The following folks should now have PMs from me with a key:
Rekka
Taravassal
doctorfrog
Chthon
LordStryker
MishTheFish
ghgl090
kokonut
qrter
dersquatch
DrGonzo
Valectar
Parmenides
Tormodino
greywolf1991
EvilMonk3y
Chriamon
AlgaeNymph
Vinco
Orelius
Jerebaldo1
rallythelegions
Teal_Blue
Tolc
Gwmngilfen
If you don't, please let me know!
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Blackshirt-specific notes:
Two things I want you to know:
1. I can't stress how much the game has just changed today. It's been a week-long work in progress, and I encourage you NOT to read about it at first if you haven't already. I'd love to instead see how you experience things coming to it a bit blind for at least the first half hour or hour. Up to you, of course.
2. Based on #1 there, the number of bugs and balance issues is going to be unusually high. Sorry about that. We've basically taken the spleen and liver out of this thing and spiffed them up a ton, then put them back in in different places. That's the sort of surgery we're talking about.
It's all an evolution of the same base game, and actually coming back to some of our earlier ideas, but with a week's worth of changes all hitting at once, on this scope, you may have a rough landing at first here. Again, sorry about that. So you might go "WTF, haven't any of the testers been doing anything?" Or "what sort of crazy design decision was this??" and it's probably a brand-new bug in both cases that just hasn't had time to be found or fixed. Please tell us those!
3. KNOWN ISSUE: A number of the social progress unlocks make little sense right now, and a number of them have literally no purpose (they aren't just missing a description of what they do when they have a blank description). I just didn't have time to get to that yet, but I will sometime in the near future. Work Ethic having no description is because it temporarily does nothing, for instance.
4. KNOWN ISSUE: The AI is not very well adapted yet to capturing territory and dealing with international waters or resource gathering. In some cases they are cheating and putting seaports and resource gathererers where they are not allowed to (all in international waters), and I haven't yet chased down the code that is allowing them to do that. In other cases they just aren't expanding into nearby territories yet because the new code for that isn't there. The Thoraxians have been pretty heavily kneecapped by this latest update as well, and not yet built back up to tunnel like they are supposed to. Please do just go ahead and tell us about anything that seems wonky, because we might know about it, but our choices on this particular area were either (a) delay and wait for the AI to be fully finished up for the new spleen; or (b) go ahead and release it with it mostly-there and let people get to testing. The AI is quite capable of making war and doing all sorts of other nasty things, so its not like they are helpless at all mwa ha ha.
Anyway, these sorts of periodic changes are precisely why I do things in waves. The less you read about the way things were and the way things are now, the better, in my opinion. The patch notes for the current version are massive, and I encourage you not to read them. I mean, once you have some hours on the game, read whatever you like. But at least for the first few minutes or hours or whatever you care to give me, I'd prefer as untarnished-by-the-past first impression as you can get.
