NO!    This thread got de-railed faster than a speeding bullet!

I don't think that this thread was de-railed. You talked about game reviews, and here is one. I think the review is premature and a little oddly focused, but there it is. 

Apart from the maths thing, it seemed a quite honest review.  A lot of the main reviewers tend to gloss over bad points of games (see Empire TW, Spore etc which both got glowing reviews but were slated by the community at large - also see MoO3), he's saying 'I don't get this, this doesn't make sense' and makes some useful points.  Did seem a bit depressed while writing though, maybe needed some sleep

Yes. When you say +25%, you mean this:

Y = X + X*0.25

That is, take 25% of X and add it. If you get another 25% bonus, you do exactly the same thing and the two bonuses give you the same amount. (Or if you get five of them, the fifth one is adding the same amount as the first one still.)  Five of them looks roughly like this:

Y = X + X*0.25+ X*0.25+ X*0.25+ X*0.25+ X*0.25 = X + X*1.25

If X = 100, each 25% bonus adds 25. With five of them you wind up with Y = 225, which is 100 + 125% of 100. Every 25% bonus adds 25, no matter how many of them you get.

What Elemental is doing is this for the first bonus:

Y = X * 1.25

With one bonus it doesn't matter, but as you add more the value goes up. Five of them gives you this:

Y = X* 1.25* 1.25* 1.25* 1.25* 1.25

Starting with the same value of 100, in this case you'll wind up with 305. The first bonus is still worth 25, but the second one is worth 31, the third is worth 39, fourth is 49, and fifth is 61. What'll happen as you pile up more bonuses (and especially some larger ones) is the numbers will start scaling incredibly quickly.

Sufficied to say there's no adding going on there and the UI saying +25% isn't telling you what it's actually doing.

I think "first impressions" is the most appropriate designation.

I disagree. You are adding a percentage of a total, and that makes the total change all the time. If you didn't, working with percentages and low numbers like this, would make no sense. To me, the +25% is acting exactly how I would be expecting it to; it is increasing the previous total by 25% - and not by 25% of some old total.

It's not odd that Tom would focus on the math. He's a strategy gamer. And math is pretty important in strat games . I think he even use to work with Brad at one point.

*did some digging around found an old podcast...something about Brad's cyst and eggs hatching off of him.

Tom Chick is a terrific reviewer and a big fan of strategy games.  Not that he's the Word of God or anything, but as far as game reviewers get, he's about the best you can hope for.  There's no reason to slam him for discussing his frustrations while, as he puts it, trying to like the game.  Tom Chick and Brad are no strangers to each other, it's not as if Tom's out to do a hatchet job.

Also, this isn't a review.  This was his first early snippet of his thoughts with the game.  And you can't just say "Pff, a math problem!".  If a gun in a FPS is supposed to do 5.0 damage a shot, but instead does 50.0 damage a shot because of a misplaced decimal, it's a "math problem" but it's pretty significant in terms of gameplay!  It's even more critical for strategy games.  If numbers aren't being calculated like they should for research, production, income (NOTE: I'm NOT saying that's the case, just that's what Tom's thinking was), that's a pretty damn significant issue in a TBS.

It's only a problem if it's inconsistent. If every gun in the game has the same misplaced decimal problem then the game still works fine, it just means the damage scale as a whole is higher than what you intended. I'm not sure this in particular would make much difference in Elemental; you'd be creating far more resources, but so would your opponents, so presumably the net effect would simply be a lot more units. Which is not, on the face of it, a bad thing ...

To clarify the 'percentage' debate a bit further, this is what Elemental (as well as every RPG on the planet) is doing. Say,for instance, you have two +25% bonuses and one +30% stacking up, and let X be the base value:

S = X + (X * 0.25)

S = S + (S * 0.25)

S = S + (S * 0.30)

And then it uses S as the final value. Easy to compute, logical, and consistent with the Mathematic definition of percentage, win for all involved. And before you ask, no, the final result wouldn't change if you moved the 30% calculation to the middle or first line, nor if one (or more) of the percentages is negative either.

