Soo, all you custom commander backers...

wat

WAT.


WHERE HAVE I BEEN

Thank you for this comment, I'm new to the RTS genre and you have brought to my attention something that looks like a lot of fun. Thanks to trophysystem as well.

Bad example. Unit cannon art is done. Most other promised features are currently bottlenecked by programming.

AFAIK the only programmed thing currently missing art is the Orbital Faber - and that's not a confirmed unit. There is absolutely no reason why the art team can't be working on custom commanders right now.

Even if I'm with you that the biggest bottleneck might be programming, designing can take a very long time as well, being in the realm of creativity (you never know when you've done).

PA lacks units variety and this also would require the designers at Uber to work on it. Let alone balancing. We are also assuming than designers and programmers are two ideal roles always represented by different people. Likely so, but not necessarily. People can do multiple tasks in a company and roles can be not so strictly defined.

The truth is that once you load work on the timeline, you're busy and you can't do other things. That's why I strongly doubt that the 100 Custom Commanders operation had benefit the game. In fact, in my personal opinion it damaged the game: the return of investment is so poor that made no difference in the budget, but the load of work is so conspicuous that we will see an incomplete game at release with the risk to get hammered by the official reviews system. Reviewers do expect things like units variety, balance, and everything that has been promised on Kickstarter, including Gas giants and the Unit Cannon.

Just looking at money, it may indeed be a net loss. Let's not forget though that the $1000+ backers supported the early developent enough to make a game good enough to attract more players, so we can think of it like a loan that they need to pay back now that they have been able to get money from other sources.

There are 2 separate design fields: Visual design, and mechanics design. If the mechanics aren't done, visual can't do anything (hence custom commanders). While there is some overlap between fields, they usually stick within the Art, Audio, or Code segments they're in. A 3D modeler can't do **** when it comes to balancing things, and a Concept artist can't program the unit cannon. As they have nothing to do otherwise, they go to work on commanders which don't need any work by the Coders, who can keep working on things that need the code done so that the artists can get back to doing art for those things (if they haven't already). Who knows how much art is awaiting the programming side of things - we know at least the Unit cannon is in that state.

You're also assuming that this will hinder development - it's likely Uber planned it into their schedule, considering it was also a promised feature. Also the money they got for the Custom Commander option EASILY covered the cost of building a Custom commander -we're not losing anything there either. And honestly speaking, a couple of custom models is very little work. Assuming the people getting them cooperate, Uber could probably crank out all 100 custom commanders in around a month, while still working on other things (Not sure how large Uber's 3D department is though).

Finally, THERE ISN'T EVEN A RELEASE DATE. Why are you so worried about things not getting done by a date which hasn't even been established yet.

Here for your acknowledgement

http://www.nordicgames.at/index.php/product/planetary_annihilation

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Planetary-A...408858&sr=8-1&keywords=planetary annihilation

If you will google it for other sources, you will see that they all show the same release date. Brad Nicholson himself said a month ago how they do not like the situation as well.

As for your other points, thanks for sharing your thoughts and opinion. I do respect them. But I still stick with mines.

Apart from polish, balancing and optimization, they would have to add a lot in less than two months.

Or they would have to change that text.

Last thing I heard from Uber was that it has been delayed unitl "it's done". They have avoided confirming that release date and I hope that this really won't be the day this game is released.

If no miracle happens, it would be a catastrophe.

Edit:

Even more work for Uber....

In case you've missed this one post:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...on-units-structures-coming.58763/#post-913776