Adding tips and advice to the in-game help?

[wieder]

There are few tips and pieces of advice on the help. What about adding something there to help the new players to play the game? There has been times when tips and stuff has been posted on the in-game chat. Hopefully that stuff has been helpful to the new players and maybe sometimes to the more experienced ones. Some have also asked why posting on the in-game chat since that's quickly gone and can't be seen once the server forgets the old messages.

Any specific areas where this kind of stuff would be more helpful?

[fran]

The question is what is more work:
The in-game help, that you would need to update for every eventual change of ruleset,
or the forums. I guess the forums will give you more freedom.

[Corbeau]

also, people rarely read help

[fran]

As the forum hierarchy is now, help stuff would have to go under "other".
That is not visible enough. It's so important that a new top level category should be created.
There you could have a threat for each topic, things could be discussed and others could contribute.
From the beginning I thought that I wanted to start a thread about diplomacy, not the hardcoded one.
That would be very important for new players, it also would ease things up if you can refer to a forums post instead writing the same in chat over and over. In fact right now I wanted to start that, not only to explain my stance (also to phrases you frequently hear), but also to encourage the senior players to contribute their experience. For every topic there could be "best practices".

Help is important because if players don't know what to do they go idle, which destroys the current game, and they won't participate in future ones.

[wieder]

Adding a help forum sounds like a very good idea. I can add that. What should it be called? Maybe I'll add now one as "How to play" and we can think about the name at a later time.

Helping the new players to learn how to play is definitely important and makes the game better for everyone. That's why I have been posting gameplay advice stuff on the in-game chats.

[wieder]

Added a new forum for how to play the game. It's currently on the games category.

http://forum.longturn.org/viewtopic.php?pid=7452#p7452

[Corbeau]

Yes, this is a very good idea! Good work!

I'd add slightly to it: don't make it a part of the "Games" category with current LTs. Put it at the beginning into a separate category, dioesn't matter if it's alone. Actually, you could move the "New games" subforum there, too. The category name would be, oh, maybe just "Game stuff".

So:

Game stuff
- Introduction, Strategy and General Discussion
- New Games
Games
- LT40
- LT41
etc.

Old games
-
-

Other
-
-

[Corbeau]

BTW, I have some important stuff to do at home so I decided I should do some Freeciv stuff instead. I think placing some kind of an image on the front page, as we discussed, is long overdue. The problem is, I just realised I don't have any savegames at my home computer. Can you guzys send me something? Anything, any age, or, even better, various ages? I'll make some screenshots and assemble them into a postcard or something. The address is:

p _ dalibor at net dot hr

[wieder]

Yeah, arranging like that might work. I'll need to check with the other admins before rearranging the forum

I don't have any good save games on this computer. Maybe someone else could send you something? Or I'll do that at a later time.

The picture I was thinking about was actually a two part thing. If you look at the top of the longturn.org page, there is a picture with some units in it. That however is quite dark and maybe could be possibly more bright one?

The 2nd picture could be one about some border of two nations. Maybe there could be some arrows explaining how the situation would evolve when the other part attacks. Something like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... nberg1.jpg

The idea would be that there wouldn't be just a picture with the units but maybe 2-3 explanatory arrows/something showing what kind of stuff there can be on a game.

Actually, could also be two images similar to the first two on this post:

http://forum.longturn.org/viewtopic.php?id=370

Unfortunately I only took very few screenshots of that attack on LT32. Could be something like that.

[wieder]

If those pics can be used, I should have them "somewhere" with a better resolution

[Corbeau]

Nah, I had a different idea, just a collage of different maps and tilesets, just something to look pretty (at least prettier than an empty page). As for your "plan of attack" image with explanations, that may be a good thing, but it will take a lot of time to assemble.

[wieder]

Yes, maybe easier to start with few pics. I'll ask akfaew about the web template.