Quoting: Mountain ManWell, this is depressing, although I'm still convinced the survey is deeply flawed. What's even more disheartening is that I see some developers citing the survey as a reason why they won't support Linux even though actual game sales on Linux are between 2% to 5%.

Most publishers state sales between 1 % and 2 %. I personally think that's not a too bad value, if not too much effort has to go into porting an engine.

That said, I have little hope that steam machines will actually raise the market share of Linux. Valve for sure has a long breath on this (they're getting rich with Steam anyway taking a 33 % cut on everything sold), but they'd still need to get a lot of publishers on board, including Activision/Blizzard, EA and others. And EA will do nothing to support Valve or Steam in any way, placing their bet on their own online distribution (both with their own downloaders, not to have to share the profit with Valve "just" for distribution). For getting them on board, the market share would need to be between 5-10 %, so they can't ignore the profit, and that's a a hell long road until that happens.

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Good job Doc... keep going :-). Very nice progress you make there.

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Better than releasing in a bad state.

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The port is decent, and we're waiting for the first patch which should solve a few things (as that the battle ships become submarines sometimes :D .. just a graphical glitch though, and Kalypso reacted pretty funny on it "submarines were an important part of medieval military. Seriousyl, we're working on a fix already"). The patch is already confirmed by Kalypso, so they'll be maintaining the game as it seems.

The only thing to advance in this game is to understand economy properly (it's supply and demand based, so if you fuck that up you'll go bankrupt), and not to go too fast on things. Don't do anything further if one of your cities is not self sufficient, or gives more money than it costs you. Even more, you need to build carts for your traders and assign them to them (VERY important). This is for some reason pretty much a side-note in the campaign, but if you don't do it you'll be bankrupt within the first 30 minutes of playing the game. Other thing is that you have to understand that you don't need every damn building in every city. This raises maintenance costs so high that the cities are hardly self sufficient (if a city is ~level 15, it's ok, because taxes will pay for it). Even further, you have to activate automatic tax on each city you build, otherwhise you won't get money of them, which will drain you empty pretty fast if your empire is growing.

And you have to understand that you never should have more military than 10 % of your overall population (I go by 5-7 % usually), this will drain your pockets empty very fast (gives the achievement "military state" though :D).

When I tested it, if you get > 10 % they suddenly exponentially cost you more money (I did it for the archievement), which ended in draining my cash pool by ~1 Million / Week, despite I took it too fast there at the same time taking some poor decisions, which made me end up loosing my whole 300mill cash pool within an hour.

My advice is: Every time you gain a rank, do a new save. This will save you a lot of trouble if you take poor decisions, you max loose half an hour.

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I stopped pre-ordering after I bought DA2 (when I still had dual-boot). This was such a waste of money that I decided I'll never ever pre-order again, even if there are good pre-order deals.

Now I usually wait for a deal on a -XX% deal after release for the games I want, and look for the reviews on several platforms (including this one) to see what I'm about to buy.

Of course I require them to have a native linux version released as well (I hope M&B Warband 2 will again have a Linux client as well, I have more than 1000 hours played on the original one, but now i have Grand Ages: Medieval which seems to become a 1000+ hours game for me again :D).

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Okay, I now have ~300 mill gold and 27 cities :-) ... the game is GREAT if you give it the time to understand trading, overtaking, battle and relations with other kingdoms.

Though, the learning curve is tough, and the tutorial should have been a LOT better than it currently is.

Yes, it has a bit of CoK feeling, but it has more the rts build-up feeling than CoK could ever supply to me.

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Quoting: Crazy Penguin

Quoting: throghAnd again a game from Kalypso ported to Linux also not available as DRM-free build on GOG. What a shame after Dungeons 2! :(

It seems the Windows-Build isn't DRM-Free as well, as it needs GOG Galaxy esp. for Multiplayer and an additional Kalypso-Account. As we know GOG hasn't even a Linuxbuild of Galaxy, so you will not see a Linuxversion of Grand Ages & Dungeons 2 on GOG very soon.

I don't like the direction GOG is heading and Kalypso should be ashamed for that crap!

Just found this on Steam!

Quoting: SteamWe are working on an update/patch to fix the major problems, such as:

- Server & login problems
- Trade Balancing
- Graphic card issues
- etc.

However, we are some kind of overwhelmed by the many negative reviews because many people apparently expected a different game.

Source: Steam: Kalypso listens to Community Feedback [External Link]

I love strategy games. But this is so...*facepalm*. Is this a release or a Beta-Test?

It is possible to play the game, I have a friend having conquered half Europe already (and started later than I did). It's just incredible hard, and requires a lot of micro management. I think as hard as the game is, it's frustrating for a majority. But there are people who very well get along with the system. Me not included, but I consider it challenging, so I'll try to get it mastered.

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Well, even I did expect a different game... not economically that challanging at least. I've played it for 12 hours now, and I'm still trying to get a proper economy running.

First good hint is to set city taxes, but that only seems to be one of the issues, even with proper taxes you don't seem to be able to uphold by trade .. don't know what I'm doing wrong yet.

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Interesting that you didn't see issues with trading. I did a lot. Especially automatic trade didn't seem to make profit, it seems to be like micro-management to me, choosing the best profit at the time, which I seem to do better without calculating it than the algorithm behind it. The trade routes are most likely a loss to me except if I micro manage them. And there is a slider for the amount ;-) ... just the usage of it is .. pretty strange.

I tend to go bankrupt in this game, for a reason I don't know yet. I have heavy over production (even in campaign), don't get rid of my goods, and can't build my 2nd city due to not getting building materials there which I have on stock in the main city, even with a cart driving just between those two cities. I even burned the ~100k you get by visiting the adventure sites with your scouts within 30 minutes. Setting up two complete trade routes between northern cities and my main city, and southern countries and my 2nd city + my main city even gives me more loss. But I didn't cope too much with my own economy, I expected to get enough income by trade, which is probably wrong.

Though, still enjoy the game, may have to figure out some points. Mainly, I enjoy the great port they did for now, the rest will come in time. Hints are welcome :D.

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Well, that's true. I wonder if he earned that well that allows him to do that, or if he's nuts :D. I just saw that Banished actually was already released for Windows. I played a alpha/beta version back then.

Without wanting to f** up our platform, but financially he probably will break even, but he won't do a huge profit. Maybe it's his ideology, maybe it's good enough for him to make some cash for a living, maybe it's preperation for the future, since it seems to use it's own engine, and learning for doing a cross platform engine is quite tough.

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