While these fine people tip toe around the subject, Alex would you consider letting us test it for you?
We can help find bug, and helpfully report them:)
Thank you, I appreciate the thought!
One issue there is that to get useful gameplay feedback, the gameplay has to be tuned to the point where that's possible, and that's usually the last steps before a release. And you know there'd be gameplay feedback regardless
Likewise with already-known-but-not-yet-fixed bugs.
Development is kind of a rolling process where work on one feature overlaps with another, and most often there isn't a good point to cut a build and say the things in it are mostly done, never mind fun to play. Instead, feature X is halfway finished, feature Y is starting to be worked on, and there are still a few bugs to iron out from feature Z which was "finished" before X but was broken by it. And none of them are balanced in a "makes for fun gameplay" way.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that cutting a build at some random point is extremely unlikely to produce anything I'd dare call a game.
That aside, I'd say the period after a release and before a hotfix is exactly that, and it's really the first point where I feel comfortable making a release public. (I have thought about asking a
few people to give it a whirl a bit early - probably modders, since that seems like it'd be a mutually beneficial arrangement - but haven't leaned strongly one way or another.)
I have an old question that may have been answered already,
>Friendly fire incidents will cause a reputation drop depending on the severity
>Very serious incidents will drop reputation all the way to hostile
?Will computer controlled ships on my side be cause'n much friendly fire, or is this only based on my own dumb errors?
They may, but it's pretty unlikely - no more so than friendly fire already is between your own ships - and seems just about impossible to get to the "hostile" level. I mean, I can imagine a modded weapon one-shotting an allied Onslaught by accident, but aside from things like that? I'd say it's functionally limited to your own mistakes.