Somehow the forums (once again) stopped emailing me notifications of new posts. Sigh.
I'd be interested in alpha/beta testing when the time rolls around. I love me some 4x, and this one looks super promising.
Added you to the list!
Well Chris, looks like you're in an open field as far as city building is concerned--EA just closed Maxis. Oh sure, Sims studio will last until judgment day, but the California headquarters is gone. After SC2013 they might have deserved it, but this still isn't a good feeling.
Please please please never sell out to EA. 
Augh! Jeez, I missed that news. And no, I never plan to sell to EA. Or anyone, really.
I'm definitely up for testing as well when the time rolls around.
Added you to the list!
Not quite an open field, considering Cities: Skylines (by the guys who made Cities in Motion, published by Paradox) comes out in a bit less than a week from now.
The Maxis thing was still pretty sad though, although from what I read it was only one part of Maxis, and not the sims one.
Be at peace, for Cities: Skylines is almost out, and from what I've heard so far it's a great game that just happens to share its name with some terrible ones.
I am hoping that one turns out well, despite whatever it would mean for us. It's much more true citybuilder anyhow, and people who want this are going to need to be of the 4X bent. This one definitely borrows heavily from the citybuilder genre, but it's still at core a 4X by far. So I'm not exactly rooting for other citybuilders to fail or anything.
I need to see gameplay of this SO. BADLY.
Hope I make it in to your Alpha!
I had hoped to get a gameplay video out this week or last week, but it's just not in the cards yet. We're actually going to need to push the release into June from the look of things, because there's just so much polishing I want to do before I even give this to testers. I'm being really anal about things and want to be uber good at the game and really fluid with how I play it and enjoy it before I start handing it out to other folks. Right now there are still some interface things that are tripping me up, and we're going through those one at a time and smashing them with a hammer until the tasty goo comes out. I think I mixed some metaphors there.
Snip.
Contentious, or Contiguous ??
Sometimes it seemed you meant one, and then other times the other.
-Teal
Contentious, in the resources sense. In other words, they aren't competing with one another for resources.
If there is a door that is very narrow, and both you and I want to go through it at the same time, then we have some contention between us. Somehow we have to decide who goes first through the door. If it's just a matter of politeness, it doesn't matter. If there's a gunman on the other side, it matters a lot. It also matters a lot if one of us is late to a critical meeting and the other one is just going to a lazy lunch, etc. That can get pretty complicated when the differences are more subtle: what if I need to catch the elevator that might close, but you need to beat out another person to the queue for a newspaper? Etc. There are a lot of problems that can come up there.
In a non-contentious design, there are two doors and your going through and my going through don't matter. Instead if I'm trying to catch the elevator, the math that goes on is how fast I walk to it, or if I run, or if maybe I take the stairs, etc. I don't have to factor in you at all. And the same thing with you for getting your newspaper or lunch or whatever the scenario is there; you don't have to factor in me.
A lot of strategy games, particularly turn-based ones, funnel everything through "one door" so to speak. Chess and Checkers and similar where you get one move per turn are the best examples of this. In this case, all of my pieces are in contention with all of my other pieces every turn. And ditto with yours. Having a more parallelized system allows this to work slightly more like an RTS AI in some ways, because it puts less importance on each individual decision, which is very good for AIs. And it can make things less agonizing for players, too, since one mistake isn't the end of all things. Missing a bishop that can sneak over and grab your queen just feels So. Terrible.
Chris, I'd love to volunteer my time for testing on a lower-spec machine (low-end amd quad core, integrated radeon gfx). I've enjoyed learning about your dev process (as always) and look forward to your 4x!
Awesome, thanks! That would be extremely useful to know your full specs when the time comes and get some metrics from you in terms of how things handle, etc.
