Did you even read his post? The "manual" (if you can call it that) does neither. 

And I sense a jerk who thinks ad hominems are good arguments.  I'm not a fanboy, I'm just telling you my experience.

Yeah, it was.

am I the only one who isn't impressed by the performance? I just expected gameplay to be 100% smooth for me, I have windows7 64-bit, amd phenom II x4 945 @3.0 GHz, Radeon 4670.

I dont want to be too negative, although I have a lot of things going on, tired from my work schedule, etc. so I'm not in the best state for playing this type of game, it looks amazing otherwise. It may be just because we don't have the 'day 0' version for tommorow, or my video card is too weak (if thats the case its a non issue because i ordered a nvidia gtx 460 today)

Just played for about 30 minutes this morning and I couldn't figure out how to give my guy the items I just bought at the market.  It was listed in his inventory in the shop, but he still had an attack of 0 with his new club, and it was not listed under items on the thingie™ at the bottom of the screen when I had him selected.

Mtn_Man, it's unfortunate that you're being dismissive, because the points that condar28 makes are really salient and completely encapsulate the difficulties I've had in learning this game.  I gave the farm example earlier, because I think it really clearly illustrates how, if the campaign is supposed to be the "tutorial" for the sandbox mode, it does not achieve that goal.

So, I had a character who joined me who enabled my ability to build a farm.  Perfect!  Also, I learned that farms need to be placed on fertile land.  Wonderful!  Unfortunately, that's where the education ended.  So of course, the first thing I did was go into the city building menu and look for the build a farm button, because there was the build a workshop button, and the hut button (albeit greyed out).  Not seeing it there, I went to the research tree to see if farming was something I was going to need to research.  Nope, research is locked out.  Finally, I clicked on the in-game encyclopedia to see if it could give me some specifics on how to build a farm here.  I even went so far as to hover my mouse cursor over the fertile land to see if a clue would be yielded there.  "Build a farm here to harvest food".

I figured, what the heck, maybe it unlocks later in the game after I run through a bit more of the campaign.  So off I went and spent about 40 turns tooling around the (admittedly pretty) world.  But when I returned to my home town, I realized that my city growth was being stymied by a lack of housing, caused by a lack of food.  So I really had to figure this one out.  So, I re-watched the tutorial and finally noticed that he had clicked on the plot of land in question to build a farm!  A light finally went on.

I'd like to consider myself a person of average intelligence and problem-solving skills, but leaving out the mechanics of how to build something in your supposed "tutorial" campaign is a significant oversight.

I really would encourage the Stardock team to take a good hard look at how the UI communicates with the player, and how the information in the campaign is trickled out to help players get a good grasp of how things work, and why they do what they do.  A good layer of spit and polish and this (sleep-deprived!) gamer would be a happy camper.

Nice of you to clip out the rest of the post of course and decide to focus on an 'ad hominem' as you like to so eloquently put it.  Unfortunately you missed everything else.

I never dismissed your experiences in the game - notice I quoted your post regarding the manual being substantial enough to provide a "pretty good job explaining the basics of the game."  I decided to point out that from the point-of-view of anyone who has no TBS experience, and even for those who evidently have plenty, it's not nearly substantial enough to provide even the basics of the game.  I consider explaining how to build basic structures / improvement 'basic' - configuring a multitude of display and audio options to be inconsequential, yet nearly 3 or 4 pages is dedicated to that, as opposed to 6 or 7 sentences for improvements.

Take it or leave it, but pleased to see you adding constructive feedback!  Keep up the good work

If you're still having trouble, please email [email protected] and they'll get you sorted.

For me the best part of the video tutorial (aside from actually learning how to play) was the quote:

"Naaaaah....  I like walking faster"

+1

Thank you Frogboy for making these videos, very nice.

Awesome videos.  I would like to see more.  Show me midgame.  Show me an endgame.  Show a epic battle with armies.   Just ideas.

holy barrage of videos frogboy! thanks!!

Can't get tutorials #6 and #7 to load.  All the others work fine but those are just black screens.  Anyone else have that problem?

Edit - Never mind.  They finally started loading after a few minutes.

Great stuff, thank for these!

You guys should sticky this, I bet alot of people will come into the forums asking for just such a tutorial.

My video is messed up, I can only see a zoomed in top left part of the video...?

Quick question(s): I was hoping you had won the fight because it would have answered it:

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.

Great  introductory  videos.  Still waiting  for  Gamestop  to  call  so  I  can  play  the  game.  I  would  have  loved  to  see a battle  kill  to  view the  results. 

Suggestion:  After two  runaways, the  victor  was left  with nothing on  both  accounts,  what  about  a randomizer  that  gives  the  victor  of a runaway enemy battle,  a small reward.  Perhaps  the  fleeing  foes  dropped or left  something  in  haste?

somebody said something about still being able to create factions, just look in the mods section. is there a downloadable faction create tool or something, I can't find this anywhere?

I didn't miss it.  I just didn't consider it worth responding to.

Thanks for the videos. Yeah, some stuff (maybe a lot) isn't explained as much as it could be. But would we have rather have had to wait another year before playing around with the game? I am able to figure out most all of my questions so far. It almost feels like unlocking or just a reward when I do. So it's not been bad, makes me feel like I'm learning the game a little using my own smarts. Like just discovering how to upgrade units. Still wonder what the difference is between upgrading and making a new one as both seem to add a new unit. Anyway, really enjoying the game. Don't be discouraged by some comments. It's good that so many people are this interested in the game.  Plus, I have never seen any game that didn't have lots of criticism. It's actually a good thing that will help make the game better. Again, thanks for all the hard work to the entire team. Please keep it up. 

I'll be posting a review sometime in the near future. Got my copy a few days ago.

Agreed. The videos are nice but don't take the place of a quality tutorial. Anyone who cares to add, this thread is specific feedback on the problem

In the first video, setting up your sovereign, it was fairly surprising how quickly you jumped to certain settings and reveal that other settings were vastly suboptimal. Obviously, there are some balance issues here that you briefly touch upon. Interesting! In most of the videos, you seem tired, and somewhat bored. In the third video, for instance, you reveal that your sovereign is unarmed and would fall easy prey to wolves, bears or bandits et al., and you seemed to be surrounded by these at times, yet were not in the least worried -- also because it appears that all units always have the same movement speed. Is that intentional? In any case, it did not appear "exciting", at least to you.

Please continue the video tutorial/tips & tricks guide. You don't know how helpful this has been in regards to wrapping my head around the basic UI.

anyone figured out if we can fight our own created sovereigns yet, maybe a way to remove the default sovereigns from the game? I think it would be cool if there was a simple way to play the sandbox game with only our own created factions and sovereigns involved.