Tutorial

I disagree, there will be new players, much like myself, that gravitate towards turtling...
Its more of a "novice RTS player" thing... But there will be people playing this game that have never played anything but first person shooters, MMOs, etc. and they deserve some kind of strategic overview.

yaay im not alone.

No one is forcing you to play the tutorial. Most games these days allow the player to skip the tut and get straight into the game. If you want to learn by playing skirmish then good for you. That doesn't help the guy who needs his hand held through the learning process because he never played the genre before. Try not to be so elitest/selfish and consider those who may require a guiding hand to get them started. Particularly because we are lacking a campaign, which is how most people (correct me if I'm wrong) learn how to play the game.

The point is that when you talk about tutorial in PA, it means more than just the basics. We also need to teach people to play the game.

Combining ideas from this thread, here's my suggestion.

There should not be a separate tutorial. Instead, there should be different levels of tutorial hints integrated into skirmish mode.

From the game menu you can choose multiplayer or singleplayer. The first time you press singleplayer, the game will ask how experienced you are. Your answer determines the degree of tutorialization, the length of the onboard ramp if you will. You can choose between:

"I have never played RTS before": The game will automatically start a skirmish against the easiest AI. On the easiest difficulty the AI should never attack. It will just build its base and wait to be conquered, like in Civ. On this level the game will literally walk you step by step through the most basic things like 'press this button to move your unit', 'this counter shows your metal', 'press this button to build a unit' - all the way up to 'now select all your units and move them towards the enemy base'. Of course they should get Lowrie to spice this up a bit with lines like "harvest the world's resources with brutal efficiency!", "now unleash that power and annihilate the enemy!" etc. Since you start with the utter basics this will be more effective than most RTS tutorials.

"I have played some RTS before but would like an introduction to this game": This starts a game on the second lowest difficulty, where the AI will at least try to attack. There are some tutorial hints but they focus more on the differences between PA and other RTS. Introduction to the flow economy, basic counters, etc. It can still tell you what every part of the interface does but should be aimed at players who know the basics.

"I don't need any help, just let me blow stuff up!": No tutorials, obviously. You go straight to the screen where you select galactic war or skirmish, AI level, number of opponents etc. No hand holding for you!

An interface controls tutorial would probably be nice even for the advanced players.
It will depend on how intuitiv the interface controls will be but we will play on spherical battlegrounds and multiple of those in one match not boxes of landscape like we used to. I for one would like to know how to switch from planet to planet and stuff

maybe they find a way that's so braindead simple that it needs absolutely no explanation but if it's any more complicated than zooming away from the planet surface up to system view and back with the mouse wheel it would be nice to know.