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To answer your question Grant, on why the Tutorial is explicitly American focused is simple. You unlock things as you progress, so in order to give the player a new perspective on all the things going on in the game, it does thematically make sense to view it from the eyes of the Americans just showing up at the tail end of the war.
Just like the player, the Americans had little to no concept of trench warfare, all they knew was that trench warfare was a meat grinder that both the British and French where suffering terribly under.
Tanks, aircraft, trenches, these where known to the Americans, but how to utilize them effective was not. Compare this to the French, British and Germans, who had been grinding through the monotony of trench war for the past 3 years. Any general assigned to command the front would have been a veteran, would know how their armies work, how attacks and intel work
The Americans, didn't, so it makes sense, the tutorial voice is the French (mainly) and British (secondarily), giving the American general Pershing (you) tips and orders on how to deploy his troops for them to be most effective.
Flame would be at least a little effective against tanks. I mean molotovs were invented to be cheap anti tank weapons. I thing that get me about this tutorial is how basic everything is. Hay balloons let you see further and artillery kills people. Wow I'm glade I was told that over 4 times in 2 hours.
Early part of the tutorial should've been framed as purely hypothetical, seen through high command's "over by Christmas" lens. It's the perfect way to justify making the enemy an idiot, showing the effect of "grand victories" and encirclements, and you could even scale the campaign map way up – make France and Germany like a dozen tiles each – so you can "win the war." Then have the rest of the tutorial go through the first year, juxtaposing how wrong they were as the rest of the game is fighting over relatively minute parcels of land. Have the tutorial proctors lower in morale (and perhaps certainty) as you have to suddenly start caring about logistics, active military research, and national will.
A salute to you, i was trying to pay attention and was falling asleep, playing this must have been much worse
After about 2 hours of this video, I caught myself Schlieffen
I was actually hopeful to see a good tutorial, then the remaining 2 hours filled with campaign gameplay. That's what I figured from the video length. I was quite possibly naive, either way have been thoroughly bamboozled.
This was an incredible journey
"Hey Grant is this game worth getting?"
Grant: idk but I hope to find out some day
"I don't… I don't have a great understanding of this game," says man after 90 minute tutorial.
1:40:31
Hexagons are the bestagons!
French are awesome!
Lots of love from France, Grant!
watching the infantry negotiate the trenches at 1:12:50 has me convinced this is a comedy game
Is this even a game or a simulation?
Man that auto-resolve rant hit just right for Total War. Back in the day's of Rome 1 and medieval 2 I never auto resolved a battle, nowadays I auto-resolve far more than I actually command.
Me: "Oh, I saw Rimmy play this and really like it. I hope Grant enjoys it too"
Well that was not how I saw this going.
I heard from an other reveiw that the tutorial was kinda terriblely made and Im only 10 min in this vid and Im starting to under stand what he ment… :p
My guess is they tried to quote a price for voice acting in the tutorial alone… and realized it would be cheaper to just make an entire second game.
Two points:
1. The persistent map is awesome, BUT ONLY IF you can only build the most basic trench in the first battle, and then upgrade once for every subsequent one.
2. You could make auto-resolve only be available for battles that are for sure loses or wins to not waste time, but being able to auto-resolve on a stalemate is not good.
Methinks the title is presented in Sarcastic Font ™!
It seems they need to put the tutorial into a separate simplified map, and have a phased introduction of game concepts!
You dont understand the genious of this tutorial. You can buy the game, try the tutorial , decide it is not for you, and not be able to refund it on steam since the 2h grace period expired >.<
Wow. This was painful to watch. On a more sincere note, I really suggest playing the tutorial for Totalwar Warhammer 3. I know you might be hesitant, but that game's tutorial is one of the best RTS/4X tutorials I have seen in the last few years. And it has a good story as well (the tutorial I mean).
Me: well I don't know about the hybrid style but total war makes it work and grants apparently a big fan
skipping ahead looking for the rts now, when you release you DO intent to have rts in your rts game?
