[Poddu]

I gotta add my 2 cents here.

Although a new face here, I've played computer games for quite a while. And I can understand that a few people can only do so much, and you must prioritize your work. But if you want to create a classic, its not advertising that will do it, but *word of mouth*. I'm relatively sure that [for example] Sid Meier's Colonization had a larger ad budget than Civ did, and it had a player base from Civ to get it going, but that didn't matter. Civ is well remembered, Colonization much less so.

Why? .. word of mouth ..

As an older player, who played Civ and Moo when they first came out, and happily informed fellow shoppers to "buy this game", I find myself unable to do the same here without caveats about how hard the game is to learn to play well. Thus, my main gripe is the shameful manual/Online manual.

Every review of this game has dinged the manual. And understandably so. The interface is confusing to the new player, and the Online manual is cumbersome as well. Nothing so well illustrates this than trying to refit/retrofit a ship. Question 19 of the Q & A: "How the ---- do I retrofit a ship?" The wording of this reflects not only humor, but the confusion and frustration of the player having to tunnel down through several mouse clicks to do what should be a simple thing. It's easy to understand in hindsight, but certainly isn't intuitive when you're trying to do it the first time.

The Tutorial could be expanded to alleviate this, but, currently, does not take you far enough into the game to illustrate the many features that the game does offer. Note that if this title were released by a major vendor, it would lose several points ranking, because one would have to buy the strategy guide to find out how to do basic things in the game which should have been covered in the manual, and this is currently and rightfully deemed a rip-off.

The cumbersome interface is another big drawback. You're always clicking. There are no windows in this windows game. You cannot move or resize a window and you cannot have two open at once, which would oftentimes be useful. This compartmentalizes information. For example, when inspecting an enemy ship that you have fought before and have in your enemy designs screen, you must go to this screen to see what should be in the large ( and empty) ship report window.

Another classic is "Why doesn't my new colony have any people on it?" This is covered in the Tutorial, but is so anti-intuitive that anyone who just jumps into the game can't figure it out, and comes here to post. [One could argue that a colony ship should automatically have people on it, just as a warship automatically has ammo on it. Imagine if you had to load ammo manually unless you used the Attack button while your warship was at at one of your planets.]

But, I digress .. Give us a good manual and a streamlined interface, and the game will advertise itself.