Quoting Glazunov1, reply 311A strawman is a matter of deliberately putting a poor argument in someone else's mouth and shooting that down, in order not to deal with the real argument they've presented. Since my comments you quote above have nothing to do with a strawman argument, and aren't even an argument at all, I'm not sure why you quoted them.
Yes. And you wrote:
But he doesn't sit back and wait to be thanked for a finished game, and that's an issue.
Which implies that you are representing Brad's position as he expected people to thank him and that he was unhappy that people weren't thanking him.
There was no cheap argument being substituted for a real one, and no argument at all. The important part is the setup: willfully switching out a bad argument for a good one that somebody else is making before a third party, to have them look bad. When in fact, it was never their argument, at all. A classic strawman argument would be, "My political opponent would have you believe that the moon is made of green cheese, which is arrant nonsense, as I'm sure all of you can attest!" When the opponent in question hasn't made that argument, at all.
If we can swing this discussion back on topic that would be appreciated.
I'm going to expand on my originally very short expression of thoughts, here. I gave FE in its current state a good rating, keeping always in mind that it's a mid-beta. As a mid-beta, it's surprisingly stable, has plenty of features in place, and can played successfully through with some enjoyment from beginning to end. It has plenty of meaningful decision-making, and much more focus for actions the player takes, in my opinion, than WoM in its current state. Faction differentiation is in progress, and both hero and city differentiation were apparently planned for some time and (we are told) are up, next. This is all to the good. I like the steps that are going to be taken, though it remains to be seen how I'll truly feel about the result until they show up.
I do feel information screens are somewhat lacking. You can't see a snapshot of a city or hero's current values, for example, as they level up, which is just when you need to. There's no listing of the contents of each spellbook arranged as such, and some missing or wrong entries in the help system. You can't bring up a ledger screen to sort cities by building type. This is all to be expected at this point, however. Outpost spam, buggy spells, monsters that appear on mountain sides, quests that trigger reward popup screens only after you've gone to the combat screen of another stack: nothing unusual. I'd get pissed if I'd bought a final product that was like this. I expect it right now in the game's cycle.
The main design features hold me. I wish sovereign's children could have been kept in some way or form from WoM, and I think the research trees are a little too "lite" right now; plenty of balance needed, too. Spell books need to be more distinctive, but I can't fault many of the spells which appeal to different ways to play, and the quests are fun. The random placement of things needs tuning, but the monsters are a fine assortment. Just speaking for myself, this is about where I'd hope to find FE in its development, if it's to released in September/October. There's still plenty of time to tighten things up.
Again, if this is the shape the game is ultimately released in, I'll be pissed. There's a lot of work still to be done. But as a mid-beta, it's a strong effort, in my opinion.
