Todo
Get some kind of payment page setup using one of those form offerings that Peter had used.
Maybe handle the payment with gumroad.
When the user pays, have the user redirected to my private atlassian page and just host the videos on YouTube.
Target audience
Beginners who are interested in the game but intimidated by not knowing what to do: people who want an extremely step-by-step guide to playing the game well. Especially people who don't have powerful gaming computers that could run the newer games.
Course goals
Major goals
Provide an extremely step-by-step process new players can follow to play the game well.
Engrain in the student generally-applicable concepts that the student can apply to other games.
Minor goals
Nice to have: Provide an introduction to the game for completely new players (in other words, cover the stuff the manual does).
Nice to have: provide training scenarios that drill individual skills.
Nice to have: pay Jeff Paulding to develop plans for a few different scenarios and then use them as tests for the students: the student would try to develop their own plan and then see what Jeff did and ask themselves what they maybe neglected to consider.
Course outline
Appendicies
An intro for totally new players.
How to install GOG, buy the CMx1 games, install them.
How to start the intro scenario.
What the objective of the game is / how missions are scored.
How to move the camera around, access the help menu, order troops around.
Changes to the game I’ve made.
Removing annoying sounds / music.
Ideas for how to organize and present the information
Have the course proceed from a very general high-level perspective to keep the student from getting bored and then go towards a more fine-grained view.
Present the ideas in a expandable text format so that the main ideas are easy to spot.
Have a video for each of the leaves of the expandable format. This would be like one of your slides in your python course. But unlike the python course you won't combine them all into one video but instead keep them as separate videos for each slide.
Misc ideas I want to communicate
You can do everything perfectly and still get destroyed if the random unit selection and random terrain generation puts the odds against you. Perfect play does not guarantee victory. For example in one scenario I had a lot of my points put into an 88 mm flak cannon that would have been very easy for the enemy to take out with a mortar.
You can end up in a rock paper scissors type situation where in order to win you need to concentrate your forces in a particular direction and hope that the enemy happens to come from that direction. And if it turns out that the enemy comes from the other direction then you are lost. Ideally if you have time to move your forces you could try to adapt when you learn the direction that the enemy is coming from but in some cases it's simply not possible because the enemy immediately can see your area and can put fire on your location if you try to move any forces.
If you are charged with defending more than one flag, it may actually be smarter for you to only try to defend one of them instead of spreading out your forces. Another way to think about this is that if you assume that your opponent is competent and the scenario has been designed to provide a roughly equal chance of victory to either player (which is not always true) then the best you can hope for is a minor victory. So you should not take risks that would pay off and achieve a major victory but also make it more likely that you will suffer a defeat of some kind. So if you're playing chess you should not go for a fool's mate against a competent opponent but should instead expect that the game will be close and you should optimize for a minor victory.
In general in games and in real life you need to understand the likely outcome of micro decisions. For example in chess you know that if you move your piece to a square occupied by the opponent's piece then your piece will always capture the opponent's piece. But imagine for example that whether your piece captured your opponent's piece depended on variables like the facing of your piece and the facing of the opponent's piece and the pieces that surrounded it; then it would be more difficult to learn and understand the likely outcome of your decision to move your piece to your opponent’s square. That is the situation in combat mission. So, in order to be able to see more moves ahead than your opponent can, you need to understand the likely outcome of all of these possible moves.
Time is a critical resource. The more time an attacker has, the easier it will be for him to reposition his units to take out your strong points. For example a mortar or tank might be better off in a position on the other side of the map and if the attacker has infinite time then he can reposition those resources to the other side of the map. It's similar to how in chess, sometimes you would prefer one of your pieces to be in a different position. If an attacker is running low on time he might throw all of his units against an objective in a haphazard way which would allow you to have favorable odds in an engagement. So as an attacker it's critical that you make efficient use of time.
Concepts from other games that I want to introduce to the student
Knowing how you did maybe more complicated than seeing whether you got a victory or defeat at the end of the scenario.
In memoir 44 the odds of victory for either side are given for each scenario
In the Zacklike games they tell you how you did compared to other players
In contract bridge you are compared to other teams who are playing with the same cards you've been given.
The existence of hard counters leads to a balanced fighting force.
For example in starcraft and Warcraft you see balanced fighting forces in elite tournaments.
Questions I had about how to play even after watching YouTube tutorials
What is the step-by-step process I should follow to do an OCOKA analysis?
What is the step by step process I should follow for every part of the game. “What do I do now?” Is a question that was coming to mind constantly while I was new to the game.
I think the problem with Jeff's videos is that I watch them and everything I hear makes sense when I'm listening to it but I don't actually retain it when it is time for me to take action. It was only by writing out a summary of his videos that it really became clear what his key ideas were and they really started to stick with me.