What Huib (and others maybe) don't like about PzC

[Volcano Man]

I may (or may not) be working on a game in progress which may (or may not) be an HPS game, and I have been bending over backwards for several years now, spending hundreds of dollars on books and thousands of hours on research. The thing is, no matter how much I constantly question myself "is this good enough" -- it never will be good enough for some people even if I spent the remaining days of my life perfecting it (and it will probably never be good enough for me either).

I think the only thing that a designer can do is get it reasonably good that any mere mortal can attempt, then commit yourself to address any glaring errors that are uncovered post release. It is not that the lack of research caused an error, it is simply that something could have been overlooked or improperly deduced. For the most part, the good game designers (such as Glenn in my opinion) commit themselves to address any errors that are found, the bad designers do not. The bad designers cannot be bothered by a mistake or probably never even play it once the game is released. The fact is, no matter how much you research and how much you slave over it, a mistake is inevitable so the only thing a good designer can do is attempt to address them.

Beyond that, it is easy for someone to take a painting and add a brush stroke to it, but it is something totally different to start with a blank canvas and make in into a painting that resembles something. If you take the mods that I work on, I try to make sure that I never disrespect the original designer because I respect the work that they have done. For the most part the mods that I work on are just adding brush strokes to the painting, with new artwork and different unit ratings. Of course, to show that I am unbiased I have even modified my own game (Korea '85), redoing it into _Alt scenarios. For the stuff which are considered "glaring issues" like missing units, it is respectful to the original designer to bring it to their attention first before a mod is made which supposedly addresses a mistake I think. That said, most of the adjustments and tweaks to the _Alt scenarios are made because many changes are required to shoe horn the _Alt values into the existing scenarios, not that many of the original scenarios were incorrect to a large degree -- but it really depends on who designed the original game. In most cases, if the designer was not Glenn then you can pretty much forget about an issue getting addressed so I don't bother to report issues (because the other designers are pretty much out of touch with the community).

I just think a customer must take the individual title at face value by who researched and designed it and judge it that way, similarly to an author of a book, not apply a wet blanket judgment across every game in the series.