Cheers folks!
Some thoughts:
1. Glad things are feeling so much better.
2. Now is an okay time to jump back in, but waiting another 2ish weeks wouldn't be bad, either. The diplomacy stuff and more passive mobs that you have to aggro before dealing with them are two of the big upcoming things.
3. Also the jobs thing was completely un-intuitive in this version AND past versions mainly because it was trying to show you two things: how many jobs filled and unemployment.
4. I understand the frustration on the percentages, although I'm glad people like the tooltips so much better. I do understand about the percentage frustration, that's something that I think is a legitimate improvement in some ways, but a step back in others. I've come up with a better idea than either of the two prior systems, but I'm not sure if I'll have time to get it to work tomorrow or not.
5. With the military, I think that planning is better than micro, and the next version shifts some things toward planning more. The version after this will -- time permitting -- be adding some of the automation on "counter-attacks" to defend your territory when you don't use the military buildings during direct attacks on your turn. I'd like to have a nice blend of "easy stuff takes care of itself automatically when you hit end turn," and "certain special cases make you directly intervene first, and then the rest is automated." Then it gets back to the empire-building roots more, but still with the ability to have combat be something you directly control when needed.
There's a thread on this general subject started by Shrugging Khan, and I really agree with it on reflection. He wasn't the first to bring it up, and in the past I didn't agree with this sentiment because there was not such a clear delineation between counter-attacks and aggression and so forth. Territories and incidents have changed all that, so a framework for that sort of player-sensible AI now makes sense. Like having FRD mode on your ships on your planets in AI War, for instance: because of the delineation of having your own separate planet space, it makes sense. In the context of something like an enemy's planet, that just doesn't work. Anyway, long blob of text.
6. So really, in terms of major changes still coming, I would say:
a. Counter-attacks and the automation that entails.
b. More with the passive mobs.
c. All the stuff in trade and diplomacy is still slowly marching toward a good state.
d. The game start options.
And then everything other than that is pretty much a matter of polish, balance, fixing features that we broke or disabled in past upheavals (there's plenty of that, ranging from ending conditions to things like Work Ethic to stuff like some of the AI construction patterns -- Thoraxians in particular). Hopefully that will lead to a nice length period (a month?) of time where we can just be beating the heck out of bugs, polish, balance, the GUI, text descriptions, tutorials, etc, etc.
One more note: I'm going to be out Friday through most of Tuesday, so things will be slow or nonexistent in terms of public progress then. But Cath and Blue are hard at work on a number of art things, and Keith is hard at work on a variety of code things (he will probably wind up going into "plow through bugs" mode for the time while I'm out, which will be nice to catch up on with our general todo list), and of course Pablo is always making his inexorable progress.
Anyway, that's the news.
