Learning curve?

[zarkwizard]

And it got me wondering how long, on average, do you think it'll take for a entirely new player to get up to speed on strategy and the like to be competitive with those players who've gone through the Betas? Normally one could say after a couple of games you'lll get it, but here a couple of games could be months, or on the flip side could you find yourself crushed quickly before you even get a feel for what's going on.

If you scan through some of the game threads you'll see some of the things found out during beta. It was quite a bit harder in beta to pick up the game because we would implement some feature then give a brief overview then let the players have at it. Now that the tutorials are in place it's pretty simple to sit through the 2 min topic explaining how things work. The videos are very clear in how you perform specific functions. In the beta none of that existed, so they had to do a lot of "guess work" to figure out how something worked. The combat tutorial gives really good detail in to how combat works, which there was zero explanation in beta for stuff like that and trading.

Also, is this going to be something where someone who can only check in 2-3 times a day for 10-15 minutes (or something similar) will be able to be compete with someone who's able to be on much more constantly or consistently?

We have tried to keep it competitive for that type of player. Naturally if someone was seriously hard core they might have more area uncovered than you, by sending probes around to uncover their sector, and the sectors around them are pretty important in the early game, but in the end they are bound by learning times, and building times. So they won't learn any skills faster than you, and you can queue skills in the game, so if you set one skill to start training after another the new skill will start training when the one skill finishes. If you queue up ships to be built they will all be built one after the other.

We have tried to add queues to the game to help with some of the basics things, and trying to keep the game more even. So in theory if you start the game tomorrow you could queue enough skills to train for 3 weeks and not log in again for 3 weeks, and you would have the same skills as someone who has played everyday 24/7. The biggest difference is they will have built ships and explored more of the galaxy, and probably have several planets colonized.

Obviously that's pretty extreme, but once you get the hang of sending your probes around, and you can check on them a few times a day you should have a decent amount of the area uncovered. Building a ship yard right off, and setting up some basic harvesting routes in your local system, as well as a few probes to explore can be a good start to the game.. Then finding other sectors that you want to colonize is the next step so you can expand... well you get the idea of a 4X or you wouldn't be here..

We have talked about coming out with servers that are specific to the type of player you are.. So having a casual server for "casual" people and hardcore for "hard core" players. But that would be after a few games and we can gather data on how much someone is playing to know if they could play on a specific server. That's in the future though..

Hopefully this has answered some of your questions. Feel free to ask anything else.