Ugh, backlogs. That's right.
Indeed, then, those achievements aint worth much for data purposes.
That's too bad, I'd be kinda interested in seeing what sorts of things in the current game are frequently or rarely used.
Last, AI war is... not very much newb-friendly.
As one of the newer players (I've had the game less than a year), I'll echo this. I played through the tutorial, then played a full game, decided that this Champion thing looked interesting, and got blindsided by the first Nemesis wave. After investing some time reading forum posts and wiki pages, I now feel I know what I need to play competently, but I had to do research to get there. The learning curve of AIW is quite steep, and I think the data people are quoting show that a lot of players aren't managing to climb it; over half of them give up during the tutorial.
My opinion on the cause: Too much complexity, too quickly. Too many hull multipliers, too many unit types, too many controls, too many in-game options.
My opinion on what will help: Eliminating ad-hoc hull multipliers will help. New unit types should be introduced one at a time, with a brief tutorial blurb on the utility of each one. The player's ship database should probably only contain units already encountered/buildable by default. Each game setup option should probably also have a tutorial triggered on first use. Most of the unit information on the wiki should probably be embedded in the game. The UI needs a fair bit of work, including better use of iconography over text, and probably deserves a thread here for each major component. Finally, many of the control options can probably be relocated behind an "Advanced" section to indicate that new players shouldn't worry about them.
One feature I'm really hoping for, for this new game: A database of EVERYTHING that can be looked up in the game itself. I've gone to the blasted wiki for the game so many times, but pretty much always come away from it with nothing. Either info there is very bare-bones, or there's no page for a specific thing at all.
Heck, I had that blasted Nemesis thing happen to me too, when I started out with the game (I think I mentioned this in another thread as well), where the game is giving me that "Champ Nemesis" warning, and I hadn't seen it before, and I'm like "Okay, so it's giving me a warning, but it may as well be spraying random letters at me, because that warning means nothing to me, I don't know what to do, since I don't know what that is!". And yep, died real freaking fast once the attack came. NOW I know how to deal with it, but having a loss or something like that simply because of an unexplained cryptic thing is super frustrating.
