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Brother From Another War - Unit |
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Chris, I disagree with this and prefer "Galactic", but I leave this one for you. |
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Technically correct, I suppose, but "InterGalactic War Units" is a bit of a mouthful. Honestly you could even make an argument that "galactic" does not necessarily imply that it's limited to the scope of the galaxy--only "intragalactic" would do that. After all, a national policy can be toward another nation. "Galactic" can be interpreted as 'these units deal with affairs at a galactic scope'. So I would advise sticking with "galactic." If going with "InterGalactic War Units," though, then that g better be lower case! |
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A few things about that: First: If you go with the interpretation that “Galactic” encompasses multiple galaxies, then Exogalactic is redundant, since exo- means outside the galaxy, but galactic already means multiple galaxies. Which is (I’m assuming) one of the reasons the “Extra-“ was removed. The second: Exogalactic Wormhole has one less syllable (7) than Intergalactic War Unit (8). The difference is negligible . Intra-Galactic Coordinator is fine with you, I guess? Human home command station? Anti-everyone zombies? Spire Galactic Capitol? Zenith Matter Convertor? (Dire) Fortified Tesla Guardians? And don’t forget the actual War unit names as well. Wendigo, Mothership, Poltergeist, Planetcracker, Chimera Artillery, Hunter/Annihilator. Even with just “Galactic War” before them, some hit double digit syllables for the entire name! Third: I have to laugh at the lowercase G. Despite Exogalactic not having a lowercase G, the IGC is spelled Intra-Galactic Coordinator. With a capital G. You can see proof in the xml screenshots below (see the display name line). Even the hack has an uppercase G with no spaces. Fourth: A national policy is still confined to one nation. Does it affect another nation? Yes. But a national policy for one nation is not enforced in another nation. The French don’t go into Paraguay and start arresting people that have broken French laws. Why do you think when a country does something bad in another country it’s called an international incident? I have also never heard of a war between two nations be called a national war. And that’s the crux of the issue. It’s between galaxies. Galactic does not mean more than one galaxy. Merriam-Webster (and many other dictionaries) have the definition of Galactic as “of or relating to a galaxy and especially the Milky Way galaxy”. I mean, the Spire Galactic Capitol is literally confined to and can only affect the Milky Way galaxy. There is no possible way to call the Imperial Spire with just the Galactic Capitol because like the name suggests, it’s reach is the galaxy it is in. You have to build the Transceiver to summon the Imperial Spire from another galaxy. Tallying up: there is the Exogalactic stuff (outside the galaxy), Intra-Galactic Coordinator (inside the galaxy) and the Spire Galactic Capitol (meaning one galaxy). I don’t see where Galactic could mean multiple galaxies when all of these terms are already defined and demonstrated in-game. B8466692-5ADD-48CF-9EB0-B122FD544B1C.png (21,444 bytes) 7E568CC1-D7EF-4AEA-9971-67A56F921B72.png (1,898 bytes) |
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I'm not really interested in debating this at length since it's a relatively small issue. The points on each side may stand on their merit, but I will gladly abide by whatever verdict Chris reaches. |
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I must admit, I personally liked the old term, but I agree it needs to be changed if it is causing confusion. I'm not sure about Intergalactic - it's not really any more of a mouthful than extragalactic, I just don't like it. Just tossing ideas here: what about "Core Fleet _____" , i.e. "Core Fleet Maugrim", Core Fleet Phoenix, etc. (Unless you want that term for some even more powerful AI grouping.) "War Fleet ____" is another possible, I guess. |
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The goal of "Galactic War Unit" is to find some technobabble that will convey to a player "Crap, the AI is getting out the Big Guns. It must really think I'm a threat now". Also the goal is to shorten the name and prevent players from confusing these units with Exogalactic things (like the wormholes). Having multiple prefixes to the same word isn't great. Note we do have IGCs, but I frankly didn't even remember what that acronym stood for, so I think that's fine. I think that "Galactic War Unit" succeeds in all of those goals. I think making the name longer for purely pedantic reasons (that aren't great reasons at that) is not a good idea. |
