Post by pendell on Jun 21, 2014 10:44:08 GMT -5
Okay, I voted too hard but with a qualification: The TUTORIAL is too hard.
Trese Brothers games are created to be challenging, fair enough. But the tutorial scenario should NOT be challenging. It should be a simple scenario to allow the user to get their feet wet and get familiar with the controls. I shouldn't be fighting an unending wave of aliens in the tutorial scenario.
As an example of what I'm talking about, consider a tutorial scenario you did really well, the Templar Assault tutorial: Your hand is held throughout those first five missions, and while it IS possible to lose it would have to be because you're not following the directions. Stay on the railroad tracks, keep your hands inside the ride at all times, you'll come through fine.
But as it is, there are too many gaps in the database. I was running out of money. And yes, there is the library which I found but walls of text are only so useful to a beginner. I had to go online to GUESS at what I could do to improve money.
It took me two hours of scrolling these boards to find that possibly one of the problems is that I had colonized too many worlds -- that for my first wave I should have concentrated on yellow and red stars. Maybe if I'd dug around in the library I'd have eventually found that information, but I never did. Not a clue.
A person should go online for hints and tips. They shouldn't need to go online to uncover basic game mechanics, such as the fact that yellow stars are more likely to yield good planets than blue ones.
Also, my vaunted Templar advisor had exactly NOTHING to say about combat in space or about the xenos, when I kind of think that would be her area of expertise.
There were all kinds of surprises. I don't know the difference between fighters or carriers. In every other space game I've played, such as Spaceward Ho! [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ariton.spacewardho] , which I strongly encourage the developers to look at, you only need a colony ship or transport if you want to occupy a world. You can blast any undefended planet into rubble from space even with your starting scouts.
So you can guess how surprised I was when I orbited an undefended alien colony with four warships and could do NOTHING to it. NOTHING at all. Again, I didn't know how to dig this out of the onboard library,so again I had to go online to find that if I wanted to do anything about that alien colony, I had to go five branches up the ship tech tree before I'd even have baseline capability to do so. NO other space game does that. Not Master of Orion, not Pax Imperia, none of them. It is a considerable divergence from what is 'intuitive' in a space game [i.e. what everyone else does], and there was no warning whatsoever until I'm in orbit looking stupidly at the screen and wondering about my lack of options.
Well, I'd spent quite a bit of my development time in the planetary tree trying to find solutions to the faction conflicts. I realized I would have to do a lot of work to get up that tech tree, and started on it. But I never got there, because again I didn't have enough money, because again I didn't know what I was doing. And again, I don't know what EXACTLY a solar war does or what EXACTLY a trade embargo does, though I am familiar with it from ST.
So there are two basic issues:
1) Again, a user should go online to get hints and tips from other players. A user should not have to go online to uncover basic game mechanics, and do so by spending an hour trawling through the message boards.
2) A user should not experience much confusion in the tutorial scenario. And a user definitely should not LOSE the tutorial unless they are deliberately trying to do so.
So here are my concrete suggestions:
1) You have 8 kinds of alien AI, right? Why not add a ninth specifically for the tutorial? Their job is to occupy their starting worlds, but after that they do nothing. They are always passive, never aggressive. They build a certain fixed number of ships, and after they are built they create no more. Their purpose is not to challenge their player. Their purpose is to serve as a live-fire exercises, paper targets on a firing range for the player to get familiar with his/her metaphorical weapons.
Because combat is now a fixed encounter, you can add a great deal more templar advice about every aspect of the scenario, from how to attack a planet to how to fight in space, triggered whenever the user enters a particular square on the board. Perhaps the aliens can also take specific actions based on specific events.
2) You might even consider adding a second tutorial scenario called 'defense against aliens'. This would also be a fixed scenario with a prebuilt human civilization with planets and warships , facing off with a wall of aliens. Again, this is a fixed combat encounter and the templar adviser can discuss every aspect of the defense. Once the user understands how to fend off an invasion in a canned scenario, they'll be ready to do it properly in a full game.
After these two initial tutorial scenarios are done, the gloves come off and the user is encouraged to play a real game, when all the handholding is gone.
3) Make every aspect of the library available to the user from the start. I realize the information may be overwhelming, but sometimes the new user WANTS knowledge of every aspect of the game. So perhaps, instead of hiding information altogether, you could make links to previously hidden information a subdued color so the user knows they probably don't need to know this yet.
These are my suggestions. I'm not saying you have to do them, because I know you're on a limited budget and what I am proposing is a lot of work for a small team. But they are what *I* think would make the game more accessible to a beginner. Maybe some of these ideas will have value.
Oh, yes, Spaceward Ho! Does a terrible job of onboard help as well, since you have to dig up their game manual online as well [http://www.deltatao.com/ho/ho/] . Thing is ... this is a game that was originally written in the 1980s, and is a port to android. So the people who play it are people who played it on their Macintosh thirty years ago and don't need a tutorial or an introduction. But ST 4x is a new game intended to win converts. And I believe more people will give it five star reviews if they are not confused by the game.
For myself I am deliberately holding off on a review because I WANT to give ST 4x a five-star review, but at this point I could only give it four. Still, if a review now is more useful than a better review later, I'd be willing to put one up.
Respectfully,
Brian P.
Trese Brothers games are created to be challenging, fair enough. But the tutorial scenario should NOT be challenging. It should be a simple scenario to allow the user to get their feet wet and get familiar with the controls. I shouldn't be fighting an unending wave of aliens in the tutorial scenario.
