In which case I would direct one towards Stardock. Every game is bundled with a printed manual, regardless of how necessary it is, and if it is digitally distributed you are supplied with a pdf manual that you can reference and print at your leisure. Patch notes are included with every patch which give a brief breakdown of all changes and for any that alter the gameplay a summation of what those changes entail.
I can't let this go without some comment, since I find it odd for Stardock to be praised for its manuals, which are substandard IMO. I am a big fan of Stardock for many reasons--they make great games (particularly in the near dead TBS genre, which is one of my favorites ) and continue to patch them well beyond the call of duty or economic sense. However, if they have one glaring fault, it is manuals. Their manuals, without exception, are awful: extremely incomplete in coverage, opaque, and frustrating. Paradox manuals, even relatively poorer efforts like the Victoria manuals, are far superior. (Although I like Galactic Civilizations II very much, one reason I prefer TBS king CivIV is that the documentation of the latter game makes the exact impact of every decision very transparent, while similar decisions in GCII are more guestimates. CivIV not only has a far better manual, but vastly better ingame documentation, such as rollovers and the Civilopedia, and a far more polished UI.) Finally, it's somewhat ironic for Stardock to be presented as an exemplar in this thread. Their long promised manual for the latest GCII expansion, Twilight of the Arnor, was only recently released, many months after the expansion was released. And it carries on the Stradock tradition--it's an awful manual.
I bought VV on the first day of release and was dismayed to find that there was no manual. Since I generally have a high enough learning curve for Paradox games with manuals, I've pretty much put the game aside unless/until PI produces a manual. I've never worked in the game industry so maybe I'm naive about the effort involved. But I can't think that the effort to produce a .pdf such as the one for NA is so great as to be worth the (admittedly minor) PR hit that PI is taking on this issue.
