Don't forget too, the Firaxis has a whole team of people to work on these things. Gathering from a post by one of the developers recently, Stardock, as least for the Vanilla GalCiv II had like 6 people. And it still beats the pants of everything not made by Sid or the old Microprose.And while some games do come with nice detailed manuals (which I do appreciate) many other strategy games don't. Don't fault Stardock for not throwing in expensive and time-consuming extras that many bigger companies don't have.
I acknowledged in my earlier post that Stardock has fewer resources than Firaxis and I am willing to cut them some slack, but there is really no reason for their documentation (and by that I refer to information provided both ingame by the UI and by materials such as a manual) to be several magnitudes poorer. And it is. Again, Paradox is also a small developer and they manage to provide very extensive documentation with their games. Nor do I consider this information merely to be "expensive and time-consuming extras". Not only does the poor documentation make it difficult for TBS/4X newbies to get into GalCiv (expecially when coupled with the nearly useless noninteractive tutorials), but the lack of documentation leads to a lack of transparency in the game that has always negatively impacted my enjoyment of GalCiv, as fun as it still is.
My greatest enjoyment in TBS/4X games is planning my development (yes, I admit it, I like a fair amount of micromanagement and have never ever used a governor or automated my workers in any TBS game). Lets take Civ4; sorry, I can't help using it as an axample since I still consider Civ to be the king of 4X games. I can take many minutes happily examining the map to determine my next move--where to place a city, what tiles to develop, what to build or research next. And the precise consequences of all my decisions can be found in the documentation. Sometimes my actions do not produce the expected result, and in every such instance, I have been able to search the documentation and exclaim "Doh!" at what I stupidly missed. This often cannot be done in GalCiv because many of the "under the hood" workings of the game are just not adequately set out. For axample, many buildings give numerical bonuses to various stats, like economy and morale, but are extremely vague about how they are calculated. Twenty percent to what, I ask myself? Maybe I'm just dumb, but then so are many others, since I've seen many threads on the forums debating just these matters. When I take an action in Civ, I know precisely how much it will increase or decrease research, or income, or happiness. I don't know these things with such exactitude in GalCiv and, for me personally, it detracts from my enjoyment of the game.
Now maybe this is a deiberate design decision, though I doubt it. (In original EverQuest, obviously a very different game, the devs deliberately declined to give a specific numerical value for the player's mana pool, precisely to add a sense of mystery to the game. Of course, the method of caluclating this value was eventually cracked by the player base.) Obviously, there are different schools of thought on this matter. For me and other commenters, these matters are essential components of a good gaming experience while others see it as merely extras that a small developer need not provide. I'm just trying to set out my thoughts on this subject, and it may, in part, be a matter of playstyles. I always play a turtle/development oriented 4X game and like to micromanage, so it may be a greater matter to me than those who play a conquest oriented game. Although I love to play GalCiv, and have DA and TA, I don't enjoy it half as much as playing with better documentation (to paraphrase Irving Berlin).
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