Matrix Games Forums

During the movement tutorial, you are prompted to attack France. After following the instructions carefully, the battle failed, but the tutorial continued as if it had succeded! This of course would not allow progress past the next part on reparing things as it asks you to repair France, which you do not own.

I hate to ask this as I am a HUGE fan of Grigsby since his first game, but did anyone actualy TEST or PLAY this game ahead of release??? How can something as simple as the TUTORIAL which is suppose to teach how to play the game not work correctly EVERY time? If the tutorial is flawed, why on earth should I assume the game works correctly? If I was not a huge fan of both Grigsby and the subject mater, I would take this back right now. I now fully expect to see many stupid errors when I play. I fully understand that no game this complex can be perfect on release, but the TUTORIAL???

Good luck getting new players when you give this kind of first impression.

Both tutorials worked flawlessly for me...

Well, Mark, thats because the rolls went as expected when you tried them. Instead of programing a result, they leave it up to the game to play it as in the real game. Not very smart. Play it enough and you will fail to get the expected results as well.

And, just because you had no problem, why would you think posting such is in anyway usefull or helpfull? This is a T U T O R I A L. It should teach me how to play, not confuse or frustrate me or give results other that exactly what its suppose to give.

Another stupid programing of the tutorial:

I inadverently moved the paratrooper out of western Germany duing the tutorial on stratatic movement. Later, you are asked to use the paratrooper to learn how to use them with heavy air units to paradrop. Well, as the paratrooper in not where expected, no way to progress.

I know these may seem simple issues, but should any player really have to run the tutorial THREE TIMES? Did no one understand someone could make a mistake? Or that the game would not ALWAYS win a battle as expected? If so little attention has been payed to this, what else has been overlooked?

I had the same problem the first time I tried it. You have to do EXACTLY as specified in the tutorial.

Knavery

Same problem.

If somehow your tutorial game doesn't follow the script, you get stuck and can't correct it.

The tutorial was the last thing we did, as we had to get the game fully functioning before we could make sure the tutorial was working. For that reason it got much less testing than the game. The only battle that we set up that was risky, was the France attack. In our experience it is better than a 95% chance of victory. However, there is the chance of failure. We were aware of this and added code to make the player win the battle even if they technically should have lost. We thought this would solve the problem as long as the player put in the requested forces. I remember testing this when it was first done and it seemed to work. However, I just tested it now based on this post and sure enough, it isn't doing what it's supposed to do (it should force a French retreat no matter what the actual result). We will try to fix this.

The tutorial was done in a way that the player must do exactly what is requested or bad things can happen. Although not the best way to do it, this was the only way we could do a tutorial given the resources we could put into it. We felt the tutorial was short enough that if a player ran into trouble, they could replay it. It has definite limitations, but we felt it gave the user an introduction to the basic interface commands (and a very little bit of strategy) which was the main goal for the tutorial. Obviously we don't want this French attack to disrupt a sizable number of players using the tutorial and we'll try to get that code to work. Thanks for noting the problem.