Quoted from Usac:

I bet you and I, Battler, could make a better xpac than anything currently conceived, other than the original AoC.

Uh, maybe. If we had the same budget to pay artists, musicians, campaign makers, history consultants, and competitive players like TheViper then I think we'd end up making really similar expansions just with more attention to detail...which I guess is objectively better.

I'd love to make that wager with Cysion to see if it could work.

You'd have to pay him alot of money to have him give up the reins, even if it's temporary and of course Cysion has Microsoft's trust that some outsider can't just randomly have.

[This message has been edited by The Battler (edited 12-21-2016 @ 04:51 AM).]

Was the Malay bonus changed? I could have sworn it only affected imperial age and not all ages...

The Malay bonus affects the research rate of all age advancements. You may have confused it with the Byzantine bonus of a 33% discount on the cost to advance to the imperial age only.

Quoted from TheBattler:

Cysion has Microsoft's trust that some outsider can't just randomly have.

Cysion was an outsider once too.

So what you should do is start making that expansion of yours without official support, like cysion did, and then talk to Microsoft/Skylab/FELLC, like cysion did, and sell to them that your design is superior and should be included as an official DLC, like cysion did.

Without doing that, it makes your claim that you can outdo cysion to be at best a pointless boast.

@jan dc

Confirmed for Dracula 4 on my part. Impossible to finish.

I've heard of it being systematic, not personally though.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/221380/discussions/0/496881136898615200/

Quoted from AKFrost:

So what you should do is start making that expansion of yours without official support, like cysion did, and then talk to Microsoft/Skylab/FELLC, like cysion did, and sell to them that your design is superior and should be included as an official DLC, like cysion did.

Without doing that, it makes your claim that you can outdo cysion to be at best a pointless boast.

No need to be rude. I once did try and offer my services as a creative mind, but at the time was told 'there were no new plans' after AK came out.

I could actually wax on about this topic, but not right now as I'd rather not get too impassioned at the moment.

@ Hockey -

When do we get a performance patch that actually fixes things?

like pathfinding?

In all seriousness AKFrost, could your plan actually work? Could I actually get FE team to truly take me seriously?

The last several patches have brought performance improvements to the game. Things are still not where they need to be, but there has been considerable progress as of late.

@Matt714
Yeah it has been reported. There seems to be a bug when loading the AI in a saved scenario. I hope there will be a fix for it soon.

@Usac

I'm not going to speculate on whether FE LLC specifically may consider you. I'm not a part of their company nor am I affiliated with them in any way.

I will tell you, however, that in business in general, execution is 99% and ideas are 1%. Everybody can have a million ideas and some may be decent, but having a finished product ready to go (that means in this case, having the civs, the graphics, the scenarios, and maybe even voice work) makes you a lot more compelling to be taken seriously than someone who simply pitched a few ideas over private messages.

Ultimately, there's many layers to game making, from the most numerous to least:

1. Idea people - literally anybody who ever picked up a controller have ideas on how to make games.)
2. Designers - people who took their ideas and actually fleshed out the designs, maybe even developed some concrete numbers.
3. Makers - people who took their designs, got down and made something playable happen. They have a product that can be played and may even be fun.
4. Polished makers - people who took what they made and refined it. Tuned the numbers, made graphics that look really good, and have a small following of their project.
5. Businessmen - People who took their polished product and pitched it to others to make it a commercial adventure, whether from looking for a publisher to publish it as an indie game, or trying to integrate it into an existing game as a DLC, or anything else. Few people, cysion being one of them, make it to this stage.

Anything less than 3 and you probably won't even get interviewed by a game studio unless you're a star programmer or artist. Anything less than 5 and you won't be making any money from making games. That's how the industry is.

From what I've seen you currently stand at around 1.5, you still have a lot of work to sink in before somebody will consider you.

Addendum: The idea that "somebody must take me seriously first before I make something" is the bane of 99% of "ideas people" and why they never will get into game making, whether as a hobby or a career.

Am I missing something as I bought this expansion the other day and only now fired it up and none of the new editor options are available? At least not in the menus for existing scenarios.

It's looking awesome, though I have my doubts about some of the balance changes. Great work guys!

Am I missing something as I bought this expansion the other day and only now fired it up and none of the new editor options are available? At least not in the menus for existing scenarios.

With the DLC system you have the option of selecting which DLC datasets will be available within a scenario when creating it. Scenarios that you already have in your library will not initially have the AoR (Rajas) dataset available, but you can change that. Just select the "modify scenario dependencies" option on the main menu after selecting the "map editor" icon, select your scenario, and change its DLC data accessibility as you see fit

@AKFrost I think that ideas should never be dismissed just because someone isn't as good a modder as another.

Then again, I have fears such as if I present my ideas in finished AGE format, I'd hand them in and my competition, the FE team that likely doesn't want to share profits or credit with me, will say "No thanks" then steal the idea and tell me I can't prove it was my work.

Actually I feel like saying that out in the open has already killed any potential I may have.

The idea that "somebody must take me seriously first before I make something" is the bane of 99% of "ideas people" and why they never will get into game making, whether as a hobby or a career.

Can you explain that? It's been eating at me all holiday and I must understand.

No one's saying that ideas should be dismissed, but you will never get into developing video games as an idea guy.

As far as others stealing your work, that's kind of a given with basically every design-oriented profession from graphic design to architecture. IF you want to develop video games but you don't have a technical degree, you have to have a portfolio of projects, even if other dudes steal your ideas.

Modding games is a small step, but a step nonetheless in the right direction and there are lots of game companies who have hired modders and some companies started off as modders (FE team being obvious, Riot Games is probably the biggest example). All of Cysion's work has been stolen, and then some. Actually, homeboy almost stole from me, I say "almost" because I consented to it.

Anyway, the problem with ideas is that they've all been thought up of already and it's very hard to trace them back to the owner. Stolen ideas is not a real obstacle if you can present your projects as proof of a skill rather than a product.

[This message has been edited by The Battler (edited 12-26-2016 @ 02:13 AM).]

Usac:

If you don't want your ideas stolen, all the more reason to put it on the internet. This way, if they do steal your idea, you can say "this is evidence that they stole my idea" instead of "this is my idea, but I can't prove it's mine".

As for the addendum, again, you need to be proactive and make something. Nobody became a good modder without doing a ton of modding and fiddling to know what's happening with the engine. That's how you get noticed by people who may decide to give you resources to do your work.

Let's say ideas are gemstones, you'd be the one sitting on your gemstone at home thinking "I have this amazing gemstone that I can buy so many things with", and ultimately getting nothing because you're not taking it out to show it to people so they can appraise it and give you things to its worth. You're even expecting people to barge into your home to get your gemstone when there's people outside offering theirs. If you keep your mentality, then you'll be staying at home wondering why nobody's coming for your gemstone.

Deleted.

[This message has been edited by atrican (edited 01-06-2017 @ 01:41 AM).]