Greetings, fellow World Dominators.
I have not yet finished either the old or the new tutorials. I am, as it were, a "newbie", but not so much of a newbie-- unlike many board gamers, I love normal tabletop RISK, didn't really see any flaws in the old CLASSIC game, and WARLIGHTs innovations make me feel like I'm playing RISK at HYPERSPEED, and in a huge, vast, new world. It's great!
Couple of thoughts, from experiencing WARLIGHT for going on a couple years:
1) First, any new content created should not replace old content. I hope to find the part where I get to try again at Level 5 and 6 of the Old Tutorial, but I can't find them right now. Maybe they're deep in the New Tutorial.
2) The current "Single Player" Modes are not really a Tutorial-- they're something better: A 1P Quest/Story Mode. If it were possible to nudge them with a bit of reorganization to *really* tell a STORY, that would draw a LOT of people I think.
3) I think that "Multiplayer" is probably doing just fine as one tab, but "Single Player" tab could be split into "Tutorials" Tab and "Story" Tab (or name the Story Tab whatever you want, like "Conquest" or "_____ Empire/s" Tab, maybe basing on the Historical Campaigns of Fizzer's preference.
4) I liked the 1P Single Player six levels just fine, as I said before, and I'd like Map Packs to be organized to easily find favorite Maps for longer time users. Logically, if any changes were to be made to the way Single Player Tutorials/Levels were presented to "Newbies" like me, I'd definitely still want the Maps of this version in a pack, set to the settings that the tutorial was on, but with adjustable settings if they're in a Free Play Map Pack of course.
5) I think what would be a big help, is to include a very expert guide for fast leveling up as a player, up to the point where you get ad-free play for some days. (currently it's 3 days. It'd be nice to turn ads off for 5 days, but that's something I don't know a lot about.) But the guide-- how to gain player points quickly-- listing what levels of Tutorial one should play up to, how to beat them quickly, and when the guide thinks the player is ready to start scoring points other ways, (their first ladder game), and stuff like that.
6) CHALLENGE Tab-- Tactical Speedruns
I think that, for whichever size of CLASSIC Map the WL community decides should be the "assumed default", there should be Tutorial Walkthroughs for either Continents or Large Regions:
For example, the OP mentioned "Conquer Australia in 2 Turns from Queensland". Now, Australia may seem like too small and easy to qualify for a Tutorial Map, but "Conquer Australia, Indonesia *and* South America in Four turns, starting from Queensland and Argentina", I don't know, practicing looking at slices of a World Map like that? And then, in that series, a Tutorial on "Conquer North and East Africa in 3 Turns", "Conquer South and Central Africa in 3 Turns", and "Conquer Africa in 5 Turns"
"Conquer North America in 4 Turns"
These are not numbers that I think I could do all of them. These are examples of what I'm guessing better players than me might actually be able to do, and being taught how to efficiently choose territory, deploy armies, and quickly take and defend "normal Earth" continent bonuses would be greatly appreciated.
7) DEFEND CONTINENT BONUS Some continents are more self-explanatory to defend than others. In the "CHALLENGES" tab, as you work your way up to eventually being tasked to "Conquer China from Siberia" "Conquer China from Southeast Asia", "Conquer Caucasus from China", or whatever Asian Challenges are deemed appropriate lessons, it might be useful to also work in one or two AI opponents into the Speedruns-- normally, the Speedruns should be for the bottom-tier player skill level to ensure they have mastery of understanding what their first moves and goals should be, but for areas closer to the "Big Middle" of the board, not the easily taken and held "pocket corners", it would be very good for a Map to be composed of, for example, just East and North Africa, the Middle-East, and Europe, and then have three challenges after each other on that Map: one for taking North and East Africa against a Middle-East and European AI, one for taking Europe against an African and Arabic AI, and one for taking Middle-East against an African and a European AIs.
What are the key ways to defend the whole African Continent? Should you go North, East, West, or South when approaching from a particular side?
8) ARMY AND TURN COUNTING A Tutorial level that teaches you how to choose between penetrating an AIs bonus, and expanding your own keep. This level would be pretty deep and high in the Challenges, or Story/Conquest, or Tutorials Tab. This would be for advanced gamers that are used to the idea of resource accounting in other games, but maybe haven't practiced it in WARLIGHT, or, for players like me who feel confident at playing tabletop RISK in the real world, but WARLIGHT is a whole new animal where people are a lot more skilled because you're playing against basically the whole internet.
