Memo to developers: When you create an ingame tutorial, do everything you can to help the player.
Telling me to move my troops to a region “three to the west” isn’t very helpful when the number of possible routes to the west is greater than one. It doesn’t hurt to highlight the key region, or at least make the place names really large since using county names for regions is a bad idea. They generally don’t match the big city, which will be the first thing novices notice. Unless of course the city name is blocked by the troops you have sitting there.
And if success in the tutorial requires me to follow specific steps, don’t let me continue until I have actually completed those steps. Having a tutorial box say “You have detected a Confederate Army” when, in fact, I haven’t because I missed a step, is just confusing. The tutorial boxes have a lot of very small print, so it’s easy to miss something. In short, don’t tell me what I am supposed to see on my screen, tell me what I do see.
Still, I’m getting that Birth of America feeling. And that’s a good thing.
Skip the tutorial. It is confusing. Try the Bull Run scenario and then do a few turns with one of the campaign games. It will fall into place quickly enough. This is the best computer wargame I’ve ever played and I have played almost all of them. As a strategic simulation of the Civil War it is superb. This is an example of turn based wargaming at its best, and I hope the developers make quite a profit in order to ecourage them to develop more games using this system.
Old game reviewer habit – always play the tutorials. Always read the manual. Even if I know how things work. Plus they changed enough stuff that I hoped some of it would be covered in the tutorial – most of it wasn’t.
My initial impressions of the game proper are positive, but it’s much too soon for me to say it’s the best wargame I’ve ever played.
“but it’s much too soon for me to say it’s the best wargame I’ve ever played.”
Agreed. Many games can have warts that are only revealed with lots of play. One thing I like about AGEOD is the amount of work they put into a game after release. Since the release of the game there have been three patches and the developers have been very responsive to input on the forums. This comes as no surprise to me since I observed the same thing after the release of BOA. This makes me fairly confident that any problems in gameplay revealed over time will be dealt with by AGEOD.
As an old time boardgamer who first subscribed to Strategy & Tactics in 1975, both BOA and American Civil War remind me quite a bit of the best of strategic level boardgames, without the tedium of the bookkeeping. The maps have very much a boardgame feel, as do the counters, and the attention to detail, down to a patch changing Sherman’s hair to the right color, has a very SPI feel circa 1980. Although more complicated and much larger than BOA, I still find it very playable.
AGEOD are working on one theater one year campaigns, and I think that feature should help immerse players into the game. The tutorials do need to be redone and extended, since there is much of importance that they do not cover, and I think what you’ve experienced could be a stumbling block for new players.
I had the same feeling of slight confusion when I played the Birth of America tutorials and found that I wasn’t seeing the same things the tutorial told me to look for – at least not in the right order, not to mention rivers or towns that either weren’t in the same area as the tutorial stated or seemed to be named something else. Still, I overcame that little hurdle but I do think it odd when the tutorial has to be overcome and the tutorial ends up feeling like maybe a tutorial should be included for the tutorial. Or something like that.
Troy Says:
April 21st, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Old game reviewer habit – always play the tutorials. Always read the manual. Even if I know how things work. Plus they changed enough stuff that I hoped some of it would be covered in the tutorial – most of it wasn’t.
I do that even when I’m not going to write a review on something. It took me until my third time starting for me to actually bypass all the boring training missions in TIE Fighter. I still read the manual every time I restart to refresh my memory on the controls.