Quoting condar28,
reply 47
I sense an awful lot of elitism/fanboy-ism here...
And I sense a jerk who thinks ad hominems are good arguments. I'm not a fanboy, I'm just telling you my experience.
condar28
End rant
Yeah, it was.
Mtn_Man, it's unfortunate that you're being dismissive, because the points that condar28 makes are really salient and completely encapsulate the difficulties I've had in learning this game. I gave the farm example earlier, because I think it really clearly illustrates how, if the campaign is supposed to be the "tutorial" for the sandbox mode, it does not achieve that goal.
So, I had a character who joined me who enabled my ability to build a farm. Perfect! Also, I learned that farms need to be placed on fertile land. Wonderful! Unfortunately, that's where the education ended. So of course, the first thing I did was go into the city building menu and look for the build a farm button, because there was the build a workshop button, and the hut button (albeit greyed out). Not seeing it there, I went to the research tree to see if farming was something I was going to need to research. Nope, research is locked out. Finally, I clicked on the in-game encyclopedia to see if it could give me some specifics on how to build a farm here. I even went so far as to hover my mouse cursor over the fertile land to see if a clue would be yielded there. "Build a farm here to harvest food".
I figured, what the heck, maybe it unlocks later in the game after I run through a bit more of the campaign. So off I went and spent about 40 turns tooling around the (admittedly pretty) world. But when I returned to my home town, I realized that my city growth was being stymied by a lack of housing, caused by a lack of food. So I really had to figure this one out. So, I re-watched the tutorial and finally noticed that he had clicked on the plot of land in question to build a farm! A light finally went on.
I'd like to consider myself a person of average intelligence and problem-solving skills, but leaving out the mechanics of how to build something in your supposed "tutorial" campaign is a significant oversight.
I really would encourage the Stardock team to take a good hard look at how the UI communicates with the player, and how the information in the campaign is trickled out to help players get a good grasp of how things work, and why they do what they do. A good layer of spit and polish and this (sleep-deprived!) gamer would be a happy camper.