It's not possible to follow multi-stage instructions in turn - you have to memorise them all at once and then carry them out, while guessing which piece of information wasn't quite accurate.

I obey the first, clicking on another window, and the explanatory window disappears. But where should I click to do that? Oh, where to click is stored in this other menu, over there! Right, okay, click on that - and a wall of text conceals the three instructions I need to follow. Send a science ship to a planet, I was told. Tips incessantly popped up over tips, following one instruction was almost always interrupted midway with a demand to do something else. I cannot think of any other reason why the interface should be so hell-bent on making it impossible to figure out how. It wants people that already understand how to play Stellaris. Stellaris, it turns out, doesn't want new people. I'm not sure even the first tutorial pop-up managed to not get interrupted. I was going to bloody well learn something, and I was going to get past my fears and concerns and hang-ups. I opted for the full tutorial, obviously, with everything explained to me in explicit detail. So, yes, perhaps I was leaping head first into a deep end filled with spikes, but good grief, my head began to hurt.

Having heard Adam raving about Stellaris, heard his amazing-sounding anecdotes of alien encounters and galaxy-wide adventures, and seen the huge excitement amongst strategy fans during its release, I thought: right, this is it.

There would be so many classic games I could suddenly sink into, so many games in 2016 to look forward to, and maybe I'd even start enjoying doing my taxes too. Primarily because I'd love to be in their numbers - having a whole other genre to love, you'd have to be crazy to reject that notion. Not because I find them at fault, and I certainly don't have any criticism for those who enjoy them. I have written far too many times over the years about my dislike of strategy games.

How to play stellaris guide