Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
All the information I've found (and I've found a ton) falls into three catagories.
1) Bone basic, bog standard newbie stuff (How do I start a game? How does stealth work?)
2) Experts talking to experts using abreviations I don't understand VQ? PD? references to spells I'm not familiar with or discussions where it is assumed one knows the armor, damage, attack, moral of every unit, the details of every magic item and every spell.
3) Tables upon tables of data (I'm pouring over it but haven't internalized it yet).
With those as tools it's tough to get someone excited. However, without knowing the game all that well myself I've managed to recruit 9 new players. Here's how.
Two times/year my 8+ friends and I get together to play games. We started doing this in about '87. It started off mostly board games but the Last 13 years has been mostly computers. Everyone brings up there computer.
The Last time we got together was in March. There were 14 of us. I burned the demo onto a CD and set aside 2 hours for a walk through. All of us had tried it for 30 minutes or more but all but 2 found it too opaque.
We had everyone start a single player game, select Ulm and walked through diety creation and then basic play. By turn 3 or 4 people started moving ahead on their own and when they had questions the two of who'd played it a bit more tried to answer them. Of the 10 who participated in the walk-through tutorail 8 bought the game.
If you can't get a bunch of people together to play like that you can do the same thing over the Internet using a voice program like Roger Wilco, Battlefield Communicator, Team Speak, Sidewider Game Voice. Get your friends in the demo and walk them through a few turns explaining research, the economy, units.
It's a great game, truly. But I think it does take some hand-holding to get people into it.
Ice
|