I played around 3 hours and can say that I got familiar with all game mechanics. Game is definitely interesting and playable, I like idea a lot. But if you are looking for playtest, here is my feedback about aspect which imo could be improved,
1. Having natural wonders gives huge unfair advantage, especially that map is generated randomly. If player or AI get 1 or 2 of them, that the whole game. I'd recommend to remove them or redesign their mechanic.
2. There is no motivation for player to build more towns. You probably want to invest and develop one strong town, rather than staying with 3 weak towns, which will be easily burned.
I was glad to see "No Cities" option but it seems not working. As for me, better to give only one town for each player and make map smaller to be able to have enemies in reasonable range
3. The winning strategy is to develop combat skills by building barracks and research. Once you have 50% block chance you are unstoppable. The problem that player doesn't have winning ways through investing into other skills.
4. Dragons, wolfs and wizards are useless. They deal 1 damage, while soldiers deal 3. Whenever dragon hits all enemies, you still have to make 2 hits to each of enemies. I think it would be better to reduce HP from 5 to 3 and make 1 damage for each hit. Dragon probably should be more powerful (like immediately kills 3 enemies) but with reduced probability (for ex. 5% instead of 25%)
5. Would be better to have direct correlation between people involved into combat and its visualisation. I don't understand why when I'm sending 5 people to kill 14 pirates I see combat 5x5 ships. Maybe introduce 2 types of people? E.g. soldiers and heroes. Heroes can be sent to ruins and fight with dragons while soldiers need to defend cities and fight with pirates.
6. I didn't notice any effect from morale. Maybe this mechanic needs to be redesigned or at least described.
7. Meat and ale - why they used automatically?? Since only usage for them is to exchange to fame, now you just motivating player not grabbing those until appropriate quest appear.
8. Sand is useless but seems to be more frequent tile. Try to play in mode with town at the beginning and see how much of initial territory occupied with sand.
9. Red/green bars appearing when action is tested is not very informative. I suspect that you try to visualise something like success probability, but it's not visible what was the result. Why not showing it with simple dice or score?
10. When my town is burned I'm losing all items. After such effect I'm losing interest to continue playing since you are starting completely from scratch. Maybe make items to be permanent? btw, I'm talking about respawn mode. If respawns are disabled all you need is to focus on destroying enemies and you can skip most other game parts which is quite boring
I think there are more balance, AI, map generation areas for improvement, but those which I listed seem to be most critical.
Anyway, it is just my opinion feel free to ignore and sorry for long post, just wish you to complete your game, good luck with it
Thank you for playing and for the extensive feedback! I agree with much of your observations.
Some core mechanics are still up in the air hence the lack of balance.
1. I think it depends on the map generation and spawn locations. AI having access to wonders at the start just provide more of a challenge and incentive to harm them. Due to so much random generation I have had many games that are challenging and other that are too easy. I will provide more way to configure the map so if you choose you can play without wonders.
2. The motivation to create more towns is 1. a town can only have a max of 50 units so defense is limited, you may want to max out multiple towns. 2. you may see resources that are in other areas that would take too long to expand to. 3. The more towns the more of the map you can see and take advantage of encounters you find. 4. You can reach further out in the map with more towns. 5. Towns population generation maxes out at 10 units per turn. so multiple towns is useful to have multiple source of unit generation.
3. The goal of the game is to have many paths forward or combinations of gaining fame to win. Combat is probably providing too much fame. I have gained fame many other way, exploring, missions, wonders, and even hunting (killing the rare buck). All skills should be viable but will require much balance.
4. I agree in general that the proc object need to be balance. WIzard are cool since they hit for 3 and have a 50% to chain lightning to the next guy. Wolves hit for 1 but then cause bleeding of 1hp per turn. Dragons will hit all opponents for 1hp.
5. so the idea is that each encounter object requires a set number of units, however combat encounters are different in that they use up to 25 units. (5 stacks of 5)
6. Morale is a % that is added to every chance and should be working.
7. food and ale are auto consumed (1 per turn and provide a bonus to morale)
8. Sand is supposed to be useless, its generally a tile to avoid when setting up a town, or can provide a challenge when starting with a town. It should not spawn more than other tiles its pretty much up to the random generator. You can regenerate the map as many times as you like in the setup.
9. Correct, the red/green bar should indicate your odds of success. Dice rolls take longer, require more screen space, and are more difficult to understand a simple percentage. I like the animation to make it feel like a dice roll. However I will consider other options here since it likely will be confusing at first since no one has every seen it.
I would like to keep in touch since your feedback is very valuable to me, would you mind joining my discord channel? https://discord.com/invite/YbmZS6SXGw
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I played around 3 hours and can say that I got familiar with all game mechanics. Game is definitely interesting and playable, I like idea a lot. But if you are looking for playtest, here is my feedback about aspect which imo could be improved,
1. Having natural wonders gives huge unfair advantage, especially that map is generated randomly. If player or AI get 1 or 2 of them, that the whole game. I'd recommend to remove them or redesign their mechanic.
