Long term goals
CA exists only because of the interest of developers. Interest of many developers hugely depends on interested of players. For that reason CA's primary goal at this point is to ensure stable, lasting and growing player base.
1.) Improve CA GUI
GUI must be easy to understand for newcomers and easy to use for pros with enough customization and high performance. GUI must also look nice and uniform. Atm each widget implements its own visual style, method of moving around the screen etc.
This gives high boost with lasting effect (newcomers more likely to stay/understand CA).
Progress: GUI is nearly finished, we need command menu and bugfixes
2.) Rename CA and change in-community advertising/pose
Current name, being too similar to BA causes unrealistic expectation in players and prevents many from trying what they percieve as improved BA. Current lobby advertisting strategy, while having decent success rate seems to alienate a lot of players. AdLines should imo be dropped and instead replaced with simple "join CA <screenshotlink>". Picture is worth thousand words. We should also stop posing as inherently superior mod, and stop engaging in lengthy debates.
New name should also address other complaint - that we update too often. We should improve SD system to allow different naming for stable releases. Like "Robocracy 1.0". This step can also include BA PlanetWars round to get higher coverage among existing spring players.
3.) Get rid of major remaining OTA content
OTA content prevents us from breaching barriers of spring community. Most obvious models should be replaced asap. If we still have few hidden OTA textures or sounds, its reasonably safe to go ahead.
4) Prepare improved tutorial or single player
To appeal to newcomers outside spring, we need more advanced tutorial or single player campaign. We can either extend nubtron or prepare few simple tutorial missions. We should also prepare some simple "play single player" presets for lobby.
Progress: Missions are abandoned, upgrade nubtron and prepare chicken startscripts
Make a video tutorial instead. Requires no scripting, is effective, does not require code maintenance, will never crash. -quantum
5) Prepare frontface website
We need new central point outside Spring portal for new players to gather and read basic info about CA. Site should contain best media we can obtain, guides, in-depth tutorials etc. This includes major improvements to planetwars.
Progress: frontface is nearly done at http://zero-k.info/
6) Prepare custom installer and lobby that hides other mods
This step might be controversial, but at least initially, we need lobby that has other mods hidden by default. This can be done using some advanced settings in Tasclient/Springlobby that can be turned off by players. Reason for this is simple - if people see most other people playing BA, they will join it too. In the absence of information, people follow crowd.
Progress: SD now has lobby capability/quickmatch and can be used to hide other mods in release.
7) Start advertising outside community
Once previous steps are done, we can finally start properly advertising. This includes:
- exchange banners (traffic generated by planetwars)
- installer uploaded to popular free/shareware/gaming/mod sites
- reviews submitted to local web based gaming magazines - most accept high quality user reviews
