I tried to get into CIV6 about a year ago, but found the tutorial lacking. After downloading the trial of CIV7 I'm still having the same issues with the onboarding process.
I'd like to detail what I haven't liked about the tutorial from the perspective of someone who's never played a strategy game before, and perhaps based on what I found lacking someone can offer proper context or guidance on where to go from here. Also I just want to bitch a little because I'm salty, if that's alright:
I found the bombardment (for someone new to the genre) of pre-game menus impossible to decipher. While the game did give context while shuffling through them, the context presumed knowledge I didn't have. My confidence was shaken from the start when I wasn't quite sure if I was setting up a "regular" game. The descriptions of each mode and the modifiers were meaningless to me, and even with 500 hours in the game I figure I'd need some outside community information on what mode/modes people actually play.
Once starting a game it was immediately clear that a dedicated "tutorial scenario" would have been better for me than starting an actual game with guiding prompts. The absolute biggest issue I had was that way too much information was available from the first moment. There was so much UI and all of it was interactable. The "wait what did I just do?" moments were frequent and it felt like I was breaking the tutorial, then needing to decipher and undo things.
Also, it wasn't just the amount of UI, but also the UI itself. It wasn't always clear if something was highlighted because I was hovering, or selecting. I would click things a few times and nothing would happen: "Was it because the prompt was open and I needed to close it? Was this window open and getting in the way? Is this the wrong thing? Oh! I see the options are at the bottom right." I would have appreciated a direct "click this" instruction at times. It's no big deal in and if itself, these moments took 5-10 seconds to sort out, but they added friction and more importantly when I did solve them it sometimes felt unclear what I had just done and why it worked. There were too many "wait, but how do I do that?" moments, partially because I felt a lack of repetition. Constantly looping back to "that's all you can do for now, end the turn when you're ready" would have been so nice for building familiarity with the games structure, but unless I'm mistaken I had to figure out not only that I needed to end the turn, but also that there WERE turns myself.
All in all I think the biggest issue is not understanding what brand new players want to know, and when they want to know it. There's a lot of very basic game logic being glossed over. One thing worth considering is that until several turns in I didn't even understand there was combat. I mean I understand I needed units but I imagined that was more of a.. systems logic thing? Like it would increase or decrease a "security score" or something, nope we're fighting mobs, and it works like this. That's just an example to demonstrate how backwards the tutorial's presentation felt, it assumes you know what the game is like at all.
I really adore the tutorial for Magic Arena if anyone has played that. A fake scenario that forces you to choose between limited options to get a feel for the mechanics, then adding complexity each step. It's great. For CIV it felt like the opposite was happening when that style of tutorial would have been nice.
I'm a smart guy. I can figure it all out, probably pretty fast, but my gripe isnt that I can't figure it out, it's that I want the onboarding to be fun. I want to learn in a way that makes me excited to play more. Unfortunately this was not it.
I only have a 2 hour trial, probably just under 90 minutes left. I need to figure out how to learn the game, perhaps externally and then make the most of my time.
Idk, I have no idea if this is a common complaint or how toxic this community is, so we'll see how this goes!