On to the game. "Single player" and the "Campaigns/Scenarios/Load Game" menu opens by default on "Campaigns". And all the tutorial message pop-ups one after the other.
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| Figure 1 - Campaigns screen |
The ones truly relevant/useful are the "Free Campaign", "Campaigns Overview" and "Connected Campaigns" but we'll have to cycle through a message for each of the 17 campaigns.
Thankfully they will only pop-up once (until you reset the tutorial history). In any case, we're now up to 20 tutorial messages and counting.
If one is being careful and paying attention, there's one very important tidbit of information in this screen: our "core force" can be exported from "Boot Camp" into "US Pacific" as they are linked.
Next up, the "Campaign Screen" where I crammed into one picture:
a) The (empty) "Core Force" panel on the left side, with an insert on the bottom corner for the "Green Team Recruits" button, and the tooltips for the four tabs;
b) The "Specialisations" panel in the center, with the various tooltips;
c) The "Difficulty" panel in the bottom center also with its attendant tooltips;
d) The tutorial messages pertinent to the "Campaign Screen" on the left side and those pertinent to the "Specialisations" panel on the right side (the inserts marked with a capital T inside a circle). 24 tutorial messages and counting.
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| Figure 2 - Specialisations screen |
As far as I can tell the difficulty scale lies mainly in the strength of the enemy units (7, 8, 10, 12 or 13 health points from easiest to hardest) and the tactical decisions the AI will make based on that; on Avery's last mission he was confronted IIRC with a light cruiser while both TheEdmon and myself faced a proper heavy cruiser but that could be from different versions of the game (as an example the M3 Stuart in the first tutorial mission now has "flexible pathing", the ability to split its movement allowance into two "pulses" whereas in the version I played for almost seven years it only had one "pulse").
The specialisations should be quite baffling to our putative blind player at this point. Only actual play will disclose how many missions in the tutorial campaign (four), how many will grant specialisation points (the first three) and how much (five each for a total of fifteen) or in which order to take them (IMO, Infantry, Naval and Tank).
Clicking on the "Play" button takes us to the "Scenario Briefing Screen" and an informative tutorial message, the 25th so far.
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| Figure 3 - Scenario briefing screen |
"Start Briefing" and three consecutive messages from a Drill Instructor. Has to be a Drill Instructor because he's wearing a Smokey Bear hat, right?!
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| Figure 4 - Briefing |
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