On the other hand, I do appreciate the fact that Frogboy and Stardock pay attention to all of their users, not just the <1% vocal minority posters on this forum. (and I count myself as one of the <1% ) It shows that they are a business, not a hobby. It is one of the reasons I can be confident they will be around for a long time supporting and growing this game. I also dislike the judgement implied in "the lowest of our players". Last I looked, they were people, too, paying customer people.
As to the posters complaining they might have to learn modding... No, you do not have to learn modding. You just have to learn to ask some modder nicely to do it. If it is really important to the community, it will happen. I've seen it work that way plenty of times. I have been playing with mods for years and have yet to write one line of code. All it takes is friendliness and patience.
While I see your point, I also have to agree with Seilore below. It's not about needing to learn to do it, most of us already know how. Even though my modding skills lie in art assets and programs I've had to do xml before and as you suggested I got help and formed a Team to do Elemental Mods. I'm advanced enough that I don't even use Notepad for my edits, I use either UltraEdit or Hexedit. The main complaint is dumbing it down for people with lower end machines when it was Advertised as being bigger and should of obviously had bigger running requirements.
I didn't notice until way later that earlier in the thread Frogboy mentioned something about 4 Gigs of ram not being enough. Nothing against the boss man of course, but when I read that I nearly spit my coffee all over my monitor. Windows 7 Requires at least 4 Gigs of Ram just to run. Why would anyone in this day and age even try to make a game this size and even expect it to only need 4 Gigs of ram? Show me any other modern strategy game of this size and scope that only needs 4 Gigs of ram to run. What are people trying to play this on, pocket calculators? I didn't think it was even possible to buy a computer that only comes with 4 Gigs of ram these days, much less a Gaming Rig?!?! This is a PC game, not a Cell Phone Mobile Game/App. That's just flat out stupidity IMO to think Any Gaming Rig would only have or use 4 Gigs of Ram. Even thinking about making this game and saying it'll only need 4 Gigs of Ram to run is just messed up, especially when Windows by its-self wants that much Ram to run.
The whole point of moving over to native 64bit was to make a bigger and better game that worked with hyper threading using multiple cores. Now it seems like they're taking a Awesome PC game and trying to make it run on crappy mobile devices. It's like my FarCry 4 analogy earlier. If Ubisoft took FarCry 4 after release and then turned down all the options so it could run on systems below the running requirements it would be shelved in a heartbeat. Imagine taking FarCry 4, which was Designed to run on mid range to high end gaming rigs and then trying to make it run on Windows XP by taking out graphical options and that's what it feels like is happening here. We buy a big beefy 4x game because we have big beefy systems to run them on. That's not to exclude anyone with lesser systems, my system is 5 years old now minus a few new components, but that's why games have minimum running requirements. If you don't meet the requirements don't buy the game. Damn sure though don't expect the developer to dumb down the product.
If Notebooks and Cell Phones were the target audience from the start that's different, but that wasn't the case here.
Never said they weren't paying customers, and the game should be playable by them just not at the extremes... So why lower the extremes that others are able to play just because the lower few can't?
The modding thing is not a matter of me learning to do it or have someone do it for me. I am capable of modding, if I don't know how right now I could learn it in no time, I pick that type of thing up quickly. It's more of an issue of if a game is featured as such than why can't it do it without modding? Plus I'm one that loves to play the game as it is and not mess the game up with bending the rules...
Plus that way you know how the game is intended and qualify for their leaderboards and so on. Now Paul, I believe it was him anyways, said in one of the dev streams that leaderboards (Metaverse) right now does not hold modding against you but, I don't see that remaining that way forever.
That's a lot how I like things as well. When I mod I only want to make visual changes mostly. I don't want to mod the *mechanics* outside of vanilla. I don't mod for cheating purposes and I dislike doing so. I want the game play mechanics to be as intended for just about everything I play, with the exception of cases like this where I'm only editing map sizes or some other factor that doesn't effect how the game its-self works within it's own rules.