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I think that Badger summed it up pretty nicely there, in terms of my feelings on it as well. Ovalcircle, I agree with all your points on principle, and that's why I named them the way I did to start out with. We tossed around a lot of different names for things. Inter versus Intra gets extremely hard to tell, so was something I wanted to avoid. I used Exo versus Extra despite the problems, because I was hoping that the first syllable being different enough visually and aurally would be enough to get the job done. But feedback essentially was that it was not. I wish there was a perfect word, and if someone finds it I'm happy to use it. But I think that Intergalactic will be one in particular that gets confused with Intragalactic. I also think that a lot of casual usage of Intergalactic as a phrase in sci fi has kind of devalued the meaning of it, but maybe that's just me. I liked Extragalactic or Exogalactic because it seemed slightly mysterious. For the record, I also see the AI units that are coming back to the galaxy to fight (the Galactic War Units) as being primarily from between galaxies. There's a big war happening out there in super-empty-space between formal galaxies, and the AI is involved in it. There are probably other wars in this galaxy and in other galaxies, as well, but even the AI may not be sure to what extent those exist. The main communications that they have with an external war front is the one that is outside any galaxy. This is one of several reasons they are having to feed resources over to it -- there's nothing locally for them to farm, as they are in the galaxy-equivalent of interstellar space. |
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I completely disagree, but while we're on the topic: What was the reasoning behind shortening Exogalactic Strikeforce to Exostrike? |
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Well, maybe we're being too literal in thinking only about the location of the war. Is that really what's important here? Maybe these are Prime War units, or who knows what. I'm not sure I prefer the usage of that term, but it's better than Offstage More-Important War. Units From The Real War (tm). Those are kind of joke-y answers, but as I noted I am open to other names for things. I just really, really want clarity of "what things are what." People abbreviate things like crazy, which is great, but harms understanding when there is not clarity in the abbreviated versions. Exogalactic Strikeforces were generally shortened to Exos. Nothing else. It's hard to write out the whole other thing. But someone could easily write Exostrike and it's not a pained thing to type out. So clarity gets aided. There's also the fact that, if there were any units that ever got the prefix of one of these things, then that's a huge long prefix that gets rather hard to use. "Extragalactic War" was used as a prefix for lots of units, and that gets very wearing on the eyes. I don't think we had any "Exogalactic Strike [unitname]" units, but if we had that somehow seems even worse. And I actually just had to correct myself, because I typed "Extragalactic Strike" while in the middle of trying to make a point about lack of clarity. Those things are just so darn similar. By rebranding both things to be a bit simpler and more brief, we aid in understanding of which units are under discussion at any given point in time. Or what kind of event is happening. When they don't have the same or similar prefixes, then we don't have that ambiguity. I used to work in B2B software, and naming things so that people would not mistakenly refer to parts of the system by a similar-but-wrong name was a constant challenge. Less is riding on clarity in this context here at Arcen, but I still like clarity in conversation. It doesn't mean I'm particularly married to the prefixes Galactic War or Exostrike, but I do like the brevity of both and that they are both very visually different from one another. My dislikes on them are still there, but are outweighed at the moment by my likes. I don't like that Galactic sounds like it means inside the galaxy if you stop and think about it too much. I do like that it sounds cool. I'm not sure how I feel about Exostrike, in that it seems slightly... something about the thematicness... but I do like that it's a lot more thematic than just Exo all the time. So that's where we are right now, but that's not a definite thing that it's the final word. |
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I think Prime or some other threatening name that doesn't carry too much other meaning gives the impression of spooky unit while not being technically incorrect like Galactic War Unit is - the former doesn't pretend to specify where they are from, while the latter is longer but gives a false impression of accurate information. Anyone who wants to know the fluff on where these units came from can just read the extended description or something. That way, there is nothing misleading while maintaining the threat and shortness desired. |
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I agree on that. I don't feel like Prime is quite the right word, as it isn't spooky enough, but I think it's maybe heading in a direction that lends itself to more clarity. |
