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Official Strategy guide

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Part of the problem is that strategy guides for niche titles probably don't sell too well and huge inventories for these are not something that Prima wants to invest in until they see some critical mass (WoW strategy guide is probably a no-brainer). So an on-demand, electronic version seems like a sensible strategy ... UNTIL you try and use the damned thing. If you thought copy protection on software was a bad idea, wait till you try it on a book!
 
Not to mention that Paradox's tendency to tweak games after release (one of the things I love about them) means that a guide written for the release version will be woefully out of date very quickly. Just look at the major overhauls Crusader Kings went through between its initial release and the release of its expansion. Not just bug fixes and game play balancing, the entire system of dealing with the Crusades was rebuilt from scratch.
 
delra said:
It wasn't despised until they decided to sell Anno 1404 without a manual and tell people to buy Prima Guide instead. :)
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I agree completely. I don't buy downloadable games if they are available any other way because you then need to print out flipping PDF's.

Now they don't even give decent manuals with retail games ARGGHH

Yes, support the developer by buying their game. But don't support the donkeys who then want to charge you another £20 for something you should have had anyway. Wait two weeks, and get all the advice you need on the net, then make your own manual.

Games are dumbing down, and removing decent manuals is a small step.

When games are dumb enough, the PC will go, and games will just need one of those fiddly gamepad things. The 100+ key keyboard won't be needed because games won't need that complexity.

Mass Effect will be seen as the height of "strategy gaming"

One small step folks...towards the end
 
Once upon a time, game manuals worth actually worth reading. They gave you real information about how to play the game, instead of just telling you that this is the GAME START screen and that when you press the START button the Game will Start.

Then, manuals became useless junk like telling me what the Start button does, but Strategy Guides were useful books that told you a lot about how to play the game.

Then, Strategy Guides became these useless, formulative books that just printed out pictures of all of the ships in game and all the buildings in the game and just gives you the same game stats about these that you can find in the game.

To me, the question is, does the company want repeat business. Because all of this has to do with telling people how to play the game, and when people know how to play the game, they'll have fun playing the game. Its much more fun to play with an idea as to what you are doing instead of blindly making mistakes. When a player can't progress beyond that confused state at the bottom of the learning curve, most frequently they give up.

The question is, does the company give a dang. Are they happy that they've already grabbed your $50 and don't care if you can play the game or not? Or, do they want happy, satisfied customers who will also likely come back and buy their next game too?

Bad manuals that don't tell you anything, over-priced 'strategy guides' that are worthless, and a general policy of trying to make the customers explain the game to other customers (for free) on the company forums generally equals a company that is just happy that they've got your $50 in their account.
 
Deaghaidh said:
Not to mention that Paradox's tendency to tweak games after release (one of the things I love about them) means that a guide written for the release version will be woefully out of date very quickly. Just look at the major overhauls Crusader Kings went through between its initial release and the release of its expansion. Not just bug fixes and game play balancing, the entire system of dealing with the Crusades was rebuilt from scratch.
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Actually, that's not a good thing. What that shows is a game design process that completely failed and produced an unworkable system that needed to be reworked. And how much of that was because a distributor like Paradox pushed a development company to release a bad game on an assigned date, well you'd have to be in the meeting rooms to know.

Surely, in a game called Crusader Kings, the system of dealing with the Crusades was a rather important part of the game. That they were selling it, and taking people's $50 for a game that sounds fundamentally broken says a lot about a company like Paradox.

This sounds like if a car company sold me a total lemon of a car, and then I spend the better part of the year taking it back to the dealer to get the latest fixes and upgrades and finally after a year of that its seems to almost be working decently, would I then turn around and say the car company was wonderful because of how they worked with me? No, they still sold me a total lemon, and in the case of game programming companies they usually did so knowingly. Here's this piece of junk that don't work and probably just crashes on your computer, but we wanted to get it on the shelves for Christmas and take your money. Enjoy! Even better if they got you to buy an 'expansion' to get the workable system you thought you were buying in the first place.
 
I've bought one prima e-guide. It was for Caesar IV. Figuring that I would simply take the e-guide and print it out on my nice printer and then have it bound with my binder machine. Unfortunately, it wouldn't even allow me to print it out. I contacted Prima who after several days responded that they know there is an issue with trying to print out the Caesar IV e-guide. I was like, WTF? So you tell me there is a known issue with printing the guide and that's all that you tell me? So I contacted them again, this time not being so unicorn and puppy dogs polite and asked them then what was I to do about printing out the guide, after all that was my primary purpose in buying the guide so that I could save money and print it out myself (printer, supplies binding machine was all freebies from where I use to work, they let me take all the supplies when they went out of business).

Well, long story short, I did get a positive resolution out of it. They ended up mailing me the full paper Caesar IV prima guide. But some e-guides don't have a paper counterpart, so for those guides if you can't print them out, your just out of luck. From what I understood of the situation after they told me they were sending me the physical guide, they also told me that it has to do with how large that guide was (over 200+ pages I think), and that was causing the issue of not being able to print it out.

Anyway, I looked at this EIC e-guide and quite frankly, if the content in the free pages that we can see is indicative of the contents of the full guide, then to me it's is nothing more than a waste of my money. The stuff that I read in the e-guide preview, I would expect to be in the manual for the game, not in a strategy guide simply there to take up pages and make it look more heft than it might actually be. I assume that either the developers or the publishers get a cut of the profits of the sales of the e-guides and is why they don't bother putting out proper manuals anymore, but instead opt to nickle and dime us some more by selling us the manual disguised as a strategy guide.
 
Yup, same experience as the rest here with e-guides. They are so unpleasant I challenge anyone to find someone who has actually bought more than one. My one purchase was the Prima guide for RTW which I mistakenly bought on a computer that I sold a few days later, having no idea that the license didn't transfer. The file still sits there staring at me unable to be activated despite jumping through endless Adobe and Prima hoops.
 
Whats funny is you can probably get as good if not better advice here in the forums. Like I am working on Convoys, 2 fleets working together in the early part of the game. 1 for a Salesman Captain and 1 for a Haggler. Also seems like a good idea because you can sell larger quanities since you are talking about upto 10 ships of MTI for a better profit before the market is flooded and prices drop down where runs are not as profitable.

But really...this game needs little in the way of a stategy guide since It's so easy to whomp on your competition and get ahead of them...i can quickly buy the plans for the Xebec and place a fleet of 5 to kill everything coming out of the med at the Straights of Gibraltor, removing 2 of my competetitors very fast. Portugal for the win...you can make several short runs to Jadida at the begining...each run in less then a month if you are not using a convoy you can always wait till a salesman is in port to sell the items by using the warehouse...so even if it is little profit...its so quick of a turn around you can make tons of money very fast, atleast compared to the competition...just do them manually....don't know why autotrade takes so long in port but it almost doubles the turn around time for one comeplete voyage ro and fro....

This game is so repeatative...its not really fun...no variation to the game...all the ships are so standard...you basically know if you have a fleet of 5 galleons you can take any neutral port...its just a rush to each level....a few sunked fleets and a company is basically too far gone to ever be a problem....very few bad events....dont see weather causing a ship to sink and such.
 
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Didn't get a manual with Steam and Iam sure not buying any Prima guide. Perhaps Paradox should take a reality check and realise that we are not all well of financially. Look after the customer and provide a decent manual. That goes for Steam as well!
 
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