Major Update - December 2023

[Mathew5000]

Thank you paramesis for all this work; the update is terrific so far. I especially appreciate the automation of pink powers.

[Pyro1812]

I'm also of the mind that this is a regression. The information that is now presented in a cluttered manner was already there--it just required the player to keep track of the game state not dissimilar to the actual board game. I vastly preferred the cleaner looking board before the update.

My vote is to get rid of the recent changes that provide information parity. Make us keep track of it ourselves. I might feel differently if we were playing with all of the expansions, but we're dealing with 170 cards total. Keep it pure.

The only thing that I do like is being able to browse the discarded bonus cards and that's only because they were bordering on too tiny to see before. That and the discard pile is information that players had access to in the physical board game and I agree with its recent inclusion here.

Personally I agree with this, I feel that needing to keep track of things (for example the number of egg spaces available) is an integral part of the game. The interface does also now feel rather cluttered.

Please add me to the list of people who think this is going backwards rather than forwards. I applaud fixing bugs but please do not fix things that are not broken. The original adaptation was VERY faithful to how one plays in real life and all the information was already there. Now the information has been doubled or tripled, the same information just appearing in many places so it is harder now to keep track of everything and clutters the board. What makes strong and expert players in this game is being able to keep track of your opponents birds, their powers, guess their bonuses and anticipate their moves. Without this ability the game is just a game of luck. Having all this "extra help" just babies the game and makes me not want to play anymore.

Maybe we are in the minority, I don't know, but at least let me be able to get rid of the blue cartographer, historian, photographer icons. I already changed as many setting as I could to make it look more like before the updates, but I was not able to get rid of this one.

[Deer poo]

wow! there are so many small details and functions, which makes it lose the charm of a paper game (How about adding all the additional hints like what round it is now and how many units I have in total above the field into the settings and turning them on as desired? The black outline on the eggs also ripples a lot( Thank you!

[campusclimber]

I'm also of the mind that this is a regression. The information that is now presented in a cluttered manner was already there--it just required the player to keep track of the game state not dissimilar to the actual board game. I vastly preferred the cleaner looking board before the update.

My vote is to get rid of the recent changes that provide information parity. Make us keep track of it ourselves. I might feel differently if we were playing with all of the expansions, but we're dealing with 170 cards total. Keep it pure.

The only thing that I do like is being able to browse the discarded bonus cards and that's only because they were bordering on too tiny to see before. That and the discard pile is information that players had access to in the physical board game and I agree with its recent inclusion here.

Personally I agree with this, I feel that needing to keep track of things (for example the number of egg spaces available) is an integral part of the game. The interface does also now feel rather cluttered.

Please add me to the list of people who think this is going backwards rather than forwards. I applaud fixing bugs but please do not fix things that are not broken. The original adaptation was VERY faithful to how one plays in real life and all the information was already there. Now the information has been doubled or tripled, the same information just appearing in many places so it is harder now to keep track of everything and clutters the board. What makes strong and expert players in this game is being able to keep track of your opponents birds, their powers, guess their bonuses and anticipate their moves. Without this ability the game is just a game of luck. Having all this "extra help" just babies the game and makes me not want to play anymore.

Maybe we are in the minority, I don't know, but at least let me be able to get rid of the blue cartographer, historian, photographer icons. I already changed as many setting as I could to make it look more like before the updates, but I was not able to get rid of this one.

People complaining about this is kind of silly to me. Nothing made it more difficult for you to play. Just easier for newer players to learn.

"Now the information has been doubled or tripled, the same information just appearing in many places so it is harder now to keep track of everything"

I've never seen such a good example of someone contradicting themselves. How could having the same information in multiple places possibly make things harder to keep track of? When I'm driving and I see three different traffic lights at an intersection and they're all facing me over three different lanes, I don't complain that there should only be one light, I know that each light is there because sometimes there's a large truck in front of you and you can't see one of the lights. Sometimes redundancy can be really useful.

Thanks paramesis! I look forward to playing the updated version!

[RightNextThing]

I absolutely love this new update, thank you!

[Ze Monstah]

I think it's quite a decent update.
At first it seemed a bit off, but you get used to it easily.
The pros are definitely heavier than the cons, IMO.

[Mimimimina]

I fell it took a lot of fun and complexity out of the game and simlified it a lot. It deffinitely changed the games mechanics, which is the bad part of the update. Before you should track everything that is going on, now you automate it and take fun out of it. Will likely to play less

[bananasplay]

Thank you all for your patience over the very long period of time I've talked about this update coming. It has been a significant effort from which I've had to step away a few times over the past year. Despite extensive testing, there is always the potential for new edge cases and bugs to be introduced. I will be closing out most of the hundreds of reports addressed by this update over the next few hours, and will be keeping a close eye on new issues.

This is indeed a massive update, and equally impressive documentation. I don't have words commensurate to thank you for what must have been a phenomenal effort, but I feel compelled to express my appreciation—doubly so in the face of critical remarks that seem to disregard wholescale your many bug fixes and outright improvements in favour of critiquing certain issues (valid issues, perhaps, but not ones that invalidate your entire effort here). So, a hearty thank you from me. :-)

Now, whom do we have to lobby in order to have you take over the development for Terraforming Mars? ;-)

[Cos-]

I fell it took a lot of fun and complexity out of the game and simlified it a lot. It deffinitely changed the games mechanics, which is the bad part of the update. Before you should track everything that is going on, now you automate it and take fun out of it. Will likely to play less

No game mechanics have changed at all.

Instead, what you're saying is that it makes it much easier to evaluate the game situation because some of the things you had to keep re-figuring manually and keeping mental track of, are just written there for you. For example, instead of painstakingly counting how many empty egg spaces you have remaining, over and over, and re-counting to make sure you didn't get it wrong, now you can just look at a number. Instead of having to repeatedly look at all your cards one by one to count how many have a color on their name, and repeating the count to make sure you didn't mis-count, now you can just hover over the bonus card and highlighting makes it really easy to count.

These are EXCELLENT changes. The make the game much more fun by removing some of the more frustrating and tedious aspects of it. They make the game much more accessible to new people who are trying to learn a lot of rules all at once. They avoid the bitter feeling of making wrong moves because you made a mistake counting something - which feels awful when you do it, and adds no value to the game at all.

Having to keep mental track of things like who's ahead on the round bonus, or how many egg spaces you have, are not parts of the game that were added because they're fun or make the game better - they're part of the physical game just because there isn't any better way to do those things. When we have the game in software, there IS a better way to do it, giving us the opportunity to remove some of the more tedious or annoying parts of playing this game to focus on the game itself and the fun parts. I'm glad we're taking more advantage of that capability now.

If some people preferred the game without these features so much that they will play less, while that's a bit sad, it's a wonderful tradeoff because a lot more people will play more, and a lot of people who would've tried the game and not continued because of confusion will start playing, and the game will go more smoothly for everyone who does keep playing, and people will take less time making their moves. Even if we do lose a few people to these kinds of changes, on balance it's a HUGE improvement both in the experience of playing the game and in the community of people who play it on BGA.

[bananasplay]

I fell it took a lot of fun and complexity out of the game and simlified it a lot. It deffinitely changed the games mechanics, which is the bad part of the update. Before you should track everything that is going on, now you automate it and take fun out of it. Will likely to play less

I don't know what definition of "games mechanics" (sic) you're using, but in actuality, leaving aside bug fixes, precisely zero game mechanics have changed—only some game information is presented differently. You're free to dislike those changes, of course, but please don't misrepresent the nature of these changes.

And have you tried using the options menu to disable those changes that you dislike?