2. There is no motivation for player to build more towns. You probably want to invest and develop one strong town, rather than staying with 3 weak towns, which will be easily burned.
I was glad to see "No Cities" option but it seems not working. As for me, better to give only one town for each player and make map smaller to be able to have enemies in reasonable range
3. The winning strategy is to develop combat skills by building barracks and research. Once you have 50% block chance you are unstoppable. The problem that player doesn't have winning ways through investing into other skills.
4. Dragons, wolfs and wizards are useless. They deal 1 damage, while soldiers deal 3. Whenever dragon hits all enemies, you still have to make 2 hits to each of enemies. I think it would be better to reduce HP from 5 to 3 and make 1 damage for each hit. Dragon probably should be more powerful (like immediately kills 3 enemies) but with reduced probability (for ex. 5% instead of 25%)
5. Would be better to have direct correlation between people involved into combat and its visualisation. I don't understand why when I'm sending 5 people to kill 14 pirates I see combat 5x5 ships. Maybe introduce 2 types of people? E.g. soldiers and heroes. Heroes can be sent to ruins and fight with dragons while soldiers need to defend cities and fight with pirates.
6. I didn't notice any effect from morale. Maybe this mechanic needs to be redesigned or at least described.
7. Meat and ale - why they used automatically?? Since only usage for them is to exchange to fame, now you just motivating player not grabbing those until appropriate quest appear.
8. Sand is useless but seems to be more frequent tile. Try to play in mode with town at the beginning and see how much of initial territory occupied with sand.
9. Red/green bars appearing when action is tested is not very informative. I suspect that you try to visualise something like success probability, but it's not visible what was the result. Why not showing it with simple dice or score?
10. When my town is burned I'm losing all items. After such effect I'm losing interest to continue playing since you are starting completely from scratch. Maybe make items to be permanent? btw, I'm talking about respawn mode. If respawns are disabled all you need is to focus on destroying enemies and you can skip most other game parts which is quite boring
I think there are more balance, AI, map generation areas for improvement, but those which I listed seem to be most critical.
Anyway, it is just my opinion feel free to ignore and sorry for long post, just wish you to complete your game, good luck with it
Thank you for playing and for the extensive feedback! I agree with much of your observations.
Some core mechanics are still up in the air hence the lack of balance.
1. I think it depends on the map generation and spawn locations. AI having access to wonders at the start just provide more of a challenge and incentive to harm them. Due to so much random generation I have had many games that are challenging and other that are too easy. I will provide more way to configure the map so if you choose you can play without wonders.
2. The motivation to create more towns is 1. a town can only have a max of 50 units so defense is limited, you may want to max out multiple towns. 2. you may see resources that are in other areas that would take too long to expand to. 3. The more towns the more of the map you can see and take advantage of encounters you find. 4. You can reach further out in the map with more towns. 5. Towns population generation maxes out at 10 units per turn. so multiple towns is useful to have multiple source of unit generation.
3. The goal of the game is to have many paths forward or combinations of gaining fame to win. Combat is probably providing too much fame. I have gained fame many other way, exploring, missions, wonders, and even hunting (killing the rare buck). All skills should be viable but will require much balance.
4. I agree in general that the proc object need to be balance. WIzard are cool since they hit for 3 and have a 50% to chain lightning to the next guy. Wolves hit for 1 but then cause bleeding of 1hp per turn. Dragons will hit all opponents for 1hp.
5. so the idea is that each encounter object requires a set number of units, however combat encounters are different in that they use up to 25 units. (5 stacks of 5)
6. Morale is a % that is added to every chance and should be working.
7. food and ale are auto consumed (1 per turn and provide a bonus to morale)
8. Sand is supposed to be useless, its generally a tile to avoid when setting up a town, or can provide a challenge when starting with a town. It should not spawn more than other tiles its pretty much up to the random generator. You can regenerate the map as many times as you like in the setup.
9. Correct, the red/green bar should indicate your odds of success. Dice rolls take longer, require more screen space, and are more difficult to understand a simple percentage. I like the animation to make it feel like a dice roll. However I will consider other options here since it likely will be confusing at first since no one has every seen it.
I would like to keep in touch since your feedback is very valuable to me, would you mind joining my discord channel? https://discord.com/invite/YbmZS6SXGw
Game's great! Would you consider adding downloads?
Specifically Mac would be nice!
Thanks for checking it out. The game will have a download on steam in the future. I will see about getting it here in the near future.
Sounds great
This game just works, and it works in a way that works, which works very well.
can you explain a bit more?
Can you add endless mode ?
how would that work?
War forever
The victory condition is score based. I guess that could be a mode or you could just set a very high score limit.
Is this game Cool?
getting cooler every week
It didn't load for me
after it said loading assets, it was just a black screen
thanks for the feedback, what browser are you using?