indie scene) in my spare time.

Games development studios work on more than one project at a time. This isn't shady.

Games development studios, of late, have been investing in Steam's Early Access model. The game is marked as unfinished on Steam and users are aware of the game's state when purchasing. This does not count as a "release" in the traditional sense.

When Gamma arrived, or when PA officially launched, it was mostly feature-complete. You cannot reasonably expect a games developer to fulfill every ideal promise made (though since Gamma Uber have done their best to fulfill these) - especially on a time limit. If Uber had abandoned the game after release, I would be sympathetic to your viewpoint.

But they haven't.

They've been very open about numerous delays, why certain features didn't work as intended (the original Unit Cannon), and so on, and so forth. They have worked under "crunch", a rather terrible industry practise whereby overtime and working through weekends is seen as normal just to get the product out by a particular deadline.

Games development is not glamourous. It takes a lot of time. Some times don't work out the way you intend them to. Software doesn't always perform the way you want it to. Software and hardware developments might completely break a portion of the tech you're working with three months into your project because that's how fast computing is (still) evolving at.

Your average user doesn't care about any of this. Your average user just wants a game to play. Which is where problems with entitlement come in, when they buy a game marked Early Access and complain that it has bugs in it. Released software has bugs in. There's a popular conversion ratio or ten for SLOC (source lines of code) to bugs in the software. Contrary to popular belief, bug-free software is literally (I am using that word correctly) impossible.

I have seen more communication from Uber in 18 months, than I've seen from Valve in 8 years. I regularly rate Uber as one of the most communicative AA / AAA-tier developers I know (AA / AAA based on the calculable costs of developing this game). I'm starting to get very tired when people put out misinformation about them, and about software development in general.

Saying that the games got worse is hyperbore, and complete bullshit you know it, but lets be honest here telling the truth wouldn't backup your bullshit arguments.

Please show me the concept video for the kickstarter that had titans? Please show me anything that said titans will be in the base game. Because i have a funny feeling its all in your imagination.

Because if your basing all that text off your 'feels', then my 'feels' are telling me your talking ****. Because hold up didn't you get it for free? like holy **** what more do you now expect?

Valve's a bit like God. Doesn't say too much very often. But when they do, people shut up, listen, and the proceed to argue and war over different interpretations of what was said for the next x-hundred years until Voice O' The Clouds decides to talk again.

In the earlier state of the game, I could play it for hours and have good fun.

In its current state, the frame-rate dips to 20 FPS on my system - and stays there, after roughly an hour of play.

Firstly, there's the Megabots thread(s) from the backer's forum.
Secondly, there's the fact that TITANS has nothing to do with it. It's fantastic that there are units made that weren't originally planned, but is this an excuse to ship the game a-new? No. Especially when, in the original days of kickstarter and early alpha, We had them saying that future updates and content would be free.

TITANS is a content patch. There's no arguing the point. It adds new units, but that's still content.

I expect what any customer would come to expect. Good service.
I'll fight the corner of anyone when they're being clearly trodden on by the guy they've sunk money into. We have invested our money into your unfinished product on the plans you laid before us. Therefore, we deserve to see those plans completed and would rather not have some scam-artist take the money and do as they please. Would you see this kind of conduct on Dragons Den?
Because it's the exact same principle here.

Expensive? I thought it was too cheap. I paid about 14$ and would have gladly paid 20 for this content. Also feel like it was a bit over geneous giving it to KS backers for free, but hey, just look at the butthurt going around for 14$. Uber can't win, really.

So do you hate Gas Powered Games and Chris Taylor for making Forged Alliance?

Forged Alliance was a lot more than just a bunch of units, though.

There was a new story, updated engine, many new units, a new faction, over-all it's a quite different game and with the changes made it wouldn't be viable to have it as an update to the base game. TITANS, however, is simply that: Added units and a couple features. It's the same base game.

I suppose your intimate knowledge of PA's code and development tell you that Titans was perfectly viable as a patch.

OH WAIT.