Who is Playing What?

[-72-]

I found a challenge on the Civil War Game Club board for a campaign of Overland from a tester (after I had left the testing team) - found it too much to resist.

The condition was that I, as the Union player, had to select the western swing option.

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?

In this case it isn't testing - just playing against a guy on the play test credits. But as a more general answer I suppose it would be up to the Lead Scenario Designer as to how they want to handle feedback.

I know that my own approach will be based upon my experience as a tester. I am going to remove myself from the process entirely so as not to bias any answer -after all feedback is what I am after not an affirmation of my own opinion. However that is all hypothetical ;).


Mind you - I ought to be playing some Dutch Revolt material from Ren, instead, against an opponent instead of the AI - but maybe I will get to that a little later.

[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.

[-72-]

Actually, I had not thought about that- but Chad makes a pretty good point about the campaigns. I don't recall the campaigns being done for REN until possibly after they wrapped up testing, as they were based around stand-alone scenarios.

When I was involved with Overland the campaigns were not a part of the project yet, and in my other testing experience in several other projects -that is generally the case.

I think that Rich Hamilton is the one that develops and posts the spreadsheet charts, not that that matters apart from if you are on a team, then this is who to address concerns about the spreadsheet updating to.

Testing itself, also can involve proofing the maps; for example I generally use my own art mods when testing as well - as for me it improves the visibility a bit. I have found one hex that was about 3 or 4 levels below the rest of the terrain around it (it looked like an anomaly -and apparently it was), occasionally roads/trails that don't connect, sometimes uncrossable watercourses without bridges (in the case of one Ren scenario there were vp hexes inside a town behind a gate but no bridge leading to it - so that was an omission that needed addressing, and sometimes you find rivers that have elevation increases and drops ( when it happens in the middle of a river- it is a bad thing generally - unless I guess you are trying to represent an island that impacts LoS but does not impact movement ... which I don't actually think is a technique used - usually it is an oversight sometimes caused by adjusting the riverbanks).

These are some of the non-play issues that you hope testing can catch - more sets of eyes are better than one in my opinion. :)