OK, so I just played the new tutorial in 1.17, and while I appreciate the addition of an intro to the new classes, I think there are a number of ways it could be improved:
MAJOR POINTS
- This is going to sound strange, but I think the mission is a bit too… well… hard for a tutorial mission. I know it’s actually very easy, but what I mean is you can’t just plonk down the sample dreadnought and three destroyers the game asks for and win. The player IS told they can put down some more ships if they want to, but this shouldn’t really be necessary for a mission that’s meant to show off the capabilities of the new classes. I’ll go further into the specifics of why it is too hard in the next few points, so bear with me.
- The sample dreadnoughts and destroyers are not up to the job. The destroyers are primarily armed with anti-fighter beams, plus one regular tractor beam; while this does result in quite a few dead gunships, the dreadnought’s shields are down before they can even start thinning out the gunship swarms. This brings me to the other half of this point: the dreadnought has a total shield strength of only 90, something even cruisers would laugh at, making it near impossible to keep the shields up. I get that the vulnerability of dreadnoughts to fighters needs to be shown, but this is ridiculous.
- The deployment space is too thin to create a ‘screen’ of anti-fighter destroyers - they end up just sort of next to the dreadnought, helping it far less than they could otherwise, and making it hard to fulfill the tutorials’ request for one.
- The dreadnought moves much quicker than its escorts. This make sthem even more useless.
- The other capabilities of destroyers (anti-missile, support beams etc.) are not even touched upon. This seems like it misses the point of the tutorial.
- The scope of this map makes it very incongruous with the first mission. The first tutorial throws the player in a the deep end in terms of complexity, with a little bit of everything: frigates weaving between giant capital ship beams, fighters and missiles zipping from one end of the screen to the other. This is a perfectly fine way of doing a tutorial. The second tutorial is very clearly designed to show the player certain mechanics in a certain way: the enemy gunships are supposed to be annihilated by your destroyers, and their cruisers by your dread. This is another perfectly fine way of doing a tutorial, but it doesn’t really feel right coming off the back of the previous mission.
MINOR POINTS
- The name of the mission is the same as the name of the first one.
- The names of the new sample ships do not have capitalised first letters, whereas the old ones do. This is as nitpicky as I can get, but it just looks very unpolished when they’re right next to each other on the ‘load design’ screen.
PROPOSITION
A better way of showcasing all these relationships between classes, I feel, would be to split it into two different parts, for the dreadnought and the destroyers, so the strengths and weaknesses of each can be displayed. What I mean by this is for the tutorial to be designed so the player loses on the first try with just one class, but wins on the second with both. For example, the deployment space could be widened and a few enemy frigates added, and the enemy cruisers made into missile spammers. The player would be instructed to place down a dreadnought, which would destroy the frigates, only to be subsequently annihilated by the gunships and cruisers. Following this, the player would be told to add a few destroyers (this time equipped with shield support and guidance scramblers in addition to anti-fighter), and the battle would be won. This method allows both the supreme anti-ship capabilities of the dreadnought class and the useful support of the destroyer class to be displayed fully, and also establishes the idea of modifying fleets to more effectively win battles.
Hopefully I got my points across clearly.