For everyone's benefit, here is the transcript of everything the video had to say about Forge of Empires, and my comments about it.
Q: Why do the bonuses on Great Buildings increase so slowly after level 10?
A: The thing is, the balancing is set up in a way that a Great Building is already very, very good at level 10, the bonuses it provides are very, very good. So for every level more than that, because the amount of levels you can get on a Great Building is infinite, so with every level more, the bonus can only increase by a little, because otherwise it would just break the game, Great Buildings would become way too powerful. But here is something that most people don't realize, that is the ranking points that a Great Building provides, they increase by a huge amount for every level, so even when you don't see a huge bonus directly that a Great Building provides, your ranking will see an increase.
While this is true for many Great Buildings, some of the earlier ones become outdated even if they reach level 10. This is why few advanced players have buildings such as Colosseum or Notre Dame, they have either sold them or never built them at all. For these buildings, additional levels could have given them a new lease of life, justifying keeping them in your city, and it is a pity that this possibility has been squandered. As it is, the bonuses for additional levels are so minimal that they are simply not worth the effort. The potential of infinite levels means nothing if the benefits are so low that no one bothers to try.
As for Great Buildings providing ranking points, I did not know how much they would increase every level, but now that I do I still don't give a damn. Ranking points from Great Buildings, no matter how high their level, are still insignificant compared to points earned from battles, and even if they were not, the rankings have been permanently tainted by the failure to respond to the infinite two-wave battles exploit. No one in their right mind is ever going to level a Great Building for ranking.
Q: Will we ever get the chance to rotate buildings around?
A: I'm sorry but I am going to have to say no, basically because our 3D buildings are flat. This means their backsides are not textured, so we can't rotate them freely in every direction. Also we could not just flip the image because the shadows are pre-rendered on the images, this would basically mean that the shadows would fall into different directions, and actually give the impression that Forge of Empires takes place in a weird alternate dimension where the Earth has two Suns. So yea no, sorry, but we think actually that the fact that you have a challenge of finding useable places for your new buildings is part of the fun.
It would be possible to generate flipped images by going to the original 3D files and changing the direction of the light, but even though that would not require too much work, I agree on the second reason. Not being able to rotate individual buildings is part of the challenge, though I think it would be nice to be able to rotate the entire map.
Q: So, what about the Android app?
A: Ah, we always hear this question, we are working on it for quite a while now, it already looks pretty impressive, but these things take time. It will come out at one point, but we want to make sure that it is a good quality product, so you just have to wait a little longer.
When the iPad app came out it was surprisingly good, considering the problems the browser game still suffers from, but it was not and still is not perfect. Take your time.
Q: What exactly is the new Hardware Acceleration feature and why do we need it?
A: First let me start by saying that in a modern computer your graphics card is far more powerful than your processor, but three and a half years ago when we started developing Forge of Empires Flash did not have the capabilities of using the graphics card, it only supported the CPU at that time. So as your cities grew bigger and bigger especially in the later eras, the current graphics engine could not always deliver the performance you would like the game to have. So this is why we went back to the drawing board basically and started developing a new graphics engine completely from scratch, and decided to deliver this feature early as an optional feature to you, the players. The new engine is basically far more powerful than the old engine, and will enable us to put even more animations inside the game without decreasing the performance.
Bull. I have still not heard of a single player who would actually have benefited from Hardware Acceleration, all it has achieved so far is to introduce new bugs and waste development effort. Additional processing power is no solution for the basic problem of bad and inefficient code. It is not the size of the cities that is the problem, prior to version 1.27 my city was running reasonably well, but the moment that update was implemented, game performance took a major hit from which it has never recovered. My recommendation would be to go back to the 1.27 changelog, figure out which change was responsible for killing game performance, and fix the problem. I don't want to see any more animations making the game even less playable until the speed issues are definitely sorted.
Q: Why don't you answer us in the forums directly?
A: Because I'm busy making videos? No, there is actually quite some truth in it, we don't have the time. There's plenty of forums, we run the game in like 23 languages I think, and we don't have the time to answer in all those forums directly. Also, by answering we kind of commit to the thread and we kind of have to stay alert and keep following it and keep answering it, and that's just time we don't have. But that does not mean we are not aware of the issues, we read the forums very well, we are in close contact with all the community managers, they report to us on a regular basis, so we are aware of all the feedback that comes, of the good feedback, the bad feedback, we are aware of all the things that people want to improve and we take them all into account.
If you don't have time to talk in the forum, how is it that you have the time to make these videos? It would be much quicker to answer questions in written form. I get that you don't have the time to participate in conversations, but it should be possible for you to provide written answers to questions from time to time.
Q: What does the guy in front of the monastery actually do?
A: I was wondering about that myself, so I went very close to the monitor, I looked at it very well and I think he's pressing books.
I hope you're proud of wasting our time with this.
One final comment, the quality of the subtitles needs work. The timing is frequently off and many lines pass by without enough time to read them, and that blunder at 5:08 is just plain embarrassing.