Noob in need of direction

I hope don't make everyone go all ape........ and flame me, cause I know no one likes it when someone says, "I have an idea for a mod, all I need is someone to do it!", but I would like help.

If I wanna make a game that will, lets say, have an ascII interface that will look like just a bunch of boxes (like a giant tic tac toe board), and have some sort of turn based strategy, what things(knowledge of programming) would I need?

I know a lot of simple C++, so I have the vehicles to implement any new tools that I am given, but I am lacking in these simple areas, or never learned them: arrays, classes, funtions, bit assignment(huh?), and some other things that I should know easily, but don't, cause I'm kind of self taught, and lazy...which isn't ad good combo.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

arrays, functions and classes are a must in C++

Yes I know, and I've been trying to catch up with those, while trying to catch up with school. But I'm working on it. Anything else I should learn, though, and where/how to apply it to a game like this?

I thought about doing this myself, but there's a whole lot of complexity involved. The thing that made me decide to wait before I made it was the fact that the player presumably must have an intelligent opponent, and I don't think I'm up to coding an AI like that yet.

If you've thought of that:
Knowing how to use classes and functions proficiently is a MUST.
Also, becoming familiar with vectors and other containers in the STL library will be very important. They're basically necessary for making a 2d grid for your characters to fight on...

A 2d vector looks like this, by the way:
vector <vector <int> > my2dgrid;

It can get very complicated very fast!

So pick up a book and dive into those parts of the C++ language. It's really not that difficult once you get started.

Classes and objects will change the way you look at code and the way you approach problem solving in code.

ALright thansk a bunch...by the way...what does that vector command do, and does it like create a variable that I can just cout?

EDIT:

also just a quick question:

If i wanna have a graph of a like for an ascii tic tac toe, just a lot bigger, is there any other option that's quicker than this:

board[1][1] = e; board[2][1] = e; board[3][1] = e;...(etc.)

?