The second problem is the inverse difficulty. Letting the kids play with my saved games with an end game fleet they can go in with no experience and have a great time. But you throw them into a wolf and tell them to fight a hound half of them will fail on their first try.
So true. The recommended start should be a pretty large fleet for new players imo. And I don't think easy mode solves anything. I'd sooner quit a game than start a new save on a game I wasn't enjoying just to try the easy mode.
I would tend to disagree on the inverse difficulty curve. Let me ask Linnis this, did the kids refit the ships from empty with a pile of weapons at a colony, or did they use your already at end game fit ships? If they are not fitting from scratch, then I don't think this proves the game has an inverse learning curve. I'm guessing the fact they are finding success is because you are playing the hardest portion of the end game for them, the fitting screen. It only seems easy because you're an experienced player discounting the fitting step as not being part of playing at end game. Fitting is arguably harder and more important than having average piloting skills. Especially for full sized end game fleets.
I think the appropriate comparison to the Wolf and Hound fight at the start of the game would be handing the kids infinite credits, a level 15 character with no skill points spent yet, 100 story points, and a set of colonies that can build anything in a month, and seeing if they have just as much success against an end game fleet such as a late stage Ordo, the double Tesseracts, or the Tesseract bounty. My guess, which I admittedly have no evidence to back up, is they would have difficulty coming up with good fits and a good end game fleet composition without any prior experience that would have anywhere near the same level of success as your pre-fit fleets.
Hmm... Let me talk to my spouse about gathering evidence.
As for starting with a larger fleet, I'm going to guess that just leads to a tendency for a new player to over deploy which in turn results in logistics issues. If you don't know how to fight the easy fights with a minimal deployment, you really shouldn't have moved onto a big fleet which lets you win simply by virtue of over deploying and thus running into logistics issues on the campaign layer. Personally, I would recommend any new player start with the Wolf and Kite and do the tutorial which will add in enough ships through salvage to have a reasonable fleet for a new player to run. I tend to think the faster starts + tutorial is perhaps a tiny bit too big for a brand-new player.
Start the campaign with an option to have them as a officer somehow and have the player participate is as many battles as they want. When a battle is lost the player loses no progression and the system continues.
I like this idea. I don't think the menu missions accomplish this nearly as well because they are not in the environment you will be dealing with, and again a lot of people will skip over the missions. I know I did.
So, are we suggesting this play as an officer in a larger fleet (that they do or do not have fleet command over?) be forced? Or if this is an option, why wouldn't your typical player skip over it just like the tutorials, missions, and the easy mode option which people in this thread suggested they or other players do now?
Do we just need to ask if the player wants to try missions from the new game questionnaire?
1. Do the combat tutorial
2. Jump to missions screen to learn without penalty
3. Begin a normal campaign
Would this proposed officer in an AI fleet just be a similar question?
1. Start as an officer with fleet decisions made by AI to learn without penalty
2. Start a normal campaign where you decide everything
Would simply having the last option greyed out until you've done a sufficient amount of the prior options work?
Actually, would renaming new game to new campaign (and load game to load campaign), help at all to make it clearer that there is more to the game than just the campaign, and would that result in a higher percentage of players going from top to bottom on the menu (i.e. tutorial, then mission, then campaign?. I'm pretty sure they are in that order on the menu for a reason.
No amount of NPE tweaking will get rid of the simple fact that all the game systems, tokens, etc. need to be learned by the player. At some point you just have to sit down and read the wiki. The only alternative is to remove 90% of game's content and I hope no one wants to do THAT.
You only have to sit down and read the wiki because many of the mechanics are left unexplained. Plenty of complex games don't leave new players stranded.
I'd be really curious to see how new player experiences are done well in a complex sandbox game with multiple game layers. If a player goes through the combat tutorials, some missions, and then the campaign tutorial, I think it should be pretty comparable to explaining the mechanics in other games. It then becomes a question of convincing players it's worthwhile to do those first rather than just jumping right in.
And I don't want that jumping right in option taken away for experienced players. Certainly, I don't want a gradual ramp up of difficulty in the overall game as a veteran, since that just becomes busy work in a sandbox game. I just want to play the game. After playing the campaign a dozen times, I'd rather just add a mod that skips it, because well, it's relatively linear and only so many branches.
Don't get me wrong, the campaign is great, but David can only write so fast and so much.
I think the campaign tutorial and pop-ups could definitely be expanded upon by touching upon more mechanics, perhaps a more depth in places, and a more direct pointer to the main campaign, but I'm not sure the overall format really needs to be drastically overhauled. It is a sandbox game, and at some point, you've got to just be cut loose. You will not always have a clear arrow pointing to the next place to go (other than in the main campaign).