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1. I think the location of the war is extremely important. It doesn't have to specific like "Triangulum Galactic War unit" (That's a real galaxy). But when things like Exostrikes or Exogalactic Wormhole have to prefix to denote that the AI is bringing in reinforcements from somewhere else, players can tell at a glance that's what it means. The problem with Galactic is that it does not tell the player that it's from outside the galaxy. I have looked through every War Unit's description and I don't see a single reference to something outside the galaxy until the Tier 4 Mothership ""A colossal armed planetoid. The AI would not normally consider even the entire Milky Way galaxy worth the attention of a mothership. What did you DO?!" It's possible that more info is in the in-game tooltip that's not in the XML, so my entire point here might be invalidated. Aren't the War Units supposed to be redeployed from a massive war going on somewhere else? The player will never actually know about the Unit's origins unless they specifically ask about it. They think "Wow, a Galactic War Unit. I guess this has turned from a guerrilla campaign to a full fledged war" which is true, but the "Galactic War" part is supposed to also refer to the greater conflict somewhere far away. 2. About the Exo confusion. This has been bugging me for a while, but for some reason, people call Exogalactic Strikeforces "Exo waves". Even I'm guilty of doing it! I don't know why. I believe it's from the AIWC entry for them that mentions "exo waves" https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War:How_Exogalactic_Strikeforces_Work#How_is_the_size_of_an_Exogalactic_Strikeforce_determined.3F Just search "exo wave" on the discord. And that causes some problems. 1. It causes confusion with new players because there is no such thing as an exo wave. 2. By promoting exo wave, new players will say it. Now people are calling something the entirely wrong name, while still understanding what is meant. 3. There will be people still saying Exogalactic Strikeforces. Now there are 2 names (one made-up name) for a single mechanic. Confusing. Which leads to the bigger problem. People will call stuff whatever they want, despite the game literally showing the correct terminology. As Badger said above, he didn't know what IGC stood for, but he knows what it means. I suspect that people will shorten the "Galactic War Whatever" to either "War Whatever" or just plain "Whatever". You say that Exogalactic Strikeforces were shortened to Exos. Which is fine, but if players are shortening it on their own, why bother shortening it in-game where it provides context ? TLDR: 1. I don't like Galactic, but I understand the Exo/Extra confusion. I would like something that says "Outside of galaxy", but that needs to be discussed (which is happening right now). 2. I don't understand why Exogalactic Strikeforce is being shortened to Exostrike to be concise, while Exogalactic Wormhole does not receive the same treatment. I also don't understand why Intra-Galactic Coordinator is 99% of the time referred to by players as "'IGC" but nothing is done there, despite Exogalactic Strikeforces being called Exos all the time. This Renaming thing seems unevenly applied. |
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You know, on that subject, Intra Galactic Coordinators are an incredibly awful mouthful, and if we are renaming things it might be worth it to think about something for those, too. I don't feel strongly about it, but if we ever did expand "beyond the known galaxy" in an expansion, an IGC would still be there helping "all your ships in the galaxy." It seems like an IGC really isn't about a galaxy at all (unless we made that not work outside the galaxy), but rather is more about the faction as a whole. But that gets... strange... in wording rather quickly. On the other hand, IGC is a really unique and easy to recognize acronym. So that part is excellent. |
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I was writing my last response before yours came in, Ovalcircle. In terms of the location of the war, I think that it is relevant, but I'm not sure that the humans who would be encountering these would really have knowledge of where the war is that the AI is involved in. These are kind of Elsewhere Ships, from the mysterious war front. I do agree that the locations of things matter, and more lore is always a good thing, and evocative names are good things. But I think that most things from for instance WWII are not named from where they were at. Then again, a few things were. Regarding your first point, I don't think that we are in disagreement overall. I'd just like to perhaps broaden our thinking to not be location-based. That may or may not be useful in the end. Personally it matters less to me that the big scary war is outside the galaxy, and more that it is a giant scary war happening offstage. I guess that is kind of my point. The Italian Campaign makes a lot of sense, and talking about North Africa makes a lot of sense, because in WWII those were associated with very specific antagonists as well as very specific terrain. So the location kind of was a catchall for all of that. Maybe I guess a WWII analogy is actually pretty bad, since there is a LOT of stuff in the pacific campaign in particular that was very location-specific. Offensives on both fronts were named after locations a lot of the time, and even the fronts were named after locations. Various other wars were named more