I Write As I Take A Hasty Bowl of Soup…
… to quote a widely-mocked despatch from one of the US’s more pompous XIXth Century generals.
Actually, I write as the US on the verge of an early Mexican War. Despite considerable military power at my disposal, I am of course uneasy about the prospect, not least in budgetary terms. I mention the foregoing in the interest of disclosure, so those reading may judge how far I am in getting used to 1.02.
I do however have some preliminary observations, in addition to my prior remarks about ‘stealth’ emancipation in the Texas Revolution.
First, a further disclaimer: due to considerable difficulty in finding a retail copy of the Old Vic, my experience with 1.01 was limited. There was a GC as Switzerland (someday I’ll post the AAR: ‘Anything For a Quiet Life: the Rise of the Gnomes of Zurich’), which was marred by 1.01’s emigration glitches. (I bought Alaska early on, for the future gold rush, when the Mexicans wouldn’t sell me Mariposa. ‘Sutter’s Icebox,’ we called it. But I couldn’t fully exploit it, or the, ahem, Swiss West Indies [the Danes needed the money, what can I say?], because none of my thrifty little clockmakers would leave the Canton of Zug for our New and Glorious Colonies.) And I noodled about with various North American scenarios. But I didn’t have time really to get invested in 1.01 before 1.02 came out, so I don’t really have any dogs in that fight.
That being said, the following points thus far occur to me.
The world market is indeed severely flawed, not least in failing to respond to supply shortages or increased demand properly, by realistic price hikes. Moreover, a more responsive demand / price curve would eliminate one of the most annoying, and ahistorical, elements, that of effectual state monopolies (especially as regards machine tools). With Free Traders running HM Government, the only ‘restriction’ on the export of such goods ought reasonably to be, not the state’s decision to build factories (comrade! Another Five Year Plan!), but the home market’s superior ability to pay the price of acquisition. (Yes, I know, the player is supposed to be more the genius loci of the nation, including incarnating Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, than he is merely the government, but still….)
And the fabric issue is especially vexing. Even with a player-directed US, building textile mills and clothing companies all over the Deep South, there is still a ludicrously low amount of fabric on the market. Good Christ, people, half of the politics of Great Britain in the period, on matters from India to the War Between the States, revolved around the spinning-wheels of Lancashire, and the cloth trade.
I understand the positions both sides in this thread have taken to date on the issue, but if Ascaron can get that sort of thing dead right on release, sans patches (Patrician II and III, Port Royale), surely Paradox of all groups is eminently capable of equal competence?
Speaking of which examples, I do find I’m doing more micromanagement here than in any of those trade sims. It’s sufferable, but it was not really what, or, I think, most prospective buyers, intended in terms of gameplay. I would wager – based on an extensive familiarity with the average gamer (see below) – that most folks come into the Old Vic expecting some degree of economic and logistics management, but anticipating that the main thrust of the game will be political, diplomatic, and military.
I also am in agreement with those who consider that the Scramble for Africa, and all overseas colonization, is too early, too easy for the AI, and too widespread amongst the Powers in the GC. I further agree that it is precisely contrary to the spirit of the Victorian Age that a Power can lose prestige, as well as ‘honor,’ if you will, for seizing lands and conducting wars against those whom the people of the time viewed as the ‘Lesser Breeds Without the Law.’
Another anomaly that will be noted by those playing the US in particular is that the pool of immigrants is too deep. Or, perhaps, too wide. Portuguese fishermen in Rhode Island, the Irish in Boston, Germans brewing away in Milwaukee and the Texas Hill Country? Fine. But when I look at Southwest Louisiana and see that the dominant local ‘free’ culture is that of immigrant laborers from the Far East…. Well, okay, I suppose the rice planters can use the help, assuming they’re low on slave labor (this is, after all, 1840, still), but the ugly fact of the period was that the US, and not a few other nations, heavily restricted immigration from the non-white world. It’s one of our great historical sins, and I don’t see it modeled here.
And yes, I’m sure this will eventually be addressed in further patches. Of course, that’s an issue for me in itself: whether one regards a computer game as an intellectual property, as a book is, or a tool, as a saw or a hoe is, no other industry on earth behaves in this way. Books are not released without someone’s having edited the galley proofs. CDs do not hit the shelf without the sound’s having been through remastering and other post-production. Chainsaws are not released into the stream of commerce with ‘bugs’ in them, or if they are, the plaintiffs’s bar is all over it like white on rice. But software publishers…. Oh, well. Such is life.
But there is a reason, other than mere venting, that I mention the foregoing. So much of the unpleasantness and the occasional ad hominem argument in this thread, by those pleased and those displeased with the patch alike, would have been avoided if software companies behaved like every other company on the planet, in not releasing product until the damned thing was actually finished and market-ready. (Ascaron is notoriously good about not doing so, Sierra, noxiously bad about it; Paradox is in the middle in my experience.) And it seems to me that the divisions here, and the divisive nature of the argument, are driven, not by anyone’s having some sycophantic ‘allegiance’ to a product (an accusation that ought never have been made), but by the amount of time they have invested in the game or in its beta development. It depends, in other words, on the way in which a person self-identifies either as a consumer, who expects a product to ‘work, damn it,’ or as a participant in development, who is perhaps a bit caught up in counting trees rather than in assessing the forest as a whole. (I am eminently familiar with the phenomenon at, e.g., Epinions, now Shopping.com / Deal Time, where I will doubtless in due course be reviewing this product, as the resident historian.) Both classes of person are, in my view, victims of an industry that chooses to release unfinished product and expects the consumer, or at least some consumers, in effect to act as unpaid quality control. It certainly makes for occasions, as here, of unnecessarily embittered discourse, and I cannot say that I, in my old-fogey fashion, care a right smart for it, on either side.