I've just started getting more practiced at card-counting and turn-counting in Magic: the Gathering, and the whole "Tempo Advantage"/"Card Advantage" thing applies to WARLIGHT really well-- Reinforcements received every turn are like the cards drawn every turn in Magic.
The levels and tutorials that the average player goes through coasting on intuitiveness are usually, I would guess, "up to completing level 3 on the old Tutorials" and "up to completing level 10 on the new Tutorials"-- partly because people are getting pretty good at doing research on Wikis and Forums anyway, but games are still hard, and skill is time-consuming to acquire. I beat Level 4 before the New Tutorials Change, and I'm on Level 8 now.
And I feel like right now I'm not learning enough for how hard things are getting. New Tutorials Level 7 was pretty fun and easy, (took a few tries but I slowed down because there was no stress and the map was PRETTY :D). Level 6 on the New Tutorials was a pain for me, which is frustrating because it looked easier than it was, and I'm pretty sure Level 8 I'm going to need to scroll through the Forums quite a bit for help on.
As an Aside: QUESTION: Is the point of Level 8 to teach players to chase down the AI as soon as possible? The only YouTube I found, the player got very lucky and found all the AI's starting centers on Turn 2, which sort of meant there was no mystery involved in watching it, "gee I could have done that, but in my games, the AI always starts too far away from me, and it's a bigger challenge to guess where I should start on the Map to get good bonuses quickly."
Actually, in a lot of ways, I really, really like Level 8 on the New Tutorials in its structure because it seems like it could teach players a lot, but I feel like it should be accessible to play for "Newbies" a lot sooner than it currently is, in its own separate Tab, with a different set of Tutorials teaching you how to get ready to play on it.
The Tutorials teaching the Cards and other features are good, those are helpful, and I liked how Level 7, the BIG SECRET that "Solved" the level like a puzzle was: Blockade the Bridge!
Turning the Tutorials Levels into Puzzles like that is how to make the Tutorials the best they can be, and currently I feel like Level 8 is a lot of useful Puzzles, but I'm not sure the average player is quite prepared for it without extra help and resource, an extra level or two, and I also think that while Level 7 is fun, it is different, and there just seems to be a disconnection overall between the early New Tutorials.
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Perhaps........Perhaps Level 8 could stay where it is, Level 7 could be put in a different track of "Fantasy" Tab, with Middle-Earth and Westeros Maps?
Lastly, this might not entirely be what most of the CURRENT community of players come here for, but I think that WARLIGHT would expand its player base extremely quickly if there was a tab which mainly existed to play the most popular table maps of RISK and RISK like games on:
Classic RISK, Lord of the Rings RISK, Star Wars RISK, Castle RISK or RISK Europe, the Axis and Allies Map (basically, Issander's HUGE WORLD MAP is exactly what I most love to come here for!), Conquest of the Empire.
Now, some of those games, in particular, have special pieces that go beyond counting just the number of units in an army-- the games with horses and catapults and the like-- I think it might be possible to add them, but between how much effort it would be, and how much returns, how few people might be interested in them-- I'm not expecting that the games be recreated entirely, but the idea of *the Maps* being made, to play WARLIGHT RISK on, now that would be really, really cool. :D
http://brilliantmaps.com/risk/Basically if you took a random 10 Maps out of this list of 27 Maps, and called it a day in, that would probably make people super happy.
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Actually, I just had another line of thought:
You all commenting seem to be "Above Level 50+"
Now, this is fine, and it's also fine that I'm "Below Level 10". Now here's what I think would be super super constructive for perspective!
Do any of you high level guys know some "Level 20-30" guys you could ask to contribute to this discussion? To get some accurate angles of view!
I think we need to figure out "What keeps someone playing from Level 1-10", "What keeps someone playing from Level 12-18", and "What keeps someone playing from Level 20-30".
I'm pretty sure that if the community works to make Level 30 accessible for those interested in shooting for it, after that, player participation drop-off is just a matter of people being themselves that managing wouldn't help anyway. But getting to level 30 and involved in all game types, is something some players need help guides and tutorials to achieve.
Edited 2/21/2017 17:24:25