It is balanced around no prestiges meaning that all battles are beatable on normal without any prestige bonuses. There were also a bunch of people who completed the game before I even made the prestige system, so I don't know. Admittedly, I have never played from start to finish in one go to time it, but it took me 3 weeks to reach mid-point I believe (on normal), so I expected the overall time to be close to two months. Did you play in the Idle mode or incremental mode?
Had a power outage while this was playing and when I came back, I somehow lost manual and auto saves going back all the way to last month. Bruh... that is so crazy. I was in the 4th era or whatever with like 360k pop... now I'm back at 31k
The game is better on desktop/browser than on mobile, where it's hