AE.......A comment

[m10bob]

All I have read and seen about AE has convinced me that all the problems we long time players have found lacking in vanilla is being addressed and in many cases corrected in AE. Very much appreciated, and I'm glad the team was made up of folks from these forums, intimate with the problems we've discussed all along.
A lot of the mods created for WITP tried in their own ways to make those changes, using different techniques, but all of them were confined by the mechanical confines of the game.
Now, AE promises to extend the reach of the original program in many directions.
My particular favorite will be either the ability to alter an AI's direction of intent midstream in edited mods, or maybe the super-duper enhanced OOB's..

[jwilkerson]

m10bob

We appreciate the comments - however - "expectation setting" can be important. There is no way that AE will address "all the problems" in stock ...

While there are not technically an infinite number of such problems (remember each player will have a different list of problems in his head at different points in time) the number of problems is effectively unbounded.
We started with a list of about 400 problems (the forum's WITP wish list) and culled that down to about 70. That was our starting point. Since then we have added several hundred more to the list based on emails and forum comments. But we are still addressing only 100s of problems ... not the many thousands that would be the de-duplicated union of all lists of all problems from all players at all points in time, past and future.

So it is important to realise thus, that EVERYONE, me included, will find some of the problems on their list which are NOT addressed.

This being said, we have tried to prioritize our list based on what we think are the major problems - which can be addressed without effectively starting over. I'm sure if another team was doing this work - they would have prioritized differently - but our priorities reflect what we THINK the majority of players want.

And post release - the team will continue to try to improve things on into the future.

So anyway, just a minor cup of reality tossed on to the exuberance - but I think the AE team are excited about being able to do this work for the community. Most of us were modding before and now we are super-modding and changing code and changing art - all together.

Thanks again for your comments!

[Japan]

I agree with m10bob Good work Team.
 
 
 
Personaly my opinion is that as long as the Final Product is not Balanced im happy, as WW2 never was Balanced.
 
So, Realism and Historical Options and Data in favure of Play Balance.   (I hate Balance in Strategy Games/Simulators, WW2 was not a Balanced war).
 
 
 
 

[Tactics]

I'm glad you forum dorks were involved. In my experience when things are left only to the 'professionals' they often turn out craptastic.
 
I think I'm most looking forward to the 30mile hexes, stacking limits and some of the data tracking, and of course the snappy new mods that will follow.

[jwilkerson]

er ... that would be 40 mile hexes!
[:)]

[Tactics]

40 is ok also. And Im not even dissapointed about being ripped of those 10 miles.
 
PS- San Jose sucks. San Ramon Rules you hard!

[jwilkerson]

Well we agonized about 30 versus 40 ... but 30 was double again the work it took to do 40 ... and we just weren't up for that.

Yeah actually I work in SJ ... but now "live" (uh sleep sometimes) in Gilroy ... much more relaxing!
[:)]

[witpqs]

Thought I smelled garlic...

[madgamer2]

I view problems to be bugs in the game and fixing them is an on going thing. I also think that all of us have a "Problem list" that are mostly made up of items that the game does or does not do than within our own minds should or should not be included in an expansion such as AE.
So you not only are fixing the bug problems, adding some depth to existing game functions you are trying to do the impossible and include many of the things that many of the folks on the forum want.
I just pray that we do not go down the "More depth and detail" road to the point of creating a micro managers delight because we may then have a game that is not fun to play for a lot of us. So a await the release of AE with both hope and dread. Which will it be I can not say.

Madgamer