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potski -> RE: Road to Minsk too slow? (7/27/2021 6:25:29 PM)
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Thank you for bringing my attention to those specific pages in the Manual. I agree these are well-written and clear information how to get started in the Velikie Luki scenario. But...
- I use (and many will) the Manual as a reference guide, to look up specific information, rather than reading it start to finish before playing the game. It's 600 pages long, that's a really massive effort to read it before you do anything else.
- The "tutorial" is 90 pages in, and isn't referred to as a tutorial. You will first come to the section referring to the tutorial videos in the folder, which are missing. If you use the find option in your PDF reader you will see that "tutorial" only appears in the whole document four times - in the Contents telling you to go to Section 1.10, and then three times in Section 1.10 itself.
- Section 1.10 should be editted to go out correctly in the next update to omit the reference to the videos. And then 1.10 should refer to Section 3.1 Learning the Game. Plus when it mentions Velikie Luki it should then tell you to go to Section 4.19 for a walkthrough of that scenario.
- Section 4.19 should actually use the word tutorial somewhere prominently within it.
- In the game, it might be better to refer to the scenario as a "tutorial". Since everything in the list is a Scenario, and most of them like "Road to Leningrad" do not include the word "scenario" within their names, then the use of "scenario" in "Introductory Scenario 1 - Velikie Luki" is redundant. Rename the scenario as "Tutorial 1 - Velikie Luki".
- And a little thing, but make it appear first in the list of scenarios, so the message is clearer that this is where you should start.
- Most games have the inbuilt tutorials walk you through a series of steps. The functionality to do that doesn't appear to be present, and developing it is a cost which you way be unwilling to accept. Though at the price of the game, I think most players would expect this sort of thing for a game released in 2021. And I think the lack of it would put off some players who might be more willing to try the game. To "learn" the game we currently have only: read a 600 page manual; or follow the enormous numbers of hours of streams from people like Strategy Gaming Dojo; or some tough try and fail, retry and fail, retry and fail, before spend hours searching online or in the manual trying to work out why you failed. The time and effort of an add-on to your engine that allows scripting of an in-game tutorial might bring dividends in numbers of games sold. Still, I understand you are a small development company. Nevertheless, it isn't all lost...
- Despite being less than perfect, due to the lack of interactivity, you do have Events in scenarios. And there is nothing wrong with both the Overview of the Velikie Luki scenario and the first Event that pops-up to tell the player specifically to refer to Section 4.19 in the Manual. And have some Events which also give some of the most basic advice to beginners, like: Use your forces to surround Velikie Luki, then attack it.
- Going back to the question that was posed, about the "Introductory Scenario 2 - Road to Minsk" then I think this has been poorly tested, and testing should not be by good players who had previously played WITE and/or WITW, die-hard grognards, but by someone who is genuinely a beginner to the game, to address the issue - is it even clear what you are supposed to do? I think you will find that they will say, as the player above said, and as I found and explain in my video, that the scenario is not clear about the fact that Minsk needs to be captured in one turn. English is my first language, for someone where that is not the case, it might be even less obvious. And many who know alot of the history of the Eastern Front, might not know that Minsk was in real life captured so quickly (I had to go and look it up myself to verify that what appeared at first to be such a challenging requirement was indeed historical). This sort of frustration that you keep losing, even when you appear to have fulfilled the objectives, is what puts people off, and these things are just as important in attracting and retaining players as technical bugs. But the fortunate thing is that the Scenario overview text is so easily amended to make the wording more clear, and it would be really easy also to add in an Event to fully explain it. This can be written as a Tutorial Event (and you might put in a simple trigger to the Event system with a toggle off/on to display such Events in the Game Options) which breaks immersion. Or even written with immersion in mind, so that it appears as a command from OKH to the Commander of AGC to use a Motorized Corps from Panzer Group 3 to head towards Vilnius and from there advance to Minsk and capture it on turn 1. So that even without a tutorial toggle, the Event would not seem out of place to an experienced player. This is especially important as 4.19 in the manual covers in some detail Velikie Luki, yet it barely mentions Road to Minsk. And as the Events in Road to Minsk are based on the 1941 GC, but don't have to be exactly the same, then you could omit any of these sort of "tutorial" style events from the GC scenario if you felt they would be out of place once people feel ready to play the GC. Though as you say, Minsk still should be captured on Turn 1 even in the GC.
- Velikie Luki is a good map size for a tutorial, given the number of units, though perhaps it is too long in terms of turns, with too many secondary objectives. Road to Minsk with a whole Army Group, is really far too big. Especially when you realise that you can actually complete it for a Minor Victory by using one Infantry Division (to break a hole in the line near Alytus), one Panzer Division and one Motorised Division. There really isn't a reason to include Smolensk on the map, or to include Panzer Group 2 and the 14th Army, nor even to have two turns, if the primary objective is to capture Minsk on the first turn. The problem is if you spend ages carefully moving the whole AGC forward 5-10 hexes and impose large losses on the Soviets, then find you didn't win, it's not all wasted effort, but certainly feels bad as it takes so long just to play those two turns. Yes, moving and controlling whole Corps, whole Armies etc. is good experience, but this takes away from the very specific point of the scenario as a tutorial for beginners. It can be cut-down.
- And without even spoiling it as it currently exists, perhaps with WITE/WITW players not needing so much of a really basic level of introduction, or just once players have built some experience and want to play a short game for a weekend, rather than replay the whole GC. Leave it exactly alone, ie. just take the "Introductory Scenario 2 - Road to Minsk" and rename it "Road to Minsk", and then copy it to create a new Tutorial version of the scenario, and just remove unimportant elements and add to the Events. This would be really quick to do. Especially as balance is not required at all.
- A series of slightly artificial tutorial scenarios can be set-up in this way, indeed with a little effort you could create scenarios that don't have to be based on anything absolutely historical. Or they can be based on historical situations, but you can have a scenario which has no air units at all, and another which has ground units all locked so that you only use air. Perhaps one which has both no air and starting ground units locked, but takes you through reinforcements arriving on the map or being transferred from the reserves. And another that covers logistics. Sure, these might only take a player 20-30 minutes to do, but that is part of the learning that you get in other games. These are all possible even within the limitations of your existing game engine, and using Events to tell the player what to do, so that is not necessary either to rewrite/expand the Manual, nor to actually produce the videos that are mentioned in the Manual. It would be great if you could produce the videos, or the Community could produce them for you, but as these are outside of the game, and can't easily be watched while playing, then they shouldn't be a replacement for some good in-game assistance to new players to help them get started.
I hope this is not too critical. This is a great game, but it cannot compete with many other strategy games if it does not address these things. Sold as a niche game from your own website for fans of GG games, it will do well. But if you want to release it on Steam and attract new players, then you must get out of the idea that a Manual, even if it is excellently written, is sufficient in 2021. No-one wants even to refer to manuals by opening them and searching for some specific information, never mind read a minimum of 100 pages just to find the "tutorial". And the danger with these sort of PDF Manuals is, as you found, that errors are made, either straight typos, or that the manual is written to include information that changes or is left out as the game goes through the development cycle, and the PDF is not up to date. Having worked as a manager in IT, dealing with training users and introducing new systems, the challenges of knowledge management and keeping technical documentation up-to-date is one that we all find is difficult to get right, and has very adverse consequences on many software projects, where a system could be technically working great, but the users simply don't fully understand how to use it.
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