I would just like to get a summary of the features everyone would like to see in Beta 4, so I can see whats left to do. Feel free to discuss my suggestions, form priorities and make your own requests.
Heres what I would like to see:
I personally think that its fairly important to the success of the game that we have a decent all arround experience. This means we have to give Campaigns a better feature-set, improve the selection, features and customization of random maps (and make direct-game-from-random-map possible). The tutorial needs allot of improvement, in particular, we need on screen arrows to point to the things the text talks about, and winning the tutorial shouldn't be as buggy as it is.
We need media, like a complete campaign (I could create one), and we need to include more maps with the game. Although YOG can now distribute maps, it won't be full of them anytime soon, and it also costs quite a bit of bandwidth to distribute from the YOG server. We need maps that offer a different style of play, like King of the Hill style maps.
Right now, the YOG server offers most basic services, such as a simple map list for download, and if you click on a players name, it can show you their player score (calculated using Elo and wins/losses). We could improve this, being able to sort the list of maps by name or size, or having a new tab that would show you the current top rated players, and players near your rank (a fairly simple tab). I don't think we need to make YOG too advanced.
After those, we pretty much have all of the meta-features found in a modern real time strategy. I think the biggest thing that hinders growth of the game is the gameplay itself. Its more of a novelty to most people I talk to, they'll play it allot for one weekend and never talk about it again.
Gameplay: challenging, but also quite frustrating. Part of it is that mistakes are punishing, a problem resolved in a large recent change. Another problem is that units do their own thing, and often their behavior can be confusing. For example: when you expect a building to be upgraded but it isn't, or you expect more warriors to your flag but you don't get them. This is another problem that is in the process of being resolved by making hints to the player of why things aren't occurring like they would expect.
Also, our game play doesn't have much depth. 10 kinds of buildings, and in most maps, its expected that all of the available area is to be entirely filled with base. Part of it is that units can't travel that far, another is that buildings are big, and maps are small.
I think that, if we match other games in terms of meta-features, and improve our game play, we have a fair shot at success. Before 1.0, although I doubt this is possible, I'd recommend that all graphics are standardized. This means they are all put into the same perspective, and given the same shadows and lighting. All buildings would have the three graphics for different damage levels. It would require allot of effort to recreate the graphics in Blender, but it would be well worth it.
-- Extra cheese comes at a cost. Bradley Arsenault.