SirYelof

Why all the brinkmanship right now?

With Senate passage looking increasingly unlikely (both for lack of vote count and by running afoul of reconciliation restrictions), the House 'victory' would be hollow at best. And even then, there's another 1 1/2 years before the midterms to hammer out more details and do some deal-making, maybe even (gasp!) across the aisle. Instead, it feels like everyone's painted themselves in a corner.

Thanks. I hadn't realized how heavy a hand he had in establishing the speed of the legislation, as well as the current now-or-never approach.

It felt like he had 'outsourced' the healthcare plan to Ryan and was only coming in to make sure that he 'wins' with something getting passed.

Did we give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor????

Hi Soren! Jeff here, your Atari-based brand manager for Civ 4 before the successful transition to 2K (and the implosion of Atari/Infogrames).

How have you been approaching the QA for OTC? I know one of the tricky parts of Firaxis's approach was that "the game was the design doc" and QA consisted basically of playthroughs, which made it difficult to catch small issues at weird leaves of immense path/decision trees. With your emphasis and background on AI, I imagine there's even more opportunity for 'emergent' behavior that may lead to weird situations. Is there any way to unit test stuff to try and catch situations that might otherwise only be found through playing?

(Bought it last night, and love the game, and can't shake how familiar it all feels... ;-)

Great point -- hadn't considered how Early Access works in your favor there. I always hoped that there would be some sort of unit test to make sure the AI doesn't do stupid things in baseline situations while you're tuning the AI behavior, as a regression test for each checkin.

"Doing stuff that players wouldn't want to do" -- as the guy who showed the same first 10 minutes of a not-ready-for-prime-time Pirates! at E3 one year for three days, I have a visceral appreciation for how painful that work is.