Who is Playing What?

[Compass Rose]

When testing like that, does the designer ask the Rebel player to play without knowing which option the Union player has been asked to use? Or was the request by the opponent/designer, and if so, how will you factor in that intel?

From what I saw with Overland was that the play-test coordinator created a master spreadsheet that would list which scenarios are ready to be play-tested. Normally one person will sign up to play test a scenario against the AI and two play-testers will sign up to play-test a scenario via PBEM. When play-testing a campaign, which I did not do, I was not aware of any "special instructions" that were given to either side and I was not aware of the "enemy" ever being aware ahead of time of any Intel on what strategies his opponent was selecting at the beginning of a campaign. So basically, if you were play-testing a campaign or a regular scenario, you were playing it "blind", as long as you were testing it for the 1st time.

As the play-testing process goes on and on, and bugs and/or problems are identified and addressed, an updated play-test version of the game would be released to all of the play-testers. Every time a new build (game version) was released to us, all of the scenarios would need to be re-tested to see if the new changes were present and/or the old problems were addressed. Some play-testers may find themselves re-signing up to play-test the same scenario 2, 3, 4, etc. different times, during the whole process. If I recall correctly, some of the scenarios were play-tested by 2-3 different PBEM play-testing teams, per build.

So if you found yourself play-testing the same scenario 2-3 different times with the same opponent, you would normally identify "trends" that your opponent would normally do however, we would not normally volunteer any strategy or intel to help our opponent out.