about the time period they were in, since there were battles in similar spots over and over. Or if we think about major war efforts that were not specifically a battle or campaign, those tended to have names like Operation Backfire or Operation Caesar. Those were more about a specific objective or method, and less about where they happened. I dunno, I'm rambling. Exo waves were I think what AIWC called them, and Keith and Badger and I have all called them that. In AI War 1, there were a lot of informal concepts that came about as kind of one-off things, and were "things that were happening in the AI" but not "a big codified function with really specific rules." I guess a comparable example would be like the AI hiding the hunter fleet a few planets away from you in AI War 2. That's a thing the hunter fleet does, but we don't have a big specific name for that and detailed in-game rules about how it works. It's just a thing that happens. Exo waves were kind of like that, originally. Early on in AI War 2's life, Keith started really trying to organize... everything. For a long while we were thinking we would have AI Governors that would be lower than the level of the AI Overlord, and basically there would be one Overlord (the king you kill), and then 4-8 (or whatever) AI Governors that were in charge of specific regions of the galaxy (basically these would be like having multiple AIs or AI types that were locationally-bound, but didn't each have a king unit). Later that kind of went away, and he named all of the AI units that were mostly guarding the AI Sentinels, even though that's not really all that faction does, and then what was once the informal "threatfleet" concept in the first game got made into a very formal subfaction of AI Hunters. The informal special forces units, which was a status and some behaviors on ships in the first game became the very specific and separate Warden Fleet in this game. Badger later expanded these even further, making them really quite distinct. So we have a lot of linguistic baggage all through both games, because concepts arose and were discarded or expanded, and sometimes a small mechanic would be referred to by players prior to us as developers ever naming it. Threatfleet was just "all the threat moving around and trying to get me," initially. Nobody on Arcen staff named it that that I'm aware of. Gate Raids, on the other hand, was terminology that I very specifically introduced, and people adopted it. I have no idea on the origin of the term exo wave, but it's been around for a super long time and I doubt we will ever be rid of it. It's just been around too long. Keith later gave them a specific name, which he chose as Exogalactic Strike Force. Or it's possible Badger named it that, but I have a feeling it was Keith. Keith has an awesome sense of humor and people generally find his humor much funnier than mine when it comes to unit descriptions and things of that like. When it comes to names for units, sometimes he's really thematic and awesome with them, and other times he's overly dry and very lengthy. I suppose one could say the same about me. When you have like 50 units to name, there are going to be some boring ones. "It's a... plane... in space. It's a space plane. Moving on. That other one is a space tank! Why the hell not." And later someone else came along and renamed the space tanks to Vanguard, in this game, because that is a much cooler name. I suspect it was Puffin, but I am not sure. It may have been a player suggestion. When referring to them out of context, I will probably always say space tank. When looking at the unit in an actual game, I say Vanguard. When I see a Dagger in the game, I also call it that, even though it's of course a subclass of the Raider group. So there's a lot of precedent for that. Anyhow, you're positing that Exogalactic Strikforces were shortened to Exos, but actually it was the other way around. We came in and gave a longer name to something that had had a perfectly serviceable informal name for most of a decade at that point. Our longer, wordier name was not adopted by anyone, not even us. It's just what it says in the game, not what anyone calls them. The premise of people just referring to the Extragalactic War Whatever units as just being a Whatever is something that of course I agree with, and actually I support. I wanted people to know that the Flenser and that the Planetcracker are both part of the Extragalactic War, so I named them thus. But I just call them Flenser and Planetcracker. It actually was particularly painful to write out Extragalactic War Flenser. That really stuck in my craw quite a bit. Given my druthers, I would just call that one the Flenser, so I do. But it's important for many reasons that players understand where that thing came from and why (it came from The Future to Kill John Conner, in essence), and so it is named awkwardly. Actually if you look at Terminator names, all of them have really boring serial numbers, which only works because there are not many models of them. We know what a T-1000 versus a T-800 versus a T-101 is. They are visually striking and different, and they are verbally said with varying degrees of fear. If there were 200 types of terminator all