25-11-2001 18:30									#31
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quote: It only cost £34.99 (considerably less in the USA so even less reasons for incessant whining) and the hours of enjoyment I've got from it already easily justify the cost.

i enjoy it as it is as well, but i just can get the air units bug out of my way for full enjoyment of the game...i just cant!! its realy a fun killer!!!
like buying a book that misses a page or two at the most interesting parts of it..

	25-11-2001 23:40									#32
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quote: Originally posted by m_m_x i enjoy it as it is as well, but i just can get the air units bug out of my way for full enjoyment of the game...i just cant!! its realy a fun killer!!! like buying a book that misses a page or two at the most interesting parts of it..

EXACTLY

	26-11-2001 16:04									#33
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

quote: Originally posted by bahoo A turn based strategy game should NOT need to be patched. Sure, maybe the AI routines, maybe a few small patches to address the game balance in terms of corruption and unit strengths, but that's it. It should not need to be patched as far as things that are supposed to work just plain working! Let's face it, all turn-based strategy games are is big board games with more in depth rules because the computer can keep track of things....

O how wrong can you be!!

A turn based strategy game with a complex AI will always be more complex to develop, game balance and test than a FPS or RTS equivalent.

quote: Originally posted by bahoo ..And don't tell me CivIII is more complex than Tony Hawk or GTA3 or SpyHunter.

... errr yes much more. Think about Chess, a turn based strategy game with a limited playing environment and a finite number of possible outcomes (finite doesn't mean small !) per turn.

It took the computing power of 'Big Blue 2' to run an AI with the ablility to beat Kasparov. Now take a game like CIV III with no fixed environment and an unlimited variety of different situations for the AI to contend with.

Soren from FRAXIS has managed to provide an AI that is a challenge - compared to CIV II and SMAC. This makes for a very complex development task and therefore....cont

quote: Originally posted by bahoo ..Most complex 3-D games don't require patches to be played properly, and they have to deal with such things as cool looking three dimensional stuff and collisions and what not.

cont.......IT IS VERY LIKELY THAT THERE WILL BE ERRORS IN THE CODE AND GAME BALANCING ISSUES WITH THE FIRST RELEASE OF THE GAME....This should be your expectation - if there had been none I would be very surprised.

and BTW most 'complex' (relitively speaking) 3-D games require LOTS of patches...

	26-11-2001 16:47									#34
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look, some bugs simply SHOULD NOT have made it past testing, which leaves me to wonder if the testers (were there any testers anyway?) even made it to the modern age before starting over again. if you made a strategy game like civ, wouldn't you want EVERY unit tested? the fact that fighters are in the game but are unusable is just silly. i don't care how complex it is, and i don't care if their publisher rushed the game out the door too early, the fact is that Civ 3 is an unfinished product which NEEDS to be patched, just so you can sit down and play the game it was meant to be.

	26-11-2001 17:14									#35
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quote: Originally posted by dexter4dxm look, some bugs simply SHOULD NOT have made it past testing, which leaves me to wonder if the testers (were there any testers anyway?) even made it to the modern age before starting over again. if you made a strategy game like civ, wouldn't you want EVERY unit tested? the fact that fighters are in the game but are unusable is just silly. i don't care how complex it is, and i don't care if their publisher rushed the game out the door too early, the fact is that Civ 3 is an unfinished product which NEEDS to be patched, just so you can sit down and play the game it was meant to be.

I agree that the Air superiority bug is a real PIA...

The other bugs can be ignored if you don't use them to your advantage (what's the point against the AI, anyway).

however...I don't think CIV 3 'single player' is an unfinished product, it does however have a number of bugs. These were missed..it happens..there will be a patch shortly.

So except for Air superiority - I certainly can play the game as it was intended..

..actually I can't but that has nothing to do with game bugs and everthing to do with Real Life..

	26-11-2001 18:01									#36
	Support Apolyton, pre-order Civilization IV

As a software developer myself, I read this thread with interest .. and I have mixed feelings for both sides here .. I understand why games are produced the way they are, and also why that can really annoy people ..

One of the things which hasn't been brought up is the software development methodology which has been used, and to be honest the same methodoliogy gets used in almost all medium sized software projects these days .. That is, DSDM .. (Dynamic Systems Development Methodology) ... The idea of this is that the time frame for delivery is more important than the functionality .. Each development phase is timeboxed, and you must deliver on-time .. so if your not making it, you cut functionality......

The whole aim is to get something out, and patch it later .. that way the customer gets the product on time (if not fully functional), but can at least start using it ... then later when its perfected, it can be patched ..

This method allows Developers to budget and organise better, knowing that programmers will be available for specific tasks ...

Obvious disadvantage of all this is we get a game that is lacking functionality, if the timeframes given were unrealistic to start with.

This is no excuse for bugs however ... which is simply bad testing, but it will give you an incite to why many modern games require patches ... Patches are not simply for bug fixing (although that is its primary function), it is for releasing promised functionality.

