[couslee]

I have not played SMAC for a while now and would have to go back and hunt old threads for a longer list, but I can give you one right off the top of my head.

The "golden age" didn't work right in smac for morgan or the hive. this was fixed in smax. there was not patch made available for plain smac players that fixed that bug. That is a major bug, as it severly handicapped those two factions. Yes, smacx added a lot of new features, but firaxis gave the left hand of fellowship and a one finger bird to it's customers would either wouldn't or couldn't get the expansion. I don't have to give 3 examples, one will do when it is a major one. They found the problem and fixed it, then sold with fix with new features. IMO that stunk. because of that, and no demo, I decided to wait on civ3. I am glad I did. They followed the same trend with civ3. crappy half-a-game release, expansion sold to fix and include features that should have been included in the first release. Also of note, is the time frame between the first release of Civ3 and the expansion. They took a game, and split it into two parts, and sold each part. It's a ****ty thing for a game company to do. And I am not the only one who feels this way. (about SMAC+SMACX and CIV3+PTW).

That is one of the things I am most impressed with about SEIV, is even after all this time, they still stand behind their product.

edit in:
and no offence was taken. But their is a big difference between being a fool, and righteous indignation. I will not reward a company with my money when it treats it's customer base so poorly, even if the SMACX expansion was the greatest thing since peanut butter.

edit edit in: (god I hate when I get late thoughts in such a manner). You state it included not only bug fixes, but a lot of balancing issues. you admit right there SAMC needed repair not only to fix bugs, but because it was unbalanced, which is another thing patches are suppose to fix. Expansions than add new features, factions, special projects and the like are fine. Bug fixes and balancing issuse can be included on the xpack cd, but should also be made available to the first release players. Look at all the PBEM games that were going when they released SMACX. Those games were stuck with the bugs and unbalanced things and firaxis basicly said TFB to you.
They saw they could get away with it, and as a result, the game community got what they did with Civ3. I was playing SMAC when the only thing available was the demo and saw the trend develop. So if I had gone ahead and bought Civ3 on release, only then would I have been the fool.

[ February 02, 2003, 00:52: Message edited by: couslee ]