learning curve

Point him here. All these things are explained.

It would have been nice to have it in game, but I have been writing and writing, and I am nowhere near finished.  There's a lot to explain.

Actually, (almost) everything is explained in this game. You just have to click through the menus and look at the tooltips.

If you look at the city details, you'll see stats for Growth, Population, Food, and Grain. When you found your first city, the Grain is taken straight off the map, so it's self-explanatory. Food says something like 60 Food from Grain (20 per Grain) - 20 population = 40 grain. If you look at the level bar, it says 20 population, 30 more to level, capped at 60 due to food.

If you look at the build menu, it'll list all the buildings you can build, and if you look at the tool tips, for example for Garden, it'll say 5 more Food per Grain.

Again, in city details, the tooltip from Production will say something like 4 Production, -1.3 from Unrest, 2.7 Production total. The tooltip for Unrest will say something like 37% Unrest, 22% from taxes, 15% from not continuous to capital.

I agree it would be nice to explain that parking your hero will reduce unrest, but it's rarely ever relevant. Your hero should be constantly questing, not parked in a city.

The Unrest/Taxes stuff is actually explained in the tutorial. They tell you to lower taxes to increase production.

Using outposts to connect your territories is a perfectly valid strategy. Snaking across 7 tiles is incredibly slow, and outposts will usually be faster.

I think the devs assumed that snaking is an advanced strategy and that beginners don't need to know about it to pick up the basics of the game. After all, it's turned off by default in the options. Either that or they never even thought about it as a strategy. It's useful to know, but it won't make or break your game until the higher difficulties.

I'm not entirely sure what the question is. I think the fact that the game will tell you exactly how the AI values stuff makes trading much more intuitive and transparent than in Civ.

There's no real answer You don't actually need to know the answer to this. When it becomes relevant, it should be obvious (for example, when you unlock Henchmen with Relias). And when it's not relevant, it's not relevant. Knowing when to stockpile Influence and when to ignore it and when to trade it away is definitely useful for formulating advanced strategies, but you don't need to know this when learning the game.

In fact, I just read Tuidjy's guide and read that Influence has some side benefits related to diplomacy. I've played 2 games and never knew that/never needed to know that. Then again, my first 2 games were with Relias, so Influence was always freely available.

Again, when building the Monument in a city, the tooltip will say +1 Zone of Control, upgrades to blah blah blah. When you click on a Prestigious Location, it'll tell you to build a Monument to gain +1 Influence per turn. I agree that it's really confusing that the two buildings have the same name.

Apparently, there's no way to have multiple quotes in a single reply, so my reply got messed up.

something wrong with the way the code interprets multiple quotes from the same post.  If you edit your post and take out the details on the 2nd/3rd... quotes (so the bbcode should just be (quote)...(/quote) -- use brackets instead of parens ) it should work.

K, that worked, thanks!

I'm just curious, but has your friend ever played a rogue game ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike

Influence is stardocks way of dealing with your character having pull to change things in their favor. People with a lot of influence tend to get what they want, but they lose that influence if they use it too often. It becomes useful to convince others to fight for you in this game (hence the influence cost of henchmen, scions, etc.)

guys, I think you misunderstood (except Tuidjy)

I do know the answers for those questions. I do know where to find the information that is needed, even if it is hidden under several windows and clicks. And I did explained to my friend his issues. The problem is not everybody have a friend who was in beta since three years and can explain the game to him or her.

I wanted to point out the issue about learning curve and that the ingame explanations are not suficient currently.

Tuidjy writes a helper, but with all due respect the info his is spoonfeeding there should be ingame. 

The sheer volume of what he written there is overhelming, and he still writes. and there people (like my friend) who just never log on the forums, consider it waste of time that could be spent playing. moreover if the game does not do a good job at teaching the player how to play, they will leave the game for other title. 

I think that we need more ingame scenarios that introduce further elements.

The existing scenario is all well and good story driven one, but more advanced tutorials are needed for each of the factions with samples of how to effectively use each faction. 

I agree it could, even should, be better. However, with the information available today here on the Internet, this isn't the big problem it would have been, say, 20 years ago.

Also, at least there was enough in-game help to get me started playing the game, which is more than I can say for some games.

I thought the tutorial was very good. I don't like overly long tutorials. I want to learn the basics, and then start playing a real game.

I do agree that some of the game concepts are not well explained. In particular, I didn't know what Influence and Prestige were, and why they mattered. Tuidjy's newbie guide was really helpful (thanks Tuidjy & other contributors! ) I'm comfortable with having to look-up more advanced game strategies on the web. (I don't think the game has to explain everything to me - especially not how best to play certain factions.) But I would like for the Hiergamenon to include entries on key concepts such as Influence and Prestige. (And for all the entries to be sorted in alphabetical order! But I assume the Hiergamenon is due for an update, as some of the spell info seems out-of-date.)