Back in 2022, on the eve of my birthday, I penned an article on non-interactive elements within real-time strategy games. It remains one of my better writings, particularly given how much ground it covers, but it doesn’t spend much time discussing player education.
Tutorials within videogames are simply bad. This is more true the more complicated the game is, and the RTS stands as one of the most complicated games you can make. The common error across the tutorials I have played occurs at the conceptual level: what is the tutorial trying to teach me?
At best, the payload within these tutorials is grossly incomplete. “Bootcamp”, the tutorial for Starcraft, doesn’t even discuss worker saturation, and starts you off with your town center placed extremely far from your resource line. This is such an anomaly as compared to standard matches of the game that you really have to wonder how it’s not some kind of misplaced satire. At the very least, a transmission could have come in where an SCV pilot mutters about having to wait for the player to lift off and land their Command Center — at least then, we’d have learned about a mechanic unique to the Terran race!
To say nothing about the thinly-veiled service manual text masquerading as in-character dialogue — the kind of nonsense that is to mechanics what exposition is to writing — these sorts of tutorials fail to engage you or let you fail, and thus miss out entirely on the biggest opportunity for educating the player. You need to fail in order to see where you need to improve!
When designing educational content for Cosmonarchy Brood War, I of course have the benefit of an initiated playerbase. Even for a mod as ambitious and boundary-pushing as CMBW, new players are almost exclusively former or current Starcraft players. This is quite the luxury, as it means I get to drop the pretenses and get straight to introducing new and modified mechanics, without making any pacing concessions whatsoever. Compare this to the competition, where most tutorials assume you’ve never used a mouse and keyboard before, and you can see why being able to count on the player’s familiarity is an extraordinary advantage!
The truth is, you can teach yourself how to do just about anything given enough time and effort. Up until July of 2023, CMBW had zero promise of new player onboarding. You were expected to install the project and get your ass handed to you by game-AI opposition that has the temerity to actually try and win.
It is my firm belief that handing the player a fair and standard fight during their very first experience is actually the best way to teach them how to play the game! CMBW’s Terran tutorial reflects this as best as the aged engine of Starcraft currently can; your opponent, despite some inherent AI-specific advantages, builds up from the same humble beginnings as you do, and takes map control while amassing attack squads in an attempt to stamp you out in time for dinner.
Temper this incessant aggression with defensible terrain and an early economy biased towards a longer stint at a low tech level, and you have a recipe for an engaging tutorial that threatens and defeats weak players - but not without giving them plenty of time to suss out the particulars of the techtrees at play, the layout of the current battleground, and the tendencies of their enemies. Then, they are crushed and called upon to try again - but better!
The enemy AI is really the most lacking aspect of CMBW’s Terran tutorial, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Ultimately, despite various call-and-response events that allow it to adapt to a small handful of player strategies, the opponents will remain vulnerable to hyper-focused early aggression, especially with unorthodox strategies that require a deft touch to counter.
AI unit control is very poor, and to compensate, they have a 1.25x multiplier on resources harvested - giving them earlier timings than humans may be able to achieve, and allowing them to last longer and come back from deficits faster than players may suspect. Couple that with their ability to know exactly where hostile bases are without conducting any scouting, and you have what is essentially a cheating idiot with highly-specific strengths and weaknesses.
Yet even with CMBW’s limitations on game AI, the Terran tutorial is the kind of experience that actively prepares players to accept new challenges. To even beat the very first mission served up to them, you have to contend with your own shortcomings - and actually play an RTS.
Let’s hope we see more RTS-focused content within RTS games. That can’t be too tall a task for developers, can it?