One of the problems the tutorial has is you start with everything unlocked all at once. Because that's inevitable when the tutorial starts with the American arrival basically at the end of the war.
They should have broken the tutorial into a series of escalations over the first period of the war.
Chapter 1 – We play a Belgian and face off against the German advance into Belgium. We focus on Halen. The mission is part of the maneuver phase of the war and so our job is to intercept and defeat the German cavalry. This chapter teaches us movement orders, use of cover (we reskin trenches to look like tree lines for this), and that horses aren't going to win the war on the Western Front. The mission ends with a Belgian (player) victory.
Chapter 2 – We switch POV to Germany. We introduce professional and conscript (Landwehr) troops and focus on the Battle of Mulhouse (which we'll call Muelhausen, of course). We have again reskinned trenches, this time using the fortified trenches as stand-ins for the urban combat of Mulhouse, and learn about different unit types. The mission ends with the French retreating, so we've got another player victory.
Chapter 3 – We switch POV to the English. We're leading part of the BEF to join up with Belgium and consolidate a continuous line of contact. We introduce espionage and successfully link up with the Belgians, but then the multinational penalty costs us a very close skirmish at Mons. We lose and are forced to withdraw. Now we've learned about withdrawal, national unity, international forces.
Chapter 4 – We switch POV back to Germany and focus on the Race to the Sea in the narration and on Antwerp in the mission. Basically, all the missions up until this point are relatively limited affairs. Now we basically have midterms — the game wants us to show we've learned everything they've taught us thus far. But before the mission begins, we introduce the economic stuff. The mission ends with the fall of Antwerp.
Chapter 5 – We switch POV to France. Things are going badly for the Entente at this point and now we introduce both preliminary trench warfare and aviation. We have to use these new resources, while juggling a multinational force of French, British, and Belgian soldiers, while fighting off a numerically superior German force. Basically, the game is testing our ability to site and call in artillery, deploy machine guns, and generally hold a defensive posture against enemy pressure. The mission ends in a stalemate. We repulse the invaders but can't capitalize on the attack.
Chapter 6 – We switch POV back to the English. We now take what we learned from the last mission and apply it against the AI. We minimize our own losses during the enemy attack and then we counterattack, taking an objective and taking a star. But we don't take the tile. It turns out Marne has been to heavily reinforced. We won the battle, but the battle wasn't enough. Now we know about multi-battle tiles and how we have to grind down resistance to take tiles from the enemy.
Chapter 7 – We play either the British or French, with our choice of commander giving a slight bonus in something (maybe extra RNAS squandrons for the British and more artillery or manpower for the French), and we proceed into the Marne. This mission is full blown trench warfare, assault and counter-assault. Maybe even introduce chemical warfare, if that's a thing the game wants to pursue, in the relatively mild form of 1914 (tear gas). Either way, Chapter 7 is the final exam of the tutorial. You apply everything you've learned.
This tutorial would be multiple small battles with two big clashes on chapters 4 and 7. It introduces all key concepts slowly, by using them, rather than via info dump. It shows the progressive escalation of the initial phase of the war and culminates with proper trench warfare by the end of the tutorial (although Marne is still early for this) and seamlessly transitions into a proper campaign that picks up with our starting characters a year or two later, after which they've seen and done some truly heinous things. All of this serves to generally tell the player that WWI was horrific without dwelling overly long on it at this point. Maybe, for bonus points, the first proper campaign opens up at Ypres in 1915 with you playing the British. You do everything right, applying the lessons you learned and repulsing multiple German attacks, and then the Central Powers deploy chlorine gas.
Obviously this tutorial would be way more work than just throwing text at the player. It would also fail to teach you about tanks and observation balloons, but both of those things can be introduced later. That game doesn't need to tell you EVERYTHING in the tutorial. And I think this is a game I'd like to play.
Not going through this again, but here's a like and a comment for the algorithm gods.
I suggest to everyone to watch this with the twitch chat from the VOD open. It was wild.