Where it all falls over is when you get a company like Activision, who pulls a GRAB & RUN with your money .. They never got CTP2 finished, and pulled the plug cos we had all bought it.... so no wonder the customers do not like this way of developing things ... even if it does deliver the goods on time, and makes for a better development team, it often leaves us with sub-standard products.

	27-11-2001 00:41									#37
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Hi to all,

patch or update, for me it doesn't matter to improve the game BUT AT LEAST IT SHOULD BE ABLE TO PLAY A GAME TO THE END WITHOUT CRASHING ! I never made it to the end because all my games crashed as someone or myself wanted to build a new city. Sometimes after 70 Cities anothertime after 400 Cities (HUGE MAP) and after THIS IS FIXED, we could discuss about unbalanced things or air superiority and coastal defense and so on, because at this issues I could use countermeasures, simple don't relay on it and try to win the game different. But when it always crashes to the desktop, no work around.

SO WE WANT AND DEMAND A PATCH WHICH ADDRESSES HARDWARE AND OS BUGS.

And by the way I had to pay 65 USD$ (for shipping and taxes and special import version) here in Austria ... at the moment I really think I should have loaded it down with morpheus !

Come on Firaxis, repair the city build bug and the killing the settler in a ship bug ... better to release every week a patch, which fixes one more bug, than let us wait 5 months for the big patch !

With greetings to all suffering CIVIII Players ALEX

PS: By the way everybody is shouting about the poor quality of Pools of Radiance, but this game is technical running okay (very seldom it crashes to the desktop, but when you restart, you could continue), it is always able to fix it yourself, of course the gameplay is very boring after some time. But I will have to continue to play it now UNTIL THEY FIX THIS CIV III

	27-11-2001 03:11									#38
	Quality Assurance Support Apolyton, buy Civilization 2

Does anyone know what the QA process if for game companies today? When a new release comes out, and there is a bug like that air superiority one in Civ III, it leads me to believe that most of their QA is preformed directly by the programmers. Not to knock on developers, but sometimes the most obvious bugs seem to slip by them because the guy testing it knows that he put the code there, or worse the guy testing it didn't do that part of the code and so is unaware what it is supposed to do.
With a game like this, the documetation of features would be very important to the QA process, and if this broke down at any point (which seems to ALWAYS happen), features (especially late additions) do not get tested correctly, if at all. Then take into account that they are working with a deadline...of course, if you don't staff a QA department, you cut that expense right out, and it's cheaper to go back and patch than to pay 4 testers in the first place. Unless they came to my company...they could get me cheap! My solution...massive Beta tests! I would like to sign up for Civ 4...no charge! Of course, if they took them from this site, the game would never be released and the "bug" list would be the size of an encyclopedia...

(that's a good thing, btw)

Anyway, thanks for listening. If anyone knows anything about how this game was tested I would love to hear about it!

	27-11-2001 18:55									#39
	Re: Quality Assurance Support Apolyton

quote: Originally posted by sachmo71 Does anyone know what the QA process if for game companies today?

Well, I have exactly 1 data point.

I was a beta tester for the recently-released EU2. There were a rather large set of volunteer beta testers. We were given CD's with the game on them months before the product went gold. We had a private forum on the developer's (Paradox, in Sweden) web site, as well as an official bug reporting system on another site which specializes in that ("Bugzilla"). If we found a bug, we reported it in "Bugzilla" and someone on the development team was assigned to work it. Bugs could be updated as duplicate (of a previously reported bug), verified, fixed, verified fixed, etc... Duplicates were pretty common - you had to search the bug database before entering one and sometimes you still missed it. The programmer could also designate a bug "won't fix", which pretty much means it's not a bug it's a feature Anyway, the programmer had a new beta patch for us almost every working day (and sometimes on weekends) with bug fixes, new feature implimentations and balance tweaks to existing stuff. Because the developer & a lot of the beta testers were in Europe (about 4 hours ahead of EST), mostly by the time I got home from work, finished the daily "honey do" list & got down to serious playing & found a bug, somebody else already had it reported. They were usually fixed within days of being reported. This process has continued since the game went gold, and folks who bought it got patch 1.01 to the released game posted on the US distributor's web site three days after the official release.

Another thing that was cool was that a couple of individuals who had been very active developers of well-researched mods for the original EU were officially made members of the development team (not just beta testers) for EU2.

Anyway, that's how Paradox does it (right, IMO).

	27-11-2001 19:55									#40
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quote: Originally posted by Th0mas however...I don't think CIV 3 'single player' is an unfinished product, it does however have a number of bugs. These were missed..it happens..there will be a patch shortly. So except for Air superiority - I certainly can play the game as it was intended..

agreed. i think it would have been fine if all the other bugs were in the game but this air superiority one wasn't. it seriously ruins the game, so much that i don't want to touch it again until a patch comes out , and i know a lot of people are with me on that.