right, but just because it hasn't been done well doesn't mean that games shouldn't have it.  Maybe some people like said Dune game.   I said 'almost offensive' because I understand the idea behind it.  Games really shouldn't put some sort of artificial limit on your experiance like that without at least the option to turn it off.  But again, its not like games shouldn't have it, because some people might like it that way.

Its like, you might not want games like that, but it doesn't belong with things like "make text options available for color blind", "gamma correction should always be available" or "you should be able to leave a game at any time" that should be pretty standard.  As a game developer, I am frustrated to see people shoot down such high-level concepts without any direct function.

Usually unit caps are put into place so that the machines intended to run the game can.   That is why Warcraft 3's was so low, because they wanted the game to be pretty but still run on average systems of the time.  They could couldn't have 200 units running around the stage at once.   Sadly though, this was right after starcraft, age of empires 2, and Red alert 2 (which was all 2D) so it seemed very limiting.

A better one would be "don't not-think your game mechanics through to set boundries that might harm gameplay in the end" but thats a given.  Not something we should have to remind developers of anyway, because most of them are trying to do that anyway, and most Q&A isn't going to be able to put a check-mark next to that the way they could with the rest of the list.

OM NOM NOM NOM for the war machine!

But they do, or at least from the nearest chapter start.    If you want to turn off your movie and start it again later you will be at the begining or closest scene selection point if its a DVD and up.   The number of hours I've spent waiting for somebody to fast-forward / rewind through a movie to find the place they left off could beat me a really long JRPG.  Especially in high school where movies watch in classes were never finished in 1 sitting.   

You can 'pause' your movie for a bathroom break, But its been a long time since I've encountered a game that you couldn't pause.  Some multiplayer games can't be paused or have the option on game creation that lets you turn on and off the power for players to pause.  But that is like watching broadcast TV since its live for multiple people at once, you can't pause broadcast TV...  you could wait for a commercial, but thats like waiting to die and rushing to relieve yourself while waiting for the respawn counter to finish.

As far as I know almost any DVD player you buy now will do the same. Pressing stop once will stop the movie but remember exactly where you left off; pressing stop twice will usually discard your position.

Yeah, but you can't take out the DVD and put in any other movies.  You could leave the game on and paused...  it would be the same thing.    You can pause the game, and put your computer into hibernate.  *bam*    I used to pause games and just turn off my TV all the time.  I still do, I guess, but I leave bigger slots of time to play most games so it doesn't really come up as much I feel.   (when I was a kid, I'd have to go to dinner, or whatever.  Now I control my life so I can schedule 'game time')

The mod thing is trouble.   You can't much improve your game without changing some things, and it isn't the responcibility of the game creators to check up on all their mods.  When the game changes significantly (look at some stardock patches) some other features will break.

I think think a better thing would be is for all mod sites to be deticated to keeping their mod up to date so that if a big patch comes and breaks their stuff, they update it.

I do wish there was like a save game converter or something like that though.  I know I've lost saved games I wanted to keep because of *insert major patch for game here*

22. In-game volume controls. Multiple subcomponents here:

22a. Mute buttons. Notice the plural? Having a mute button is great but something that would be even better would be to include multiple mute keys. One key would mute all game sound period, others could selectively mute things like announcements (like map pings), music and voice chat if that was included.

22b. Volume dimmer switch. When playing Left 4 Dead for example, whenever someone speaks using voice chat the volume of the other game sounds will dim automatically by about 40-50%. This would be a handy feature to have if you were using a seperate program for voice chat such as ventrilo.

If I bound mouse key 3 to be my push to talk button in ventrilo. I could bind that same mouse button to dim the game volume by 50%. So whenever I hit the button to talk the volume of my game would reduce and the people on the other side of voice chat wouldn't have to listen to things like gunfire and screaming zombies. Binding the dimmer switch to a second key would allow me to kill the noise when someone else is speaking to allow me to hear them clearly. If voice chat is integrated this could be automatic depending on user preference.

Exactly that was my point, once resources run out you typically reach a point where whichever "sitting duck" happens to have the best army standing will win. No offense intended by the way, just my experience in a lot of cases. And Dune was a particular example because this design didn't fit the whole story behind the game. If it fits the background of the game, fine but at least try to prevent the resulting stalemates as much as reasonably possible.

My other point was born from the same thought "what are common points of criticism or annoyance towards many strategy games". But I'd rather not re-open that discussion here

One thing I'd like to add about music and sound settings: games should remember your latest settings. It's not a big waste of time but still annoying having to access menus every single time you start some games, just to reduce the music/sound volume, though the suggested in-game volume controls would make this less cumbersome.

Another point: customizable hot-keys. Nowadays a common feature but all the more annoying when it's not implemented. In particular if the hotkeys are not dependent of the keyboard, e.g. for an azerty keyboard user it's not that straightforward that "," should be the hotkey to open the map just because on a qwerty this happens to be the "m".

*oops forgot to edit this into the first post.*

I hate this so much. In a finite resource situation its possible for the game to become unwinnable without the player being aware of what has happened. All gameplay after that point is a big fat waste of time. Whats worse, the second time through I can actually see this happening and it aggravates me even more.

The real problem is balancing such a situation. If resources are not limited then competing for them is pointless.

But then you are dividing resources into nodes and only so many nodes can fit on the same map. The resources might not be finite but the scale and setting certainly is.

First I would like to point out that this is a 4X game, so it would probably be a much more helpful idea to keep ideas relevant to the genre, for example how many 4X games can you name with unit limits, or checkpoints?

That said, my comments are just about games in general

To add to the argument on infinite\finite resources, I would assert that it really depends on how the designers want the game to be played, making resources infinite implicitly diminishes the value of the resources and hence the units made by them. Conversely finite resources means you are less likely to waste units because each is an investment that reduces your capacity to do other things.

Personally I have always been a fan of finite resources because it forces people to expand, and provides natural conflict points, yes you can say the latter about infinite resource nodes but when you aren't sitting on a infinite pile of resources fighting over the next point takes on a much greater sense of urgency, and hence accomplishment. That said I like the SupCom approach to infinite resources, by which i mean stock limits, making it so that it's better for you to be spending your resources than just accumulating them.


Secondly for the argument over save games, you can take away my ability to save at any point the day you give me a game that A) doesnt crash, ever, and  has a way of making sure that save games don't corrupt. Because I have lost far, far too many hours of gameplay to those two things, sufficiently so that I always save twice, once through quicksave and once through normal procedures, even on games that Autosave. On which note I would give the suggestion that No game should be with out automatically created save backups