Mr.Mumbles: I definitely recommend playing through the tutorial scenarios. Played 4 of the 5 so far, and while it does an okay job of explaining some of the basics, some of the more minute details players will have to figure out for themselves. While in baby mode, it's a good time to go poking and prodding around to figure out what's what.
While the tutorial scenarios are helpful, they skipped enough for me to have bad impressions. When you play an actual open game, it has additional tutorials to cover more things -- enough actually to play. I have no idea why those tutorials were disabled during the tutorial scenarios.
roosterfareye: Trying to start the tutorial or new game takes me back to the main menu - which is very annoying! I noticed in windows event a viewer a RADAR_PRE_LEAK_64 error associated with the OldWorld.exe file.
This kind of thing is often a hardware combination/driver version combination issue. Do you meet the minspecs? Are your drivers up to date? Rebooted and tried again? (That said, obviously many are not having that issue.) Might be worth contacting the dev to see if they can do anything with logs to track it down if there's a fix they can do.