This may not be practical but some kind of Quick Start Guide might help a lot of us newbies get into the game faster. The tutorial Steve is doing is great and will be very comprehensive but I could see it being quite a while before we learn enough to actually be able to play the game. Something shorter that perhaps says "Here are the 10 steps to get playing now" would be very helpful. For instance I noticed that if you let the game setup pick your research and design your ships you can start manufacturing them immediately at your shipyards. So maybe that would be step 1? However it's not clear which ships you should build first and what you should do with them after building them. So maybe step 2 is what to build and what to do with them after you build them? I'm guessing you want some kind of survey ships and resource gathering ships. Anyway if this idea makes any sense maybe some of the officers can help jumpstart us leading rates.
I can't say I really agree with this suggestion. I don't think there really is a way to 'quick start' this game because there is just so much to do and there would still be so many questions left unanswered. Sure, there are some 'quick' options using the SM interface to instantly develop technology, explore your system, survey your worlds and construct ships...these 'quick' options I feel are covered in the existing tutorials sufficiently for even my thick-head to get started. I think the community is better off if the experts put their noses to the grind-stone and just did the nasty and brutish exercise of creating one comprehensive user manual. We've all seen what a good, thick, detailed user manual looks like, and there is nothing of the sort for Aurora. Instructions, good or bad, can make or break a game. Rather, in Aurora, you have out of date and arbitrary tutorials, some general guidelines, AARs and a lot of user questions answered piecemeal throughout the forums. This is not a criticism...Aurora is free. God Bless Steve for his time, efforts and toil on this game. As I mentioned, my over-riding goal is to help...I want to write a manual, but first I need to learn how to play!
