I think Millennia has some good concepts but very fundamental flaws, but this attitude is always baffling to me. "Why would I want two strategy games when I could have only one" is just an absurd question, like why wouldn't you want more devs making games that you would enjoy.
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As was pointed on out in the CS2 discussions, that's what Early Access is for. There is a real risk of poisoning the well by releasing the game while its its missing some very basic features. There is a very big difference between "We finally fixed the game" and "The game is being released."
And as was also pointed out in the CS2 discussion, games like CS2 and Millennia are not what Early Access is for. Neither game was at an early enough point in development to justify an early access release. And financially, again as pointed out during the CS2 discussions, no there really isn't any difference between "we fixed the game" and "the game released in early access is now hitting 1.0". You only get the sales boost of releasing a game to the public once, and it's whenever that game first becomes publicly available. Whether it's an early access release or a "full" release does not matter. So the only reason to do early access, and again what Early Access became a thing for in the first place, is if you can't actually continue development to put the game in a releasable state without mid-development influx of money from sales. Neither CS2 nor Millennia meet that.
Steam might want to clarify that then because this the page describing the program. . .
From what I've seen, mostly people don't particularly pay attention to Early Access and seem to treat the proper release as the actual release and don't buy it until that point. Like, I find it hard to believe that Manor Lords won't have more sales when it properly releases than when it first went up for Early Access.
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Well the IGN review exaggerated the forest removing aspect, they said that you couldn't remove forests until Age 9 (the Age of Information), when in fact you can do it in Age 5. This is still too late IMO, which can make starts in forests very difficult. But the IGN review was just flat out wrong, which shows how little they knew about the game they were supposed to be reviewing (this was just one of their many incorrect statements in the review).
Agreed. Millennia is (imo) a recognizable twist on Civ. Then there some mutations like AoW4 which are undeniably 4X...but they're not Civ at all. (I like AoW4 partly becaue it's NOT Civ)
If your land is covered in forests, as the IGN reviewer was talking about from their playthrough, then a typical player would try to figure out how to remove those forests. This was not a hidden mechanic, it uses the domain powers just like almost everything else in the game. And clearly they found the later domain power (deforest) that does this, I don't understand how they missed the earlier power that does this same thing (clear cut). These are very basic mechanics. You can criticize the game for having two domain powers that do the same thing; you can criticize the game for not making clear cut available much earlier; but I'm going to question the legitimacy of your review and knowledge of the game if you criticize a strategy title for not holding your hand the entire playthrough. Clear cut is available in the tech tree, how did you miss it unless you never looked at what all the techs grant across multiple playthroughs? It's absolutely ridiculous. It's like me criticizing Civilization 6 because it doesn't have any naval units, when I never bothered to research any of the techs that grant naval units.
Does Age of Intolerance not have clear cut? Not impossible for this to be the case, as some ages don't offer certain buildings and mechanics. However, did the reviewer go through the Age of Intolerance for all their playthroughs? I've yet to even see that crisis age after 120 hours.
Then that says a lot about the UX design of the game being poor, if the reviewer couldn't figure out how to do these things.
