Greetings.

Please tell me there is a readable manual for AoW 3 and where I can get it. The implemented in game pedia is actually worse than the one on Civilization 5 and that is saying a lot.

As it's is now I'm actually angry. It's making me stop playing. How am I supposed to come up with a Leader strategy if I have only little or no information about how things work? How am I to play effectively without knowing what stuff do and what affects what?

Oh and I deleted my first try at this post before posting because I realised I wrote something so angry that it read like a raving troll post.

Thank you! That helped a lot. If I don't get a definitive answer about a manual in a while I'll give you the answer.

The Tome of Wonders within the game is the manual. Well, or at least the closest thing to an official manual you can get.

Still, I feel your pain. The previous AoW games here don't have manuals either, which made learning how to play them quite difficult for me. I'm just not that good at learning-by-doing.

Well the other games have proper manuals and you can download them on the net. So it's irritating but not that bad that they aren't on GOG.

This trend with having manuals in game as a kind of shitty pedia thingy of some kind is a lazy developer habit I really dislike.
"We put the manual in game so that we don't have to think features and other stuff through. We'll just patch the errors as we go and change the manual accordingly. Oh and let's leave the information vague so we don't have to change the manual all the time."
I think Civilization 5 started that and it stinks.

Learn-by-doing is perfectly fine in games like FPS or adventure games for example. In strategy games like the AoW games where you need to start planning BEFORE you start playing to be effective it's just a head scratchingly poor fit.

The proper manual weren't available on the net, when I was starting to play, only the reference cards. Still, it doesn't matter anymore, because I've given up on those games. Some of the design decisions in them just weren't for me. AoW 3 is much more to my liking, and I've managed to acquire the basics, despite the lacklustre manual.

I'm also watching some Let's Plays by Das24680. His current one is in the form of a tutorial, and has given me some nice pointers on how I could improve my game.

Ah. Sorry they weren't available when you started playing. I understand that must have been annoying.

I haven't decided if I like AoW 3 as much as the rest yet. Only started playing it a couple days ago.
My biggest gripes so far are the lack of a easily browsed proper manual, the map looks cluttered and not as alive to me and last one thing that have bothered me since the second one is that walls are even less of a hindrance now.

That's a good thought with watching Let's Play videos. I rarely do that but in this case I may need to.

Amen. Especially when they decide to do one of three things:

1) Use a very tiny font - because every gamer has 20/20 vision or better, right? And UI scaling is for weenies.
2) Use a script or "ye olde English" font for "immersion."
3) Combine 1 and 2 to make it a real treat to read.

Please. Put together a real manual, even as a PDF file. In fact, I'd prefer PDF as I often use my Kindle for walkthroughs, manuals and other documents for playing games. Even if the game has a in-game tutorial or encyclopedia, a simple file that explains the controls without needing to look up screens of tiny fonts or such would be a huge help. You know, what they used to call a Quick Reference Card?

God, I've turned into the guy that yells at the kids to "get off my lawn!" already. *shudder*

Edit: Love your avatar. A lot of my high school years were lost to that game on the C=64. And later the Amiga 500. Still have a copy of Elite Plus for the PC. =)

Flynn

GET OFF MY.......sorry about that. Reflexes. ;)

My favourite hate feature with ingame pedias is when they are organised by a developer or someone else in the company that have absolutely no knowledge how to write the darn thing. IF they absolutely have to have a ingame pedia the least they can do is have a professional write the abhorrent thing so information like for example Production doesn't get buried in a paragraph about Landscape Features or something.
Having to search for keywords is NOT a optimal way of finding information. Doesn't help if the game designers get creative with naming stuff.

Just give me a simple text file and I'm happy. Preferable with a good index (This is apparently hard to do except for random gamers doing FAQs on the internet.) and paragraphs indexed with for example 1.2.5 for easy searching.

Ha ha I needed that rant. :)

Elite. The first game that gave me total immersion and a goal I felt was sooo important.
I went the same Elite way. C=64 -> Amiga 500 -> PC. Have a copy of Elite + for PC too. :)

Ps: The first TRON movie is still awesome. It's amazing they managed to create those visuals back then.

BioWare, as much as I love their games, annoys me with their pedias in games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Not necessarily because of font or legibility, but just because there end up being so many entries that it can be difficult telling what's important to the plot and what is background that can be safely ignored.

Actually, probably the game I have the most trouble with is Sacred 2. It combines tiny font size with a script font and uses it for everything. So, the journal is difficult to read, the inventory utilizes tiny icons and text (just try to tell how many potions you have in a stack). While you can edit an XML file to increase the font size and change the font, it still doesn't help with the inventory. In this case, the PS3 version of the game got it right, with clear text, a list for the inventory and other UI changes to make things much easier to read. I'm one of the few people I know that actually liked TRON: Legacy, though I thought Kevin Flynn's character had changed maybe a little too much. There didn't seem to be any of the cockiness of the original character (except for maybe CLU). But, the visuals were nice, and I really like the way they continued the story. It could have been better, yes, but it also could have been far, far worse.

The original is still one of my favorite movies. I have it on Blu-Ray and watch it and the sequel probably at least once a year. About the only other movies I do that with are The Black Hole, Flash Gordon, The Final Countdown and the Alien series. Though recently I've added Dark City and Marvel's The Avengers to that list. =)

Flynn