In the short time that I’ve been playing, I’ve come to the conclusion that a new tutorial needs to be made. The system using the cellphone instructions could be one level. But a more basic and guided tutorial needs to be made. Create a new icon for a “plane director” who is only in the tutorial (a little guy with a couple of lit flashlights.) and use him to guide the new player through the build. Do this in its own world/map rather than guiding a player while playing. Because with the new roll-out of new floor levels and baggage handling, along with the current tutorial’s somewhat vague feel, There is some serious lacking. The fan-made guides are out of date and somewhat confusing because of it. As an example, nowhere in the current tutorial does it say, “create a staff area” or add desks before the administrators will do research. There is no mention of the gender switch for the bathroom or other elements. The lack of a good in-game tutorial really lets the game down right now… I mean I can barely get the staff room and bathroom setup. There is no mention that sidewalks need to be placed to let the staff in the building. Just the note about a gate for the contractors.
Right now, the game feels like I bought a complex flight simulator and threw out the 200-page instruction book. Anyone else have other things that the “plane director” could show?
To be fair, the beginning is straightforward and clear. Hire the board of directors. (you can only hire part of them since you need to research to unlock the rest.) Build the runway, taxiways, parking pads, and a control tower. Open the airport. Then it says, lay the terminal foundation. Prior to this, there’s been no real advice on size. There is a “Make it at least this big.” note, but now you have a building with four walls and no doors. What do we put in there? How do we divide it up? Can and would an airline make use of small gates? When you get to the terminal foundation, you’re pushing the player in the deep end of the pool and saying, “swim”
Saying, “play in the sandbox” allows a lot of it to be bypassed. But doesn’t really explore what would be the progression in the game. I mean as it stands right now, if you get to baggage handling and all the belts, I can see a player going broke rebuilding the entire terminal to incorporate a lower floor for belts, break rooms staff rooms and who knows what else? To really get to know the game to where it could be played well, I think the player would end up failing so many times they would give up on the game.
Giving the players a “plane director” guide to show the player how he is building his airport would help greatly. Especially if he also points out sections that might be gutted in the future for planned expansions.
I am making guesses here since I’ve not progressed this far in the game, but here goes.
You build a 50x50 terminal building. Off in one corner you define an area as staff only and wall it in with a door. Throw in at least enough desks for your administrators. They can work now, but everyone and their brother is coming into the room on their “breaks.”
You manage to get commercial aviation researched. Now you have a bunch of new contract offers. how does that work? Is it like the contractors? Or the fuel trucks?
You’ve built a big square building and installed staff rooms and bathrooms. How many check-ins stands for each airline? Does that have an effect on the passengers’ happiness? What about the airlines’ happiness? Then, we have check-in stands and we know there’s a necessary flow from the public space into the secure area where the gates are But how is that setup? What about the passenger line cue fencing? How is that setup?
Then oh we have gates but have only placed plane parking spots away from the terminal building for general aviation? How are we to get the passengers to those waiting planes, If those same spots? All of this is barely even hinted at.in the tutorial as it stands now.
The thing is, aside from a few limitations, you really can build your airport however you want. Model a real airport, invent a new airport based on an idea or design theme, or just play as you go - play the way you want. Obviously some design concepts might work better than others - I think this gives the game great replay value - but there’s no “correct” place to put any one element, which is why the in-game tutorial never makes any concrete suggestions.
I like to devise a plan ahead of time and try to build into it to avoid making revisions as the airport grows - something you learn to do pretty well after playing for 2.5 years.
That said, I absolutely agree there needs to be some type of guide to avoid over-building or under-building. Things like how many check-in desks / security / baggage bays per stand at each size, the optimal way to connect a baggage system, etc. At one point I made an airline guide (Airlines and Models) that is now very out-of-date.
I’d love to help build a “Beginner’s Guide.” Ideally this would be something for the wiki, which previously could never be kept up-to-date because of the rapid development of the game. Maybe now’s a good time to try to flesh it out?
Oh, I agree the game has great potential, And there may be limitations that I’ve not found yet, since I’m not that far along. Part of the point I’m making is that the tutorial as it stands now is weak. And some people like to be shown how it’s done rather than a couple of lines of text from a phone. The fan-made videos show a lot and give advice. At the same time, I’m saying that relying on fan-made content isn’t enough.
Thinking about it further now. Perhaps an airport template called CEOtown could be made and then used by the plane director to introduce and demonstrate various functions and design elements to the game.
Well, all of us in the dev team like the tutorial and in general think that it does its job quite well. We’re not seeing any large number of complaints about it either, except from some criticism as voiced here which is completely valid. But I am a firm believer that fan made tutorial videos will always be better than any in-game tutorial because of the form that they come (i.e. the nature of a focused video) - it’s not really fair to compare the two (at least in my opinion) and say that the in-game tutorial is bad because a video is better. The tutorial’s job is not to explain how to build a perfect airport, where exactly certain things should be placed for maximum efficiency, that’s for the player to discover, its job is to explain the game’s core systems in the most basic way and to us, that is what it does.
After downloading a saved game from the Steam Workshop and looking at the mechanics of floors, I think I see part of what had me spinning out on the build. It appears to not quite follow physics, I mean, you can just place a belt or escalator then say, “It’s between these two layers” and it’s done. Rather than having to rebuild the first floor of your airport into a baggage handling mecha from the general aviation airport you started with. At least I think it works that way.
I’ve a few criticisms of the current tutorial (admittedly some of which were from not reading it correctly), but by and large I agree that the tutorial does the job it’s meant to. ACEO is an open ended management sim, you’re supposed to learn by exploring, building and making mistakes which are too expensive to fix now so you realise that there really is a huge problem trying to build Heathrow’s 3rd runway and it really will take 10 years to get that sorted before starting a new game with lessons learned (which sadly we cant do with LHR).
In this kind of game, a hand holding tutorial is almost counter productive because of the sheer number of different ways you can build. In this, player written guides (although I really don’t like videos) are far better for the novice player because they’ll show you different ways of doing things that you or even the devs might not have thought of.
Game could use better tool tips or a wiki of each item/concept/feature as it would be good to know at a pinch how many pax an aircraft can hold. Then again, this could be something that players can get behind and help with.
That part I fully agree with and it’s something we’ve discussed as we’ve internally evaluated the development of ACEO. We have a basic tutorial, yes, but we don’t have any explicit tips or hints expressed apart from the tool tips (but they’re more as of direct instructions). Also very much lacking documentation yes, the Wiki is outdated as was never really properly maintained by us. We would change that today, but now there’s such an extensive wealth of community content such as tutorials and guides that it would be a waste of time. For whatever next thing we build however, we’ll document the entire thing in a Wiki as we design it and that will then be exposed publicly.
I have a feeling there was an effort but it didn’t go through or really revive it. I have read through the how-to on the website, so I can work on it more solo. If there is an effort again I will join, but for now, I will work on it. From what I have seen, some sections are good but others barely have anything…
While I like my idea about the plane director. I realized the coding would probably be a true pain. Having played further I am going to suggest a compromise idea. Add a new page to the phone that gives both an overview of the tutorial steps, "Ie 1 small airport, 2 medium airports and on to large airports. Then under those setup linking to the necessary supporting infrastructure development. I guess a lot of my off the wall suggestions could be resolved with a manual. But since it’s still in early development, it may not happen yet.