I'm following AE with interest and I'd like to kick out a suggestion for the team.
In the great AAR going on at present (JRCAR - Cathartes) you posted a section from the draft manual on air unit replacements. As somebody else mentioned it is a sizeable mouthful to digest. One of the team (forgot who) made the comment in reply that AE is a complicated game and these tend to have complicated rules.
Fair enough.
However can I suggest that you pepper the AE manual with 'Player Notes'. These head up just about any section in the rules that you care to name. Something is said about 'Player Notes' not be the definitive guide right at the start of the manual so nobody is expecting them to be verbatim and to cover every case or exception.
What they would do is convey something of the big picture of what the dev team where attempting to do with the specific rule section and, importantly, to give the player a few rough and ready rules of thumb or guidelines.
An example is below. This is a comment that JCAR posted about drop tanks.
If players goes drop-tank crazy, they will not only eat up supply, but they will push pilots and machines closer to the limits. If you're carrying drop tanks, you're typically flying farther and longer, accruing more fatigue for man and machine. As a consequence combat effectiveness will suffer, ops losses will be higher. Extended range is not a freebie.
This is the kind of golden information that can take hundreds of hours of playing and forum trawling to figure out. The development & beta team, by their very nature, have all this hard won info. at their fingertips.
I'd suggest that the final version of the manual would benefit greatly from numerous short paragraphs giving this kind of stuff in that it would serve to ...
1.Lower the slope of the learning curve
2.Make the rules a lot more readable and digestable.
3.Cut down on a lot of forum postings from players trying to get a feel for what's feasible and what isn't
Just a thought.
Cheers,
Lancer