I, personally, think reviewers should way to do an actual review a day or so after the street date release. It is common for companies to have one version on disk and release a comprehensive patch upon release that "fixes" problems. This trend was started to deter pirates and get more fine tuning turing the time when the game was at the printers. To do a comprehensive review of a game that hasn't officially released yet is just underhanded and inconsiderate.

Now the exception would be if Stardock indeed released copies for the purpose of being reviewed. Then they'd only have themselves to blame. But the point remains that reviews of games should not take into account anything before release.

An example was Gamespot review of Demigod. The review was posted before the street date indicating that multiplayer was broken and things like that. Gee, ya think that a game that hadn't officially been released yet would have broken multiplayer? Had they done the same review 2 days later after the game had been released, I wouldn't have had a problem. I mean multiplayer was broken for a considerable amount of time after release as well (though vastly improved from the initial broken street date release of the game). Now the multiplayer generally works quite well and the game is quite good.

Perhaps reviews need to be revised over time. Doing a yearly recap on games would be a better indicator of how a game actually is. Most reviews are made in a day or two of actually playing a game. They are generally artifically high or low due to novelty or bugs (respectively). Once that wears off and things are fixed, the game will be different.

I know almost nothing about Elemental. I preordered only this week (and I rarely pay full price for a game, let alone preorder) because it's stardock and, quite frankly, stardock does not make a bad game. I'll reserve my judgement of the game once I'm able to play it. I will review it based on how it plays over the first few days including once multiplayer is operational. There is just no point in reviewing things that haven't been given the chance to be fully operational. Now if things are still broken in a week, then thats a good indication of where the game is upon release. I guess we shall see soon enough

Here's to hoping we, who preordered this past week, will be able to get the game today I am anxious to try it out after all I've heard.

Wow, Thread hijack in progress!!! I was expecting preview/review links but I am getting a math leasson.

So look, here is the problem with that review, or rather the root problem. Most people won't care about the math and not even notice, letting the game figure that out. Let's face it, we are most of us lazy that way.  What kind of good reviewer fails to mention specifically that they are working with a pre-release beta version. He mentions the game is not out yet but for the simple people he should have referenced it was beta 4 and focused more on whether or not he was having any fun playing it, bugs or no.

It is good to mention there are bugs so that a developer can read that too and patch up those things but I did not like this one review. Not because it had something negative but rather it became a math rant.

Back to the music, are there any other reviews, previews folks have stumbled across?

For a second there I thought you were talking about Yahtzee...

I don't understand  how one would put out a game to  reviewers  that  has  bugs  and  issues. I hope that  this is  not  the  case  with Elemental, but I  fear this  could be true. Bad publicity is bad publicity,   and poor  reviews  can  definitely  hurt  sales....  Still I hope  that  the upgrades  and patches  will make  this  a killer  game... yet  the  reviews  will still reflect  the initial  gameplay that may not  have  been  fixed yet. 

In my experience, most of the games uses additive percentages, and most of the game specifically say so.

This game uses compound percent, and does not mention it (well may be it will say so in the manual), so I would not blame reviewer for missing it. A good game should be clear about it. A good fix would be when it shows bonuses (on second screen) it should mention it somehow.

Now the problems with the game as I see are the following in this example:

1) 50% bonus instead of 10%

2) Applying bonus twice on the second screenshot: 5*1.25*1.25*1.5*1.5 = 17.578125=17.6

3) Does not provide clear explanations (compound vs additive) and together with above problems confuses player completely.

I do understand precisely what and why the reviewer said what he said. Half the time I was playing beta 4 I felt completely loss because I just could not understand why things happen the way they are and thus could not predict which way is better. And this is UBER important for STRATEGY game, otherwise it is not a strategy game but a guessing game.

Knowing that release to manufacture (RTM) version was produced around the time of beta 4, the state of RTM version does not surprise me.

Unfortunately SD choice to rush the game, despite many of beta testers asking to delay it, means that the game will get bad reviews and will not have good sales as it could have been, and it does mean smaller community and even smaller motivation of SD to continue work on this game.

And yeah, it looks like those who were saying that "release version is miles ahead than beta 4" were wrong, or at least not right enough to make release version be good enough for reviewers to have good impressions. (I am having "I told you so" moment)