Good idea, and if you need a fully qualified idiot, well, here I am!
I think, to use the term loosely, there are a lot of questions that always come up about the number-crunching side of the game (hence, not just a 'do this it works' but an explaination of why it works) in particular...
(1) tax/approval/pop-growth and rush-buy economics especially in the early game, and...
(2) fleet combat and impacts on ship design and research priorities (including but not limited to an update and elaboration on the weapons wiki graphs for TA), and...
(3) economic and shipbuilding/research effects of building upgrades including the effect of bonus tiles, and...
(4) probably something about the diplomatic aspects (again, not just a 'do this' but analytically why), how to keep the AI from going to war with you at a bad time, or better yet how to get them to go to war with each other and stay off your back while you build up to take them on, and...
(5) a listing in one place of all the various race- and alignment- unique techs, weapons/defenses, buildings, etc. and an analytic discussion of the strategic impacts that go with each of them, and...
(6) how, numerically, each of the game galaxy setup controls actually work and the perhaps unthought-of (by an idiot, after all) ramifications of how they will affect the consequent game, and...
(7) any real cool un-obvious and especially un-typical strategic approaches to the game like the blockade strategy I saw that turns the usual early game colony rush on its head (or anything similarly bizzarre that folks have come up with, good and bad, but with some analysis of it)...
...which would be supported by some positive and negative examples to back and illustrate the numbers. Maybe even, a lot of work, a literally turn-by-turn play thru of a (very small short) game with a write up of why various decisions were made.
Of course for those _really_ lost something about how to get the game downloaded the first time from Stardock central, how to get the updating from SDC to work with Vista, how to set up to use the launcher instead of going straight to the game screen...
...how to get the stupid(!)
edit controls in the forum for SDC to work. rant Stardock for all their ingenuity really does seem to have a corporate policy about weird use of the keyboard enter and delete keys - which just seem to not work 'intuitively' in any of their products that I have seen to date preferring instead weird twelve-finger-plus-your-nose keypunch combos, plus the lack of a 'back' key in the SDC forum viewer. /rant Sorry... I feel much better now.
Modding is not really something "for idiots" but I think everyone(?) who _really_ gets bit by this particular game bug eventually wants to know about the file structure and how to do mods - configuring new races, new maps, new planets, new ships with new graphics etc.
A really cool idea, entirely down another idiot guide path, would be a collection (and elaboration) of the various scattered background stories on the races (something I actually like about GalCiv, they are somewhat interesting - I'd even consider reading fan fiction) and even on the various techs, for instance there is a lot of stuff in the tech tree files in TA and such that goes beyond what is in the Wiki stuff. Some of the minors are clearly related or derived from some of the majors, and generally lack descriptive stuff in the docs. In fact, even a graphical depiction of the various race tech trees in the TA beta where you could see them outside the game would be nice.
GalCiv2 Forums
edit controls in the forum for SDC to work. rant Stardock for all their ingenuity really does seem to have a corporate policy about weird use of the keyboard enter and delete keys - which just seem to not work 'intuitively' in any of their products that I have seen to date preferring instead weird twelve-finger-plus-your-nose keypunch combos, plus the lack of a 'back' key in the SDC forum viewer. /rant Sorry... I feel much better now.