As an example of what I'm talking about, consider a tutorial scenario you did really well, the Templar Assault tutorial: Your hand is held throughout those first five missions, and while it IS possible to lose it would have to be because you're not following the directions. Stay on the railroad tracks, keep your hands inside the ride at all times, you'll come through fine.
But as it is, there are too many gaps in the database. I was running out of money. And yes, there is the library which I found but walls of text are only so useful to a beginner. I had to go online to GUESS at what I could do to improve money.
It took me two hours of scrolling these boards to find that possibly one of the problems is that I had colonized too many worlds -- that for my first wave I should have concentrated on yellow and red stars. Maybe if I'd dug around in the library I'd have eventually found that information, but I never did. Not a clue.
A person should go online for hints and tips. They shouldn't need to go online to uncover basic game mechanics, such as the fact that yellow stars are more likely to yield good planets than blue ones.
Also, my vaunted Templar advisor had exactly NOTHING to say about combat in space or about the xenos, when I kind of think that would be her area of expertise.
There were all kinds of surprises. I don't know the difference between fighters or carriers. In every other space game I've played, such as Spaceward Ho! [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ariton.spacewardho] , which I strongly encourage the developers to look at, you only need a colony ship or transport if you want to occupy a world. You can blast any undefended planet into rubble from space even with your starting scouts.
So you can guess how surprised I was when I orbited an undefended alien colony with four warships and could do NOTHING to it. NOTHING at all. Again, I didn't know how to dig this out of the onboard library,so again I had to go online to find that if I wanted to do anything about that alien colony, I had to go five branches up the ship tech tree before I'd even have baseline capability to do so. NO other space game does that. Not Master of Orion, not Pax Imperia, none of them. It is a considerable divergence from what is 'intuitive' in a space game [i.e. what everyone else does], and there was no warning whatsoever until I'm in orbit looking stupidly at the screen and wondering about my lack of options.
Well, I'd spent quite a bit of my development time in the planetary tree trying to find solutions to the faction conflicts. I realized I would have to do a lot of work to get up that tech tree, and started on it. But I never got there, because again I didn't have enough money, because again I didn't know what I was doing. And again, I don't know what EXACTLY a solar war does or what EXACTLY a trade embargo does, though I am familiar with it from ST.
So there are two basic issues:
1) Again, a user should go online to get hints and tips from other players. A user should not have to go online to uncover basic game mechanics, and do so by spending an hour trawling through the message boards.
2) A user should not experience much confusion in the tutorial scenario. And a user definitely should not LOSE the tutorial unless they are deliberately trying to do so.
So here are my concrete suggestions:
1) You have 8 kinds of alien AI, right? Why not add a ninth specifically for the tutorial? Their job is to occupy their starting worlds, but after that they do nothing. They are always passive, never aggressive. They build a certain fixed number of ships, and after they are built they create no more. Their purpose is not to challenge their player. Their purpose is to serve as a live-fire exercises, paper targets on a firing range for the player to get familiar with his/her metaphorical weapons.
Because combat is now a fixed encounter, you can add a great deal more templar advice about every aspect of the scenario, from how to attack a planet to how to fight in space, triggered whenever the user enters a particular square on the board. Perhaps the aliens can also take specific actions based on specific events.
2) You might even consider adding a second tutorial scenario called 'defense against aliens'. This would also be a fixed scenario with a prebuilt human civilization with planets and warships , facing off with a wall of aliens. Again, this is a fixed combat encounter and the templar adviser can discuss every aspect of the defense. Once the user understands how to fend off an invasion in a canned scenario, they'll be ready to do it properly in a full game.
After these two initial tutorial scenarios are done, the gloves come off and the user is encouraged to play a real game, when all the handholding is gone.
3) Make every aspect of the library available to the user from the start. I realize the information may be overwhelming, but sometimes the new user WANTS knowledge of every aspect of the game. So perhaps, instead of hiding information altogether, you could make links to previously hidden information a subdued color so the user knows they probably don't need to know this yet.
These are my suggestions. I'm not saying you have to do them, because I know you're on a limited budget and what I am proposing is a lot of work for a small team. But they are what *I* think would make the game more accessible to a beginner. Maybe some of these ideas will have value.
Oh, yes, Spaceward Ho! Does a terrible job of onboard help as well, since you have to dig up their game manual online as well [http://www.deltatao.com/ho/ho/] . Thing is ... this is a game that was originally written in the 1980s, and is a port to android. So the people who play it are people who played it on their Macintosh thirty years ago and don't need a tutorial or an introduction. But ST 4x is a new game intended to win converts. And I believe more people will give it five star reviews if they are not confused by the game.
For myself I am deliberately holding off on a review because I WANT to give ST 4x a five-star review, but at this point I could only give it four. Still, if a review now is more useful than a better review later, I'd be willing to put one up.
Respectfully,
Brian P.
I think its just the small, cramped quarters that makes it so hard to really build an effective fleet before the Xeno chew your arms off.
(now I understand how random AI placement can get.) To top it off, I run to within 5 squares of an alien planet AND ship and I do not get attacked for over 10 more turns (and that was turn 140s mind you). Also, the first xeno invasion was about 15 ships and when i blew them all away, they up and left. same for the second invasion almost 80 turns into the future, plus around 10 more ships. Take this with a grain of salt haha, I may just be lucky. 
Thanks for the hard work!!