[aldin]

I find myself really confused about the underlying complaint, namely that the game has a poor interface and (the game) is unpolished. Let me explain.

One of the games that is widely acknowledged as being highly polished with a great interface is Warcraft III. When I tried playing that game I ultimately came to realize that, interface-wise, there were many things that needed to be done which could only effectively be done by hotkey and which weren't at all obvious to a new player.

Dom II, by contrast, is completely accessable with a mouse. If there's something you want to do you can probably click around and find it. All it takes is the realization that much of the visible information can be interacted with. Once you know what you want to do, Dom II has a HUGE set of hotkeys that let you easily manage almost every usual function.

Warcraft III's 'polish' seems primarily to be in it's simplicity. There is more-or-less a 'right' way to set up your base that quickly becomes automatic because the number of options is small - you need to harvest resources which means you build the resource harvest units and buildings first then you either upgrade your resource gathering ability or start the intial armies all while scouting the surrounding area.

Dom II's polish is in the details. Every time you try a different type of Pretender with any given theme/nation you have to reconfigure the way you play the game to a certain extent. Ulm with the Iron Faith theme and an Astral 10 Pretender plays completely differently from Standard Ulm with a Rainbow Pretender. The polish shows in how many different VALID ways there are to play.

Yes. There IS a learning curve, and it IS severe. But the basic complaint should have been that the game was too complex, not that the interface is bad or that the game is unpolished. Though to be fair, I suppose that may be the benefit of having survived the initial part of the learning curve speaking and that there is no way to perceive the difference until one has done so.

~Aldin