Thank you Boogie. The videos Frogboy and Zoomba helped me, I just feel overwhelmed.

This is something I have to chime in on as well. The lack of a tutorial is a problem. I too had serious problems figuring out what to do and still don't really understand what I'm doing (I'm playing the Campaign).  For example, I didn't know how to plant a city, get food or what to do with the 2 extra guys I had. Janok & the farmer guy.  Janok got killed in a battle early on so if I was supposed to learn something from him, I didn't.

A quality tutorial eliminates a lot of the noob questions and complaints about the interface. I don't think the interface is bad, per say, but if you don't know anything about the game, are starting from scratch, and don't know which end is up, the first thing you do is complain that the interface isn't intuitive.

However, if a tutorial explains, click here to start your city, click here to build on this farm, do this to research magic spells (I still don't understand this...), click here to research regular stuff, this is how you research to build on a shard & this is why you'd want to do so...etc.  Then instead of blaming an interface you are learning the interface. Big difference.  Right now, the answers are just not in game. You have to go to a forum or chat channel to learn basic stuff.  Tutorials are for basic 'this is how you play stuff' and forums should be more for strategy type questions.

While I appreicate the time invested in the video tutorials, I need something I can interact with to learn more quickly.  Many of us gamers in our 30s don't have time to learn basic stuff on a game...we want to be playing as quickly as possible to maximize our play time. Investing a short amount of time in a tutorial is worth it for many players and sorely missed when its not available.

I hope Stardock will prioritize adding a quality tutorial for the game.   It sure seems like a fun game but dang, a tutorial is greatly needed.

Boogie, try to make sure it mentions that you have to click on the fertile land tile to build the farm. That one has been confusing TONS of people, and it's a pretty easy fix.

I've found it much easier to understand the sandbox game after playing Campaign.

I'm a newbie to these games and I've grasped it fairly easily. A few tips here and there could go a long way, though. I think the main issue, at least in the sandbox mode, is you're not given enough direction in terms of how to achieve a given victory condition. But maybe that's just me.

Well, I'm glad its just not me who felt similarly about a tutorial.

The tutorial should hold your hand a little on what you should do in a non campaign game. I tried one out late last night and I had no idea what to do, so I just wandered the world and was pretty bored. Then again there was no real AI challenge but I didn't know if I should build just one city like the Campaign sort have nudged me to or build multiple ones. I was just very lost and i've been playing Civ since the first one.

Oh yeah also in the Campaign you can skip chapters if you wander around a bit. For example when i'm supposed to kill the trolls for that farmer town around chapter 2 or 3, I sort of just wandered north and killed those Lurkers or whatever and It showed me stuff from Chapter 11.

 A tutorial is much wanted,im a experienced gamer been in on it since the 80's 

But the whole interface is very unintuitive and really dont tell you wht u want to know,

the research and spell thing are something im not getting the hang of yet.

I have checked the tutorial videos and they are nice,but thy don't tell enough.

You should' not have to check the forums for these things form the start i think,if you do it later its another thing. 

 Also the game crashe's frequently for me so its hard to get anything productive going really.

Back to watch those videos again then and waiting for the upcoing patch.

Better wait for the patch and hope for the best,im so so wanting to play as i love these types of games 

I talked with another person randomly in another IRC channel I frequent and he says he cannot figure it out either. And he's coming from hardcore Civ.

Need tutorial >.>

An interactive tutorial would make things so so much better. I keep getting frustrated, turning it off for a bit (looking here each time for a hint), coming back and starting a new game. I get a little more each time but it is frustrating. The vids area nice start but you really need to go over the interface better, dealing with NPC's, etc.I like knowing what I am doing and my options.I love the concept and think this game has serious potential, if anyone can figure it out.

I have been chain smoking since I got it, and only have one left. I am afraid to turn it back on.Please get us some better tuts so I can quit smoking.

Good luck, I hope y'all have a ton of success as I hope I found something new I can pop in for years to come.

Honestly I'm not finding this game overly difficult to figure out and I'm a newb when it comes to strategy games. Just play around with the menus a bit.

I think the UI is rather good.  My main problem with the game is not so much the difficulty, but rather the level of polish in the artwork and animation, and the so far very simplistic character interaction and zero story background in game for campaign mode.  This game requires a lot of attention to detail, and a lot of tinkering and experimentation to understand.  It is kind of like starting Photoshop for the first time ever and just figuring out how to stuff by tinkering.  Let's face it, this is a game for uber-geeks, rather the the mainstream gamer.... and its target audience is probably folks who were tinkering with their config.sys and autoexec.bat on their first PC as kids.

From my day 1 experience, I really could have done with some guidance on how to build a farm (this really messed me up lol) and other resources, a change to the UI to show where the campaign objectives are and I still don't know if there is an easy way to group all the units on 1 tile to make them move together without doing it manually each time you add a new unit to the group (which can mean clicking through again and again). Also the general UI just needed some explanation to let me know what was what.

I must admit, if I didn't know and respect SDs reputation I would have done my usual thing of 'try' the game first, then try the campaign before getting very confused and just deleting the whole thing. That may sound extreme but I did find my first few hours very unenjoyable. It wasn't until I came back after reading the forums that I had a good hour playing and started to see the good game that I knew would be there. 

Hopefully this will be addressed for the campaign and new patches so new players will get an easier time of time.

Thanks.

Let me repeat this question in hope of an answer

--

If you defeat someone with an item do you get it ? If one of your guys die with an item but you win the fight what happens to the item? If one of your heroes dies can they be resurrected ? I have the game but have only played a little the box has not yet arrived so haven't read the manual so unsure if it answers these questions.

I actually prefer the earlier api where building farms/goldmines ... showed up when you click build for the city and there was a place as well as proper tech to build those items. Having to explicitly click on the land to get the option hides the fact that you can build it (i.e, increases learning curve).

I'm not sure at least in 1.01 the campaign does not cover tech trees or spells at all.

*grin* Funny... That was one of my major concerns a couple of weeks ago.

That the devs -trying to put in so many ideas at once- get lost in the details and therefore forget about the essentials things.

As usual it's quite nice to see how quickly the SD staff is putting people's feedback to good use.

My other concern that huge army sizes would make the game's battles awfully long and render it merely impossible to play without top notch rigs has obviously been addressed as well, already...