The part that's missing here is that Rome II is not a new project. The company has been working on this series of games for 25+ years now. They release them regularly and the bulk of the engine work was done years ago. The fact that they break the whole thing down and do it in isolation for every release is a mistake. They should just be iterating on top of the previous game.
> They should just be iterating on top of the previous game.
You can’t boot your whole game every time to do AI iteration. Whether or not the menu loads is completely irrelevant to your work. You don’t really want to integrate your broken shit with the currently working rest of the game either.
You can always run the AI in a separate test harness to see changes more quickly. This is what they were doing throughout development. What they weren’t doing was putting everything back together to see if the game still worked or made any sense (until the very end).
If you don’t want to check in broken AI code then don’t; that’s what branches are for. But the fact that they weren’t maintaining a working master is inexcusable.
