What's wrong with current BBGs?

[JonO]

It sounds like a tutorial - either written, or provided on-line - would be a good idea. Take the player through the basics with lots of screenshots.

Oh, God! Another tutorial - just what the gaming world needs. ACK!!

Make the game intuitive, and the player can figure it out, without the game losing players to deficient tutorials, before they ever even try the game, proper.

I don't hate tutorials, per se. Rather, when I sign up for a game, I just want to start playing. This is most likely to happen if, one, the games interface is tutorial, and two, the game's design is intuitive. Rulebooks and game manuals are all fine and dandy things, of course, but a game that is not intuitive, at all, can become "learn-able" via the long, scenic route.

Nobody ever makes a user RTFM, but if he doesn't, and asks questions of the game moderator that are answered in the tutorial, the GM has the option of simply send a link to it rather than answering the question, which'll save everybody time. And, I believe that there are players who prefer to read a tutorial before filling out their first turn.

I agree wholeheartedly about making the choices as intuitive as possible, however that can only make sure that the player's orders are correctly formatted and machine-readable. A tutorial can have a line it in like "You can, of course, order the other planets in the system to be colonized, but you are better off sending your scouts to the nearest star systems." And then display a graphic that shows the method of sending scouts to the nearest systems.

One of the advantages of a tutorial in this case is Ram could produce it a lot more quickly, in time for Galaxy Alpha players to take advantage of it, than he can code an entirely new application.