I've voted too.

Can't see the survey statistic.  How to see the result?

Maybe add some questions able pull economy in the survey too!

Thanks for doing the survey!

29 results. Some explanation. A vote of "Hate" gave a score of -2. Dislike=-1, Neutral=0, Like=+1, Love=+2. So under the column "Average rating" That is what that number means. Without further ado, Da numberz!

Looking back there were a few questions that I did not word very well, but there were space limitations. For instance "Controlling a resource makes it available throughout Empire" wasn't greatly clear that I was referring to like Civ IV.

Camps 1 and 3 seem to be popular, 2 and 4 are generally not liked. (Camp 2 got ZERO votes in the "Love" column!)

"everything is treated as a resource" was the MOST popular single feature, and there is strong demand for caravans and roads to speed up the caravans. Roads giving bonus resources had a slight negative, But getting bonus resources from city improvements was liked OK. Pull economies beat push economies, but both were reasonably positive. It seems like how it is implemented is more important to people than pulling or pushing.

There you are - if we get significantly more votes I will add another post with those stats. We are at 29 respondents, so if we get up to 40 or 50 and the results significantly changed I would do an update.

Yeah, pull economies seem to have less risk than push economies in terms of 'excessive micromanagement'.

I'd like to humbly scoff the 'camps 1-4' items on the survey. There is so much noise on the boards right now that it isn't really safe to assume that any given respondent read Brad's OP carefully and based their choice on his definition of the camps. People could easily have embedded their own or other forum poster's *comments* about Brad's definitions into their survey responses.

Mind you, I'm a lapsed social scientist and a pretty staunch critic of the idea that opinion research produces empirical data. It mostly produces opinions about opinions. Anywho, I'd put more stock in the results from the functional part of the survey than from the camps part.

Denryu, I apologize if I sounded severe. A big part of my typing around here is justified as 'exercise' for my paid editorial work, and I'm on a "be more concise" binge. I should have preceded my griping about the fundamental flaws of opinion research with a direct compliment about you doing a very interesting, and possibly dev-useful, thing for the beta.

That sincere compliment aside, I'm still very committed to taking the polling business down three or nine pegs. Your point about "useful information" cannot be reasonably captured in a repeatable-experiment format, so I stand by my claim that very few survey results yield "empirical data." Statistics is a science when it comes to something like testing a blood sample for a white cell count. The results turn promptly squishy when you include written or spoken answers to written or spoken questions. At that point, being "useful" turns into an eye-of-the-beholder question.

p.s. Wonder how long after RTM we'll have to wait for the Beholder Collection in the custom-content Bestiary? Seems like their pun value alone would help boost them up the D&D modders task lists, not to mention their basic bad-assedness.

At 44 respondents, some things have changed, among which camp 3 made a move! It's now the top "camp" choice!

And GW, I did remember a few things from the previous monster post that I wanted to mention.

1st, I am pretty well versed on statistics and I agree with you, they should be taken with a grain of salt for multiple reasons. Often the surveys are worded according to the bias of the survey taker to get desired result (I tried to stay neutral), small sample size (a problem here) self selected respondents (again a problem) and the fact that those who are even on these forums are the hardest of the hardcore and probably do not well represent the spectrum of the entire audience that StarDock will be targetting.

Those caveats aside, I agree with you fully about surveys providing empirical data. But that is because the goal of a survey is not in search of facts, it is in search of opinions. Yes the data is "squishy" because peoples' opinions do actually change, they sometimes don't know what they really want, and the concerns I raised in the previous paragraph as well as others. However, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater - I think saying that their value becomes an "eye of the beholder" question is not giving credit where it is due - even with all the faults inherent, it at least can give a snapshot of what a given groups opinion is at a given time. And although the data should not dictateto the developer, it is still worth having and then an INFORMED decision as to whether to have the opinions shape, not dictate design direction can be made.

Case in point, the fact that NO ONE responded negatively to everything being treated as a resource, while either treating only NR or MR as a resource both received strongly negative reactions - I think that is good solid non-squishy data. SD is free to disregard that data, but I still thik better to have the info to make that decision than not.