Well here is a work in progress: http://aatrade.springfield.net/faq/index.php

Manuals are tough when your primarily a programmer game player. We try to keep up with all our changes, but even we forget things sometimes. Seems the forum is the best manual of them all. ANd yes AATRADE is much more different than BNT or TKI and we are constantly changing and upgrading things. With the release shortly ( I know... I keep saying this) of .20 its a drastic change from what .141 was so be sure to read up on all the changes. The FAQ is down to waiting on PJ to finish up the combat sections which we hope to have done at the time of the next release which as everyone knows is anyday now for over a week

We are getting there.

It's just that we keep finding little problems and things that need to be tweaked. Every little problem means a delayas we make sure the changes do what they should.

As an example the cost for buying the same ship is supposed to go up everytime you lose that ship class to combat. We found out last night that it wasn't doing this anymore because of a big change we made to the ship class system. Not a major or game stopping bug but one that needed to be fixed because it also affects the game data stored on the player profile server. So we had to wait another day or so to make sure the changes are stable.

The FAQ is the tutorial.

And if you see a place called Shipyard, which everyone sees immediatly the first time the actually log into the game, and don't check it out then you deserve to be stuck in a Pioneer. The FAQ even tells you what the shipyard is for just like what you indicated.

And btw, just to point out how silly you are being here is an example.

You complained about it saying upgrade you hull as high as possible but you couldn't because the Pioneer is limited to 15. Guess what you upgraded as high as possible for that ship. Buy a bigger ship. That is what that big old shipyard in sector 1 is for and 99.9% of the people seem to have been able to grasp that easily.

And you will NEVER see us release anything that tells people exactly how they should play. The reason is because everyone should figure out how best they should play instead of trying to follow what someone thought was how it should be played. We will give you the tool and explain how some things work, not everything, but it is up the player to ultimately figure out how to play the game. If you want hand holding it just isn't going to happen.

Good deal. Please feel free to take look at the current FAQ's and pick them apart, I'm not a great writer but have tried to include as much of the info as I can. But even I miss some stuff from time to time.

And actually that will be changing. The link to the tutorial should be switching to the FAQ as the FAQ is much more up to date than the tutorial is.

We appreciate that it would be nice to have documentation, and we try the best we can, but remember everyone, this game is our hobby and is done at our convienence as we do not make a penny writing this code. SOmeday we hope to figure a way we can make a living doing it, but right now we do all this work just for the love of the game. So as its for the love of the game documentation will allways be on the backburner while paying projectes will take priority.

Please keep this in mind when you are dissing us on documentation.

I don't discount documentation but I do dicount handholding type documentation that tells a player everything they should do.

We have a link at the bottom of every page that basically says "Click Here for Help". When clicking that link it will display a help page for the current screen they are on if one is availible. And if there is one specific to that template it will pull it up instead. We just haven't had the time to make help pages for every display in the game yet. It is time consuming. There are a few created already but not ehough. These help pages should tell what everything on the screen does and how they are used.

But as I said it is time consuming and has a lower priority than anything else so it gets push to the back burner.

If anyone wants to write a tutorial that is standalone like a text file or an html document with graphics that people can download, unzip and view on their computer offline then please do. There is an upload forum here just for things like that.

Checked out your help file, Neon.
Excellent job.