Best thread title ever.

Anyways, shadows or not, what I would love to see are improvements in the weapons / armor upgrade screen. Or, in fact, for there to even be a screen instead of a button that offers no information or options.

i would like the city upgrade screen to not block the view of the city I am upgrading. 

If I have a path selected at the end of a turn I want my units to follow that path when I hit the turn button, not wait till the next.

i want to be able to assign resources connected to outposts to the city I choose.

i want the spell of making to be farther up the tree. 

I want the diplomatic ramifications of those buildings to increase proportiomallly to how many buildings I have built.

I would love more and different direct damage spells.

While I am at it, I would like a pony, too.

Edit: actually never mind about the pony. Just remembered that I've gotten that one a couple of times.

I was thinking the same thing Heavenfall said...shadows cause problems in so many games if done wrong.  LIke in SWToR...man they were bad and thus got turned off...still havnt turned them on.  Even in other games like WoW and  many others...off they go.  I have even turned them off in Civ 5, because I dont like how it affects the performance of the game.  

Hopefully Lord Frog will get them done the right way unlike many others.

I have to agree that simplified shadowing or no shadowing would not matter at all to me, even though I have a pretty good laptop (I mean it), FE still runs very slow on it, except when using the always-on cloth map option.

After a short adaptation, the cloth map shows itself as easier to plan, easier to read, as the information is less cluttered... but it could be just me.

The question I have is why aren't you guys using a game engine that will just do the shadows out of the box?  Is there no such engine?

Not for strategy games.  If you want to make a first person shooter or a game with very finite numbers of units that isn't on land you have unity, unreal, gamebryo.

Firaxis made their own for Civ V.  

Oh I didn't forget about the forums. I just occasionally have to take a break.  Even though we have a great community, there's enough "gamer entitlement" to absolutely turn me off for awhile.

Plus, we currently have 5 games in development so Derek and I are pretty busy -- and that's not counting Stardock's main "day job" which is PC software. 

There aren't any available engines for strategy games?

Well, I stand corrected and educated; I was wrong.

That sort of surprises me, though, given how many strategy games there seem to be on Steam, many of which don't really look all that different.  It seems very inefficient that people are duplicating each other's work to such an extent.  Has there ever been talk in the industry about making such an engine?

The point about screenshots and their marketing importance is well-taken, especially in light of transforming expectations.

I mainly brought up the point because I've read that games have become horrendously expensive to make mainly due to art asset inflation, which has always seemed misguided to me, since there are many games with good but not terribly expensive art.  Perhaps I was mistaken about the relevancy of that in this particular case.  But honestly, does anyone know if there's any data about that?  It seems like a question that would be much more easily empirically answered than argumentatively.

Honestly, I'm surprised Frogboy is on the forums as much as he is.  It's rare to see developers so present in their online communities.

Any update on the AI for FH:LE Brad?

Yea, but it's only 47% of the community.... 

I'm genuinly curious as to what constitutes "gamer entitlement".

Gamer entitlement? My guess: 

"FIX IT NOW STARDOCK! HOW DARE YOUR GAME HAVE BUGS."

or

"I AM PUBLICLY ANNOUNCING THAT I WILL NOT PLAY THIS UNTIL YOU FIX [insert minor bug here], THOUGH LET'S FACE IT THIS IS JUST FOR ATTENTION AND I'LL BE LOADING UP THE GAME WITHIN TWO DAYS."

or

"WHY ISN'T THIS FIXED IT'S AN EASY FIX CODING IS SOO EASY LOL."

or

"A NEW EXPANSION WHY WOULD I BUY IT WHEN YOUR GAME SUCKS SO BAD YOU SHOULD PLAY AoW."

To be fair the the crowd that plays FE, there's a lot of civil gamers. But ANONYMOUS FORUMS are where human decency DIES. 

Thanks. I can see where the examples listed above could be irritating.

That being said, (aside from the lack of tact in those comments), most people wouldn't tolerate defects in other products, or wouldn't tolerate the manufacturer dragging it's feet in fixing issues, so why should they just shut up and not comment about defects in software?

That's not entitlement, that's expecting the product you purchased to work as advertised.

Entitlement is believing you have the right to get something for nothing, or not having to work to get it.

i think one aspect that few gamers realize is that games are incredibly cheap compared to the complexity of the product. business software is often a hundred times more expensive. I work in a small company that makes software for a fairly small and specialized industry sector. we have for example one standard software product  that costs ~3.000 € per seat and tbh, i coded most of that program single handedly within the span of about 2 years. with the same amount of effort (engineering hours) you can't even hope to make a decent video game. 

The entitlement comes from expectations.  Produce enough quality- and people come to expect it.   Flaws in a good game tend to bother me more than flaws in a mediocre game- a mediocre game isn't going to be improved into a classic, while a good game can, and classics just don't come every year. 

Also I think Brad has a no Mondays on the forum rule, probably sets that day aside for CEO work.

Personally, I don't use your PC software so I think you shouldn't waste your time with that stuff and instead focus on getting the LH Beta out sooner.  And by sooner, I mean, NOW NOW NOW.

/kidding