Hi there

We did in fact opt to go old school and not guide the player through the beginning of the game. This does give the player that initial bit of confusion but more importantly the joy of discovery. While some might assume that Final Theory is a 4X or grand strategy it's much more akin to a board game and doesn't have the lengthy learning process of those genres.

Like in most other strategy games mouseover tooltips are your best friend. Each ability or resource has a description attached to it that informs the player of it's use. There's also the option to kind of mimic the AI players that you play against and learn from their movements and actions.

We've also paced the game to be gentle at first and have a limited number of actions as to allow the player to just mock about in the beginning and see what does what. Choosing a difficulty that matches ones experience with the strategy genre is also important.

As a curator you unfortunately can't take advantage of community tips and tricks but we're very confident those will get posted once released. Strategy players are min/maxers at heart and will discover and share the various efficient ways of playing the game. But at first you simply mock about.

Um...I'm about as old school as one can get as a gamer, and back in the day, we had manuals. Board games come with manuals. I worry that NOT having any kind of hand-holding these days is going to be very detrimental to your game's reputation and its ultimate sales.

Honestly, I have to be blunt here, your answer smacks of laziness to me. It says, to me, "We don't want to make a manual or tutorial, so we're hoping the community will make them."

I love tooltips as much as the next guy, but they usually aren't enough to guide one through learning a new game. They certainly didn't explain, to me, how to build or move a ship, for example.

Originally posted by BrianRubin:

Um...I'm about as old school as one can get as a gamer, and back in the day, we had manuals. Board games come with manuals. I worry that NOT having any kind of hand-holding these days is going to be very detrimental to your game's reputation and its ultimate sales.

Honestly, I have to be blunt here, your answer smacks of laziness to me. It says, to me, "We don't want to make a manual or tutorial, so we're hoping the community will make them."

I love tooltips as much as the next guy, but they usually aren't enough to guide one through learning a new game. They certainly didn't explain, to me, how to build or move a ship, for example.

By all means, we welcome frankness in feedback. I was although referring to the sharing of strategies such as which ships players like using, what upgrades they like getting and the sharing of tactics such as target priorities and so forth. Strategy guides are quite commonly posted by community members.

We do not share the seemingly prevailing sentiment that players these days are somehow less capable gamers. But naturally it will take longer than 10 minutes to master a strategy game. We certainly thank you for your concern and will keep an eye on whether the community wants a step by step tutorial and if they do we'll most definitely add one. Adding a tutorial is not difficult so I assure you it's not related to laziness. We simply feel that the current state of tutorials in games detracts from the enjoyment of figuring out what to do next.

Or they save people time and frustration trying to figure out what to do next.

Look, it's your game and your gamble. I would just hate to see other curators and influencers make vidoes and reviews slagging the game because they found it inpenetrable.

If i tried to review this game today, it'd be at least 20-30 minutes of me not knowing what i was doing, because that's what happened yesterday. No one wants to watch that.

Originally posted by BrianRubin:

Or they save people time and frustration trying to figure out what to do next.

Look, it's your game and your gamble. I would just hate to see other curators and influencers make vidoes and reviews slagging the game because they found it inpenetrable.

If i tried to review this game today, it'd be at least 20-30 minutes of me not knowing what i was doing, because that's what happened yesterday. No one wants to watch that.

I personally find those last two statements rather unconvincing.

It's a matter of public record that you've played our game for 0.1 hours. That could mean 0.19 so let's just assume 20% of an hour. That's 12 minutes, some of which is loading screens, menus and intro text.

You've also already started trashing us on Twitter, albeit unnamed since you don't want to grace us with your promotion. You also seem to find the suggestion to just pirate our game hilarious.

But... if an accredited steam curator, veteran PC gamer and reviewer can go that far based on less than 12 minutes of gameplay then that's absolutely a perfect reason for us to add a tutorial.

Once again we thank you for your feedback.

I'm just amazed at all of this, truly. I didn't mention you by name, and also, piracy was mentioned as an anecdote to your old school reference.

I only played a short time because, again, I had no idea what I was doing. I figured I'd come here to ask if i somehow missed a tutorial.

I'm gonna try to figure this out, but I do plan to mention in my review how player-unfriendly it seems.

Thanks for your time. I hope your launch goes well.