In-Game Tutorial + "Crash on launch" (Windows & Mac) Redux!

Once more with feeling:

This update introduces the in-game tutorial! We'd originally intended to ship with it, four five days ago when we launched, though the secret masters had other plans.

The Tutorial runs as a modified Solo Game, with no pesky AI to disrupt your training. Now you can ease into the conspiratorial world without letting slip to the Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow that it's your first time taking over the world. Then after a few turns the game hands over the reins so you can scheme without its nattering.

There are a few ways we could make the tutorial more friendly, like offering some control over each step in the tutorial's progression, though it should certainly be a good-enough tour for the moment. Tomorrow, I'll return to updating the rules overlay with more of the details for which people are also clamoring.

In the meantime, we also received validation from all the players who tried last night's patch—which was predominantly impacting macOS—that yesterday's update worked for them: the game now launches fine, in full-screen mode, with the Steam Overlay enabled. So, hooray. Today's update brings the same optimization to the Windows build, which we hope will resolve the much smaller ratio of pIayers who'd reported trouble on that platform.

One of the few players who'd also been having a strange pointer offset problem—clicks always seemed to be too high by about 2 inches; also only reported to-date on macOS—says that last night's build resolved that issue as well.

We haven't yet heard back from the few people who were using some relatively eclectic hardware—something I never thought I'd say about modern Macs—and I still haven't gotten confirmation that the game is launching smoothly on the lowest-end M1 (with only 7 GPU cores). I won't call it "fixed" until we confirm it's fixed for everybody, though the current reports are better than I'd expected.

Along with the rules overlay I'll also be making a 2nd optimization round tomorrow, just to push the performance envelope open a wide as possible. Following tomorrow's update we should have all our launch errors caught and strangled and can return to the UI refinement we'd expected would take up most of this week.

If you had any trouble launching or playing the game, try it now, and try the new tutorial while you're at it. We hope it'll help get you oriented quickly enough to get you taking over the world in 30 minutes or less.

Quick tactical comment about updating: While Steam sometimes needs help realizing when it needs to install an update, we've seen some weird behavior even when we thought everything had gone right. If you believe you got and installed Build 10303645 but it's acting strangely, the fastest path to resolving it is to uninstall the game and then reinstall it.

I hope no one needs to go this route, though it has happened to exactly one person so far and after the events of this past week I am on high alert that something which happened to one person might well happen to many tens of people if we're not careful. I'd hate to have not said anything and then wake up to a bunch of people with sad-install trouble. It *should* go smoothly, it's *supposed* to go smoothly, but now you have an extra bolt in your quiver if things go sideways.

Thanks for all your feedback—and support, and criticism—these past four five days. Now I hope we can all settle in for some good rounds of conspiratorial mayhem.

—Derek Pearcy