on a sliding scale of threatening-ness, without personal human stories attached, I don't think that naming something T-400 versus T-405 would have much meaning at all. And so a really rigid naming scheme, while keeping it clear that these are all machines owned by Skynet, is soooo boring. Back even in the first Terminator movie, they referred to them more by role (IIRC -- it's been a while) rather than serial number. We saw a bit more of the future war in those first two films. So they had the hunter/killers, and the some slang for flying ones, and etc. Those were both more and less evocative in various ways. In a huge number of senses, me giving a prefix to a subgroup of units that belong to the main AI faction is me trying to have it both ways. I'm trying to make it really clear "These Came From Skynet," which is actually probably more important than "They Came From The Future," although I guess we could debate that. Other stuff also comes from the future, and some of it is even terminators, but those are not always sent from skynet. Anyway, giving it a prefix is a way to know "oh, skynet thing" and then give it a cool thematic name. Some of them got less-cool names than I would have preferred, but I can't be too picky when I didn't have to design the unit stats. And most of them got extremely cool names, and it was a matter of taste. Anyway, so if you go back to my original intent with that whole prefix thing, if that even matters, it was something that would identify it as being part of the "scary group that is here because you did a scary thing," but I was also actively hoping that people would read past it and just say "Flenser" or whatever it was. Maybe the most elegant way to handle this would have been to at least visually make it look like these were from another faction, even if they were really part of the sentinels or hunter or whatever, but that in turn might be quite confuing. If it was just given the unique and cool name of Flenser, but you saw the faction name as being "AI Exogalactic War Front" or something, then a lot of wordiness is gone but clarity is retained. To your question 2, on why Exostrikes were shortened but Exogalactic wormholes were not... I mean, there's a huge amount of content here, and we didn't think of everything. I also think that the wormholes actually do matter where they lead to, since they are extremely specifically a spatial concept. You can tell me Hilter's Army is coming and that's much more important than "the army from Berlin" (especially since in modern times that means something completely else and actually positive), but if you tell me they are coming on "Hitler's Road" that is very uninformative compared to "down the A24 from Berlin to Hamburg," not that that existed back then. As to IGCs, it also was just one of those things that nobody thought of until partway through this discussion. Other people raised the issue and Badger asked my opinion and I gave it when it came to Exostrike and Galactic. Nobody thought of IGC to bring that up, that I am aware of, and given that we were not doing a comprehensive review of unit names and consistency, it got missed. This renaming thing is absolutely extremely uneven, because it is an ad-hoc process right now in response to players seeing something and feeling grumpy about it. We are not at this time undertaking a systematic review of names in the game. At some point maybe we should, and this is somewhat turning into one now, but it's still largely community-led and so I imagine that we will miss things. TLDR: I like cool names. I like clarity. I like detailed backstories. I like brevity. I want all those things, all the time, forever, in the game. ;) That is really hard to do, and sometimes we succeed better than others. This long-ass response is my attempt to explain my thought processes, but I've not remotely been the only one naming things, and my thoughts tend to evolve over time. I also tend to like to name things differently depending on the faction, because I like cool names and being overly formulaic does not tend to lead to that. That said, we have some real stinkers in our list of unit names, while at the same time other times having some amazingly evocative things. Overall we have a general lack of flavor text, because there just hasn't been time. We do have at least one volunteer coming up soon who is interested in fleshing some of that out some. If others want to help, that's awesome. I am happy to mediate disputes, within reason. Right now I think that the dispute can be boiled down to "Galactic isn't a great name but nobody has thought of anything better" versus "it's actively worse than the old wordy one that also confused people, because it is thematically inferior, and it's hard to say how many people were really confused." And my response to both positions is: "then let's just not argue about that, and think of something better in general. Except not so much me, because oh my god multiplayer." And Badger is mostly out also, because he's really busy with a lot of things. He and I saw the least-bad suggestion, based on group consensus, and both felt like it was a step in the right direction. I can't speak for him, but for me I figured it might get more refinement. But wow does Galactic Flenser sound so much better than Extragalactic War Flenser. (I guess it's actually still Galactic War Flenser, blegh.) I never liked the construction of those big compound names in general, but hopefully my reasoning for doing so makes sense now. Maybe there's a good solution where we can start letting the cool unique names stand on their own while denoting affiliation. I honestly am quite fond of not having extra endless prefixes. |
