for me it is. it is very, very good, but perhaps not to everyone's taste. but well worth £30 if you are into this type of game, in my opinion.
you can try it for free, there is a demo on the website. it is quite large

Thank you for pointing that out, i will try it and decide if it's worth it.

That's largely my point, if the developers don't know what alpha, beta and release candidates are, then that's not a good sign. A designation of .17 is typically alpha, it typically indicates that it's not feature complete or stable and as such an alpha release. A beta release will usually have a larger number like .9 and be feature complete, and largely stable, but not necessarily complete.

Regardless of how slavishly you stick to the convention, completely skipping a release candidate phase is a sign that the developer doesn't know what they're doing as the RC is the last chance to catch bugs before the 1.0 release. Often times the RC will wind up being the final release, but not always, sometimes you have to go through a couple.

This is how professionals and people asking for money in exchange for a product are supposed to deal with this. It communicates to the user what state the code is in and if they're skipping milestones, that's not a good sign.

This wasn't really a common problem before about 10 or 15 years ago. People knew what the convention was and they used it to communicate what state their code was to other programmers and random users. About that time, you got asinine things like Google's practice of having huge numbers of major version bumps without cause and various other deviant numbering practices that just served to confuse the users. Before that, they might refer to something by a year, but there would also be a version number that followed the convention in most cases because it's a really helpful way of keeping track of changes between versions and how closely you need to check when evaluating upgrades to newer versions.

so.. your problem is not what the game is, how complete it is, or how good it is, but they did not number the updates in a system you approve of. got you. so if they did number the updates as you want, but the game is exactly the same, then you would have been fine with it...

Version number is nothing.
You could assign any number to what ever version you want.
For example, ver 3 -> ver 3.1 -> ver 3.14 -> 3.141.

Many commercial stable releases have version numbers that are not 1.0.
As long as developers know what they are doing, they could make any version number a stable release.

It makes sense to me. If they did the price change at the release of 1.0, people would just buy it the night before. Then people who have heard of and bought it because of the release announcement will feel like they've really been ripped off. Remember Botanicula debacle?
I think raising the price in advance of the final release is wise. I agree that it's a bit steep though, I feel like $20 should probably be its final price. It's a great game, but $30 feels really steep especially if they stick to their "no sales" policy.
I kind of suspect that policy is to stop people waiting, I think after it's been out for a while and sales slow they'll put it on sale at some point.
It diverges significantly from Minecraft and Terraria once you get going, the entire point of the game is automating the crafting and designing efficient factories. Much more like a management/simulation game, but one in which you have an avatar and have to start things off with a bit of hand crafting.

TeX, which will become pi on the death of Knuth. LaTeX uses e (2.71828...) the same way. I suppose you already knew that.

And yeah, version numbers are meaningless, although if you have an API, and don't follow the "major number changes indicate incompatible API changes" rule, I will hate you for it (even if you just use the "we're still alpha" excuse in perpetuity). While I used to "know" what alpha and beta meant, it is not what is commonly understood these days, and so I consider that arbitrary as well and don't use those words any more. I don't even know what "complete" means, as some games make major changes after I've already finished and uninstalled them.

Oops, my bad. Still even at $14M is a good budget. Hell $1M is a good budget, assuming you aren't hiring ridiculously expensive actors, artists, and are in California where it costs an arm and a leg to even live there (not that i'd want to at present... To think i applied for blizzard some years ago)

Yeah, i got part of that.

Reminds me of a couple idle games like reactor idle, connecting things together to create a larger machine...

Going just into it I've crafted items, mined stone/coal/iron, and created a forge & mining rig. You need to power the machinery, adding a certain level of extra work and maintenance to it.

I'll have to give it a good hour or two to decide if it's really something i want to play or not.

Spoilers:









You're not stuck with coal power forever, don't think you're going to spend the entire time running around filling things with fuel. ;)

Sounds to me like you're unfamiliar with some version numbering conventions. They don't work like decimal numbers.

You're reading 0.17 as being smaller than 0.9, it's not. For something that reads like you're reading 0.17, you'd usually write it 0.1.7. They're currently on 0.16.36. The last part will be bug fixes, while the 16 means it's the 16th major release (i.e. features added etc.).

And as others have pointed out, numbers are entirely arbitrary.

The 17 means there have been 16 major versions before that, not that it's 17% complete.

I figured 'fuel' was more than just coal :P Although mining and adding 1000 coal to everything would keep from having to refill for a while...

It's certainly one approach!

not to mention you can automate the coal re-filling process.... including re-filling the coal mining rigs.

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Ah yes, I forgot about that. :P