Jokes on you, I already do all of these things.
Does it help at least?
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tl;dr = Make your Jira board (or alternative) public with ALL Issues, yes even the Bugs and Spikes, your code and product roadmap and commercial roadmap (consoles, mostly), and everything else is already open - what's stopping the product managers from radical transparency?
And as an aside, since I'm already ticking a few people off, may as well weigh in. I think I have in a similar vein somewhere else but I don't remember. Up front: I'm not a game dev, never have been, never will be. I've built software for security companies and as part of various security teams - mostly cloud-based ****: lots of Docker, K8s, Python, Go, Linux. I don't know C#/.NET or any of that Microsoft ****, but I do know what it's like being a stupid grunt SDE or DevOps engineer at the bottom of totem pole getting my cheeks clapped by product and project managers and sweaty SDE Managers who haven't wrote a line of code in 10 years.
I think those core, boots-on-the-ground developers we see participating here are definitely doing a good job. I know we don't get exposure to many of the developers, but the ones we do are very opinionated and open to feedback. No need to tag them, everyone knows who they are, and I think a special shoutout is due to graphics and 3D design folks who put in so much work into Scenes for them to be barely utilized. They're probably even lower on the totem pole, sucking hubcaps off of a rim while being shot at by PMs equipped with rifles (Someone get that reference, please). While I would love for them to actually put in **** we all want like just BASIC Warband stuff that was on the consoles: "Change weapons to blunt", "Go Attack THOSE ****ers over there", Manhunters, Alliances / Peace Treaties that mean something, etc.
All that to say (and the reason I mentioned my background) is it means that the middle management / product managers who are managing the roadmap and dependencies are dedicated to doing God knows what. I like the optimizations, I get having to do bug-fixes and expanding mod tools and localization, but what I do not get is we get these large "plans" and the Devs who take point on the areas will be willfully obtuse about features and we never get dates. We don't even gate a rank order. The CMs are doing the best they can, it's 2 of them to 1000+ Suggestions per quarter and everything else in the popular threads (Beta branch threads, Rebellion feedback, other trending threads in General/SP forums. That is my major issue. When I did work in product management with AWS we had a customer advisory group and a Slack channel that we would give updates on our roadmap. We had quarterly dates, and if things slipped or other features were being included, we would tell people. We had analysts and "customer success managers" curate requested features, we constantly forked in open source additions to our tool, and more. I mention that because I know for a FACT that building a giant global-scale security tool that ingests 10B (at the time) events a day across Commericial, China, Secret and GovCloud regions is MUCH harder and intensive that feedback on a video game, which writes itself.
The "point" in that wall of text is
for the love of God and baklavas, at least give us a quarterly roadmap fully featured, Callum even teased "other" stuff was being developed. And from what we've seen of the "surprise" features is they SUCK. Like the taking -30 relationships for killing a Lord in battle, the inability to command your troops during the most crucial phase of EVERY historical battle (the rout), taking away banner pasting, expanding scenes but with nothing to do. Before, I was sympathetic to what a lot of the Devs and CMs were saying that they're damned-if-they-do-damned-if-they-don't and the easy solution is tell your engineering managers or product managers to externalize their Jira board or GitHub board publicly, and let people follow.
Even if I saw a major Issue in Jira continue to slide, I would be fine, because at least it's transparent (maybe a little annoyed if it's something I really want). The entire codebase is modifiable with DNSpy or other reversers, the mod tools and XML are always easily tooled with, and I am sure that someone has already reverse whatever server solution is used but I bet it would be Amazon Gamelift, or whatever the **** Google calls their services if not something similar. I guess I just don't get THAT upset because life is long, boring, and painful and I learned from the better part of a decade of my job being getting shot at that you need to let stuff go. Not that I don't sympathize, but it is a bit of fun prodding some of you.