Thank you for moving some of my edits to the Colony Building guide. I was planning to edit that article as well.
I'm aware that some of my additions to the midgame guide were already out of scope, but I did not want to start editing a second article in parallel.
If you keep moving things, please be aware that there might be more, but I will help with this in the future.
The lines between what goes into a "mid-game" guide and not are somewhat blurry. What is "mid-game", anyway?
I'd say midgame is after you have settled down, become fully self-sufficient, and built basic facilities. The objective now would be to expand your base, complete research and upgrade your equipment as opposed to being focused on survival.
Yes, I know, it's what I wrote into the introduction myself :). My question was more rhetorical than not, because the term is so blurry and not even a meta-game related word.
What's "mid game" on an icesheet, for example? When you have your first paste dispenser? Hydroponics room?
It is very easy to become self-sufficient with basic facilities in a strict sense of the word. However, in many people's minds that would still be very "early game". So it's definitely not the definition of the term.
I don't mind using the term for a guide, because it's intuitive to most people what it means. All I'm saying is that it does not make much sense to draw boundary lines around the word and apply it pedantically.
The changes you've made were good though, I will put more thought into it and reorganize things further. Thanks for the help!
If I may be a little pedantic :P : Think it might be better to drop intermediate and advanced, and lowercase the titles (like in the heading of this topic), so it's easier to link to them in-text in other articles without it looking weird with uppercase words. I'm not sure why German-type grammar enters the English usage so much.
On the first point, we don't have an advanced midgame guide or an intermediate (or basic) endgame guide, so it seems like butter on bacon, if that term translates well. As you say above, there isn't a clear dividing line between them, but given the sheer size of them I do think it makes sense so separate some of the overall content.
Personally I would prefer a good bit of this to go into separate articles on all these various features or things, but I kinda ran out of steam earlier on trying to implement some pretty big changes, when the extensions and underlying wiki technology kept throwing bugs and not acting like it was supposed to. That way we could have genuine guide content in the guides, and explanations of features etc in individual articles.
Thank you for the wonderful contributions Siggboy -- it's great to see lots of activity in here again :)
Yes, I agree on all points. More stuff needs to be extracted into separate articles. In fact, I've just done that by -- very pedantically -- editing /wiki/Comfort (so I won't have to write a short novel about that stat in the guide section).
There are many other areas where the wiki is a little, um, undermaintained at the moment. But I get the point of "running out of steam", it is very work intensive.
With regards to German-type grammar: as a German myself I can assure you it is not easy for us Germans to keep Germanisms out of our English, because the two languages are at the same time quite similar, and then not at all. If there's German-type grammar, it was probably written by a German... please forgive us (for this, and also for those Wars, LUL :).
Now here are the types of "guides" that make sense in my opinion:
The division into early, mid- and late-game doesn't really make that much sense. Of course there could be an article talking about the reactor powering event, or mid-game caravaning, but just covering "the mid-game" or "the end-game" is a little arbitrary, and most players will probably not know what to expect from such a guide. It is too abstract.
The rule for a good guide title (and scope) should be this: Most players should know, just by looking at the title, and maybe reading the first paragraph, if the guide is useful for them or not.
Oh, sorry, I didn't know you were German :) I merely meant the surprisingly common practice currently of uppercasing substantives to give them more importance. It looks a bit strange (imo), and I see it many places, not just on this wiki. It was a tangent, so sorry about that. Practically, however, it makes it easier to use links in articles if the page is titled with lowercase letters instead of Crashed Ship Part or whatever it may be (I've not checked that page, it's just an example).
I agree with what you write about the guides. I actually meant it the other way (skipping intermediate and advanced), but you make a better case. The separation between mid-game and end-game is abstract or not clear, so it's probably better to use intermediate and advanced instead. Kinda the same issue there with not-clear-dividing-lines, but still better than mid-game and such. What really is mid-game anyway? It will be different for all players, and whether they want to launch the ship, or just set up a basic base and then go again.
There was so much I wanted to do when I started out here, including a total redesign of the look and frontpage, but the work was too much, I got frustrated with all the issues, and then ran out of steam and sort of gave up. Maybe I'll try again later, but right now I'm enjoying playing the game instead :D
I don't know when I will run out of steam, but there must be some low hanging fruits here, that would immediately greatly improve the wiki.
A better front page is not a lot of work, it just needs some coordination between the key people involved in the effort.
My experience was that I could not find a lot of things by going through the front page, making it less than useful. In many cases it's just easier to use Google anyway. The front page must be very compact and to the point, and guide new people to the few most important locations.
I think the most common way that people use the wiki is to look up hard facts about thing X -- for example: How does beauty work? What does the empty "Ship" menu do? How long does plant Y need to grow?
That is the stuff that needs to be accessible, complete and correct in the wiki. The guides are important too, but guide information is usually found by simply Googling, and then going through Reddit/Twitch/Youtube/Wiki depending on what turns up.
I, for a fact, have not discovered information because the front page was so useful in guiding me there. I usually type a word into the search box, and hope that there is a page for it. For example, when I type "Beauty", I want to end up at the page that gives me all the relevant facts.
By the way, there is no need to apologize. I agree that capitalizing too many words is very bad style in English. Germans know that, however, I don't think capitalization happens because Germans are used to it. When we use WhatsApp or online chat we usually type in all lowercase anyway. It's just easier.