07-10-2013, 04:38 PM
While fellow player Ixnay's people starve aboard their rocket ships, I remain blissfully unaware of the situation developing across my own pace empire. This, you see, is one of the unadvertised benefits of not knowing what the Hell to do.
This morning, I again opened up the Central Command software, heartened as I was by Ixnay's misfortune, to give the game of Cluster Wars yet another look. And what I saw wasn't pretty.
I am quite willing to give the game its due. Clearly, it is a game with some degree of complexity to it. Now, that's not to say that it necessarily has the kind of complexity that I, personally, gravitate towards, but it certainly has a degree of complexity that many would undoubtedly gravitate towards.
The game's complexity factor, however, isn't what turns me off. I detest spreadsheets. I despise them. I abhor them with a fashion. For all of its affinity for complexity, the game is still, at its core, a spreadsheet, when it comes to how the information is presented to the player. This approach is an interest-killer, for me. It automatically ensures that trying to play this game will be a chore for me - rather than fun.
I do not want to drill down into spreadsheet links, in order to learn the what my empire's assets are, nor to learn the details of what all has gone on with the processing of the most recent turn's orders. Tedium writ large should be the game's warning to all those who flee at even the slightest mention of the word - Spreadsheet!
Now, don't get me wrong - I don't mind the prospect of Ixnay's space-faring minions dying of starvation millions of light years from home. Indeed, I very much relish the prospect.
Even still, I would much rather focus time and energy and effort upon conquest of empires flung across the stars, than striving to prevent famine aboard my own ships. Thus, once one cuts through the morass of techno-swamp that is the Central Command interface, and once once succeeds in crossing the Sea of Confusion that is the digesting of information that is turn-relevant, the tedium of spoon-feeding and playing nursemaid to one's own population at large still awaits you - the prospective player of Cluster Wars.
How the information is presented to players is no less relevant than the information, itself. In their bid to resurrect a PBM game of old, the programmers seem to have forgotten this.
Because they already possess familiarity with the game, they possess a string and distinct advantage over prospective newbies to the game, as far as knowing what to do, and knowing where to look for the relevant information that enables one to know what they want to do.
Rather than a bundle of confusion, which is what the current methodology of presentation of game information comes across as, what I, as a player who is wholly new to the game and its predecessor that it is erected atop of, is the same information presented in a different way.
Turn results in either PDF format or in ASC II text format would be vastly preferred to this quasi-spreadsheet monstrosity of confusion-meets-lack-of-intuitiveness that currently serves as my gateway to processing game information and issuing orders for my position in the game.
A nice summary, one that presents all of the relevant info in one mass, should be relatively easy for the games programmers to generate. For them, it is all data, anyway. I'm not after different data. I simply want the same data presented to me a different way. It doesn't have to replace the current monstrosity that they have in place. Rather, it merely needs to supplement it. That way, the players can have their cake and eat it, too, no matter whether they prefer what currently is, or whether they are having difficulty making heads or tails out of what currently is.
This morning, I again opened up the Central Command software, heartened as I was by Ixnay's misfortune, to give the game of Cluster Wars yet another look. And what I saw wasn't pretty.
I am quite willing to give the game its due. Clearly, it is a game with some degree of complexity to it. Now, that's not to say that it necessarily has the kind of complexity that I, personally, gravitate towards, but it certainly has a degree of complexity that many would undoubtedly gravitate towards.
The game's complexity factor, however, isn't what turns me off. I detest spreadsheets. I despise them. I abhor them with a fashion. For all of its affinity for complexity, the game is still, at its core, a spreadsheet, when it comes to how the information is presented to the player. This approach is an interest-killer, for me. It automatically ensures that trying to play this game will be a chore for me - rather than fun.
I do not want to drill down into spreadsheet links, in order to learn the what my empire's assets are, nor to learn the details of what all has gone on with the processing of the most recent turn's orders. Tedium writ large should be the game's warning to all those who flee at even the slightest mention of the word - Spreadsheet!
Now, don't get me wrong - I don't mind the prospect of Ixnay's space-faring minions dying of starvation millions of light years from home. Indeed, I very much relish the prospect.
Even still, I would much rather focus time and energy and effort upon conquest of empires flung across the stars, than striving to prevent famine aboard my own ships. Thus, once one cuts through the morass of techno-swamp that is the Central Command interface, and once once succeeds in crossing the Sea of Confusion that is the digesting of information that is turn-relevant, the tedium of spoon-feeding and playing nursemaid to one's own population at large still awaits you - the prospective player of Cluster Wars.
How the information is presented to players is no less relevant than the information, itself. In their bid to resurrect a PBM game of old, the programmers seem to have forgotten this.
Because they already possess familiarity with the game, they possess a string and distinct advantage over prospective newbies to the game, as far as knowing what to do, and knowing where to look for the relevant information that enables one to know what they want to do.
Rather than a bundle of confusion, which is what the current methodology of presentation of game information comes across as, what I, as a player who is wholly new to the game and its predecessor that it is erected atop of, is the same information presented in a different way.
Turn results in either PDF format or in ASC II text format would be vastly preferred to this quasi-spreadsheet monstrosity of confusion-meets-lack-of-intuitiveness that currently serves as my gateway to processing game information and issuing orders for my position in the game.
A nice summary, one that presents all of the relevant info in one mass, should be relatively easy for the games programmers to generate. For them, it is all data, anyway. I'm not after different data. I simply want the same data presented to me a different way. It doesn't have to replace the current monstrosity that they have in place. Rather, it merely needs to supplement it. That way, the players can have their cake and eat it, too, no matter whether they prefer what currently is, or whether they are having difficulty making heads or tails out of what currently is.