I am playing my first game and I followed, mostly, the Tutorial, so I think I have some perspective on what you are looking for.
At the end of the Tutorial, the player is faced with many decisions and the Tutorial has left little insight as to how to proceed.
The Tutorial is a work in progress and is really just getting started. I will add more sections when I get time.
1. We have quite a few unused Research Points. Some general thoughts on where to put them would be in order. No list will be the 'right' list, but some guidelines would be useful. I tried looking at the forum on Ship Design and I basically had no idea what people were talking about. A new player needs some advice on what he is going to need in the first game year.
2. We have quite a few unused Ship points and completely unused PDC points. While the answer to #1 would go a long way toward solving the ship question, the PDC was a mystery to me. I tried looking at other player designs, but I got overwhelmed with concepts I had no clue about. Examples include magazine, troops, fighters and missles.
3. The Beam Weapon Tutorial was very thorough and helpful. Something comparable for missles would be a good idea.
4. We have to set up our industry. After the tutorial, a new player has no idea whether his immediate needs are more industrial capacity, more research capacity, more mining on Earth or components needed to set up Sol system mining.
5. The Leader interface was very confusing to me. My biggest roadblock was filling the positions for 'Fleet Headquarters'. I finally found the 'Staff Officers entry in a dropdown on the Leader Screen that worked. A quick walkthrough on filling officer positions would be helpful. It would be very easy to do after all the ships have been built in the Tutorial.
6. The Tutorial sends out ships to survey. It would be helpful if we knew what to do when we found something. Tutorials on
A. Remote Mining
B. Jump Portals
would be helpful.
Thanks, these are all good suggestions for future tutorial sections.
7. You ought to mention the 'MSSTDFMT.DLL' issue right away in the first Tutorial.
The Tutorial isn't really the place for this. Only a small percentage of users have the problem and there is an appropriate FAQ section
8. The instructions for downloading the game have some minor issues. I found the wiki link to downloading the game to be easiest. I had no problem downloading 4.75. However, the link for 4.77 is a dead end. There should be some way to direct newbies to whatever the most recent patch is and how to update from 4.75.
I didn't even know there was a Wiki download link. That will be confusing to new users as it won't make probably sense in terms of versions. The only links that should be used are those in the forum. The link to v4.77 will be dead because that is an obsolete version I have deleted. I thought I had deleted the link to it to but as I mentioned I didn't know there was one on the wiki. Some of the complaints about install instructions and broken links are now making some sense. I'll try and find those wiki download links and remove them.
Steve