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Okay: * All of the units that were previously named "Galactic War [name]" are now just named "[name]" ** However, in the tooltips for them, their faction should now say "AI Exogalactic War Front" in whatever the hunter fleet's color is, rather than saying the AI Hunter Fleet. ** This lets us keep the shorter name, while making their sub-group and source a lot more clear. ** This does need testing, so please let us know if it doesn't show up correctly somewhere. This is using a new xml feature called "override_faction_name", which lets us use a different faction name for some units in a faction, but without actually creating a new faction. Thoughts? Thanks! |
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There is always the option of creating a new fictional name that we can label these things with. I do like them just having their own name, gives them more character that way. |
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I had (another) giant comment about the Galactic War unit names ready to be posted when I woke up (which is now). But the proposed change is really really good, in my opinion. The name is cut down (which people would do anyway), while giving context in the tooltip. Sounds awesome to me! Unfortunately, I have a (yet another) giant comment about the Exogalactic Strikeforce name change, so that's coming later today. But really, I think this is a great idea. |
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Sweet! Well, that's one item down, then. I don't mind the giant comments, and I hope that things don't come across as argumentative just because we're all being a bit verbose. I think that the added context is really useful for being able to figure out what people are actually after, and what the common motivations are for all of us versus the surface issues where we disagree on something. Then we can find the root of whatever is going on, and deal with that, hopefully. |
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NOTE: Everything up to Point 2 was written before Chris’s above War Front proposal. After rereading my comments and thinking about this a lot more, I realize that I may have come across as mean-spirited or hostile, which was never my intention. I just feel strongly about this issue. That being said, I have some more points. 1. I just feel frustrated because Extragalactic was a perfect descriptor. It differentiated itself from Exogalactic, while also meaning something more than outside the galaxy, in a sense. It sounds like a great way to describe a super unit, while Exo- is for smaller stuff. But players got confused, they spoke up, and so it had to be changed. That’s the way life goes. I’m not mad at the players. If something is confusing multiple people, it should be looked at. I also recognize that I’m being too harsh with all the pointing at other exo stuff and the Intra galactic coordinator. The renaming was supposed to be a quick and easy fix that didn’t need or wasn’t planned to be expanded upon in other areas. Also: I think at a minimum, the descriptions for the War Units should have some line saying “This unit has been redeployed from another galaxy/front/conflict,etc. to quell the local disturbance” or something like that to denote that the War Unit wasn’t manufacture/created specifically against the faction it’s targeting. Perhaps in the verbose tooltip mode for players who want extra info. 2. Exogalactic Strikeforces being renamed to Exostrikes. I don’t think it works for a number of reasons (that are not just if x was a problem, why didn’t y get changed). The first is the player terms for it. I personally believe that players will attempt to shorten terms as much as they can while still making sure other players know what the term means. (See: the massive amount of acronyms used for different names). Very interesting about Exos being before Exogalactic Strikeforces, though. See, I believe that the length of the in-game term (at least in this case) doesn’t really matter because players will shorten it down anyway. No matter how short you make it, players will still say exos, exo waves, and exostrikes. So the shortened name hasn’t really done anything. The only thing that’s been affected is the in-game name, since players have already shortened it and will continue to use said shortened terms. It could have been a 100 letter name. If the player-base has, for some reason, agreed that “e” will be used to in lieu of the 100 letter term and they understand what "e" refers to,, then shortening the 100 letter name will only affect the amount of text space taken up in the tooltip. Though the one instance I can see players typing the full name is when they are telling new players what the shortened term means (Like IGC for Intra-Galactic Coordinator). So it becomes the question of: Isthere something wrong with a name if players shorten it in casual conversation? I say no. The second is exostrike doesn’t mean anything. Sure, we, as experienced players, know that it means Exogalactic Strikeforce. But will new players know that? What does exostrike mean? Let’s break it down. Exo means outside or from somewhere else. Outside of what, in this case? Is the AI striking something that is outside of somewhere? Or is the AI striking something from somewhere outside of well, I don’t know? What could exo refer to in exostrike? Time to ask someone else. Oh, they come from outside the galaxy. How can that be inferred? Now let’s focus on strike. What is a strike? Is the AI rolling a bowling ball at us? Does it consist of one ship? What about more than one? I guess we’ll find out when it hits, assuming that it’s not hidden inside the threat/hunter that might move with it and that I even know what I’m supposed to be looking for. Let’s examine Exogalactic Strikeforce. “Exogalactic”. That means whatever is attacking is from outside the galaxy. “Strikeforce”. Well, a Strikeforce usually consists of a military force, most likely a group of individuals. (definition from Merriam-Webster). I can assume that the individuals in this case refer to ships. Multiple ships are going to attack. Putting it all together, the AI is bringing multiple ships from outside the galaxy to attack me. I need to be prepared and on the lookout to intercept them. There’s also the part that to know what exostrike means, you need to know that it’s short for Exogalactic Strikeforce. We know that, but as I said above, new players don’t. I doubt any new player looking at exostrike for the first time will be able to figure out what the “exo” refers to. They’ll think it’s just some fancy way to say strike in AI War 2. Which is 100% not the case. The last reason is about the actual catalyst for the change. I went back and read the Discord conversation about the name change. The whole foundation of the name change is because Exogalactic and Extragalactic were confusing players. BUT, with the "Galactic " name change, Extragalactic no longer exists. Think about it this way: Suppose there are letters representing Exogalactic ( uppercase A) and Extragalactic (lowercase a). So you have A and a meaning two different things. People can be confused by this. You change it so now "C" takes the place of "a", making "C" represent Galactic. But "A" was also a problem, so at the same time, you change "A" to "B" and now "B" represents Exostrike. So you went from (A and a) to (B and C), when only one letter needed to be changed (A and B) or (B and a). You solved both problems at the same time. But the *problem* with that, is both problems are reliant on the other existing. If A no longer exists, there's no reason to change a. Likewise for the other way around. If a no longer exists, there's no reason to change A. Both terms were changed at the same time, resulting in a solution to a nonexistent problem. |
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New players will absolutely know that "Exostrike" means "Exogalactic Strikeforce" because all the tooltips say "The AI is launching an Exostrike (aka Exogalactic Strikeforce) against you" The goal was not to remove the name "Exogalactic Strikeforce" but to give a concise way for people to say it that's standardized. If you just say "exo", well there are a number of Exogalactic things. So Exostrike means "Exogalactic Strikeforce", and its short enough to fit in the Notifications. |
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Tooltip space does matter a lot to me, so keeping away from having 100-character names for things is something that I do like to avoid if we can. Some of our stuff does get to being something like a 30 character prefix, but when there are ways to avoid that, that's great. The faction name being long but now being replaced from other data that was redundant let the information density stay about the same, but improved the meaning of the information. Anyhow, that's mostly about the Extragalactic War thing, and I think we're hopefully all on the same page now with that. When it comes to Exostrike versus Exogalactic Strikeforce, I think that Ovalcircle's points are actually extremely valid. These are also only written in tooltips that are not super long. I agree that people will continue to shorten those to Exos, but Exostrike just sounds slightly wrong in my head, and I don't think we're actually saving valuable space. And we lose that thematic-ness. While I am MAJORLY in favor of concision, I think that this is a case where the longer name is good. Intra-galactic Coordinator is one that I find painful and would rather rename, just because it's awkward and it is hard to derive meaning from it. But it's not a priority for me, and IGC itself is a good acronym. Cheers. |
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If you'd like to make changes in here go for it. I wash my hands of this whole problem. I am innocent of Exostrike's blood; it is your responsibility. |
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This seems to have been resolved |
- Anonymous
