[I decided to pop back in with a bit more insight gained as to why I, as a returning player was struggling with the tutorial battle a bit, because I think it's more useful to Alex than my original post. Please don't mistake this as me reading replies, so you might consider saving your breath on a "man you suck Im so much better than you" post. Or not. Doesn't matter to me.]
After not playing the game for what--a couple years now?--I found I maintained some grasp of the basic mechanics. Flux/shield management, maybe a lingering muscle memory for piloting. What I had lost though was anything but the vaguest recollection of weapon merits and ship characteristics ( so many other games, so many other systems in the meantime), so I was on pretty even footing with new player on that front. I just felt under-gunned in that battle.
After failing to beat the battle several times without taking way more losses than I should have, I instead used my starting fleet to hijack another ship from the pirates on the other side of the map. I threw whatever guns I had laying around on it, and just that single ship was enough to flip the battle from uncomfortably challenging to trivial. Now on the one hand, that can be seen as a strength of the game, allowing you to use the open gameworld to find novel solutions to problems. But the tutorial does not train you to do this. It trains you to do exactly what it says, and move from mission marker to mission marker.
**I wondered why a single ship would make that much difference, so I reloaded again and took a closer look at my fleet. It turns out I had missed several weapon mounts entirely on some ships (those ship mounts are really, really small on modern high resolution monitors, which weren't a thing when the game started development a hundred years ago ). For instance, I had missed the top mounts on my two wolves entirely, leaving them empty. I threw a tactical laser on each, which made a surprising difference in the next battle. In addition I noticed several other weapon slots had better alternatives available which I had missed in the big weapons dump ( I made the mistake of outfitting my ships *before* receiving the cache of free ship weapons, which is something the tutorial will allow you to do.) Further fights with my newly optimized fleet also proved trivial, highlighting the importance of weapon loadout.**
So this, I think, is my issue with the tutorial. There are too many *variables*. A player can blunder into fighting both fleets at once, or only one. A player can severely bungle their loadouts, like I did. If not paying attention, or overwhelmed with learning a new game, miss the notice about the weapons storage entirely. All these things can lead to drastically different experiences from player to player.
Now, it might be tempting for an experienced player to thump their chest a bit and think thats a good thing, that it gives them an idea of what to expect from the game, and they wont make it past the tutorial without understanding the importance of loadout, or how to find alternate solutions to problems in the game. This may be accurate, but it is still wrong headed. You must accept the reality that this game will be sold on Steam(I'm assuming Alex would eventually actually like to sell copies to a wide audience, and this means Steam). Steam players will refund a game these days if it even looks at them funny in the first hour, because they only have two hours in which to return a game, which promotes making kneejerk decisions on refunds.
There may come a time for challenging games to beat a player with the "git gud" stick, forcing them to improve their skills to a certain level before being able to move on. In the modern era, this time in not in the tutorial. I think variables in the tutorial should be eliminated as much as possible. Consider fixed loadouts and deployments, so the challenge level can be more carefully controlled and anticipated. A tutorial battle should be about combat mechanics or loadout selection, but maybe not both at the same time. The player will have all game to experiment with loadout and deployment variables. But maybe not if they get frustrated and reject the game altogether because they wound up on the wrong end of the random difficulty its possible to experience during the tutorial.
Two cents.
