The necessary strategy when considering a Steam game and checking reviews would appear to be first looking at the number of reviews per day for an inconsistent spike. That and discarding out of hand any review that is simply a period, "gud," or something similarly uninformative.

So Valve is complicit in this review stacking business? I don't think the developers can actually do much about reviews on their own. Well aside from fixing their game.

I think maybe some of these reviews are explained by the game having a demo that people can play and get a very good impression of without necessarily running accross the more annoying aspects that might take more time to notice. I really doubt Amplitude or Sega are making fake steam accounts to inflate positive reviews.

roger212 wrote:

I think maybe some of these reviews are explained by the game having a demo that people can play and get a very good impression of without necessarily running accross the more annoying aspects that might take more time to notice. I really doubt Amplitude or Sega are making fake steam accounts to inflate positive reviews.

Dude you are being reasonable...that's not done here. Be more unhinged...

Trust me, we were quite happy to see the recent influx of positive reviews ourselves. Did the Fabius Maximus Update and End Conditions Patch, the Demo, and the event (in spite of its technical issues) help? We'd like to think so. But at the end of the day, increased review activity is normal during Steam sales and especially during Steam Awards Nominations. We're grateful that many players chose to leave us a positive review, but we'll continue to work on the game to improve it with your feedback.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

Trust me, we were quite happy to see the recent influx of positive reviews ourselves. Did the Fabius Maximus Update and End Conditions Patch, the Demo, and the event (in spite of its technical issues) help? We'd like to think so. But at the end of the day, increased review activity is normal during Steam sales and especially during Steam Awards Nominations. We're grateful that many players chose to leave us a positive review, but we'll continue to work on the game to improve it with your feedback.

My feedback is to remove the mandatory surrender and allow the ability to crush an entire civ and it not come back to life via stupid war resolution. Even with a big penalty so other AI's hate my guts when I do it.

Regardless of how you THINK I want to play, I ACTUALLY want my big grey blog.

I think the issue with War support is 

1. You should be able to reject Surrender options (for a War support cost... so unless you take a lot of teritory/win battles very fast it will be a net loss in what you get/damage to enemy from the war)

2. Occupied territory should have a bigger cost.(to make you want to take surrender options)

ie

Razing an Occupied Main Plaza should cause it to put out massive amounts of rebels (ie # of troops equal to population... every turn)... Raze Districts if you want to Pillage profit

Occupied Territory should not allow your units to heal (at best you stop the enemy from healing in that territory)

Krikkitone wrote:

I think the issue with War support is 

1. You should be able to reject Surrender options (for a War support cost... so unless you take a lot of teritory/win battles very fast it will be a net loss in what you get/damage to enemy from the war)

2. Occupied territory should have a bigger cost.(to make you want to take surrender options)

ie

Razing an Occupied Main Plaza should cause it to put out massive amounts of rebels (ie # of troops equal to population... every turn)... Raze Districts if you want to Pillage profit

Occupied Territory should not allow your units to heal (at best you stop the enemy from healing in that territory)

That's even worse!

How about simply allowing a conqueror to keep what they occupy when the other civ surrenders with massive malice hit from everyone? That would solve this issue.

Maybe occupying enemy territory could add a small trickle of per turn war score (not war support, tho), so you could try to prolong occupation to take more/all of the territory, but would risk running out of war support in the process and would still need to do this against enemy sizable enough to offset war score lost through support ticking down? They'd need to add rebels appearing in said territories (non-aligned, so that they don't add to the war support), tho.

My issue here is that the decision was made to make it harder to just off an opponent in a single conflict, the loss brings consequences, but you should still be able to bounce back after it, especially considering the victory condition being the highest Fame. There definitely needs to be some kind of indicator that someone is trying to eat all the small fish for the AI, that would make the world cease trade and eventually ally against them in a war.

Dale_Kwrote: 

How about simply allowing a conqueror to keep what they occupy when the other civ surrenders with massive malice hit from everyone?

Do you work for russian government?

Sublustris wrote:

Dale_Kwrote: 

How about simply allowing a conqueror to keep what they occupy when the other civ surrenders with massive malice hit from everyone?

Do you work for russian government?

LOL

Sublustris wrote:

Dale_Kwrote: 

How about simply allowing a conqueror to keep what they occupy when the other civ surrenders with massive malice hit from everyone?

Do you work for russian government?

This is a ridiculous question. It's a game, man. Chill out. <rolling eyes>

<rolling eyes>

Yeah, it was a very dumb question. I was ignoring them though, as their actions are like a young child acting up.

Dale_K wrote:

Yeah, it was a very dumb question. I was ignoring them though, as their actions are like a young child acting up.

Yeah, probably the best route. Hoped the "chill out" prompt would help them, but it didn't.

There's nothing more dumb then to propose to make another war game about painting a map with your color, as if that is what happened in humankind history.

P.S. AOM, still can't get over the fact you suck at the game, can't you?