Aetas RTS

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Sixteen notes from one playtest

Playing a match and writing down what annoys you works better than guessing in advance what might annoy you. This round produced sixteen notes. What came of them:

  • The multiplayer lobby now shows clearly who is ready, who is still loading and who has dropped out.
  • Reconnecting behaves properly: you come back into the match where it is now, not where you left it.
  • Auto-scouting for your scout, so you do not spend the first five minutes clicking one unit around the map.
  • Tooltips on everything that shows a number, so you never have to guess what it means.
  • Building in the fog is allowed again where you have already been — that was stricter than it needed to be.
  • The town center is 5×5 now, so the sprite sits exactly on its footprint.
  • Statistics freeze the moment someone resigns, instead of counting on.

And the big one:

Every match is kept#

There is now an archive next to the lobby server. Every finished match where all players report the same result is written down: who played, on which team, who won, with which civilization, how far through the ages and with what statistics.

That archive is where the leaderboard on this site comes from. It is also the only way to say anything sensible about balance: six civilizations that look equal on paper are only equal once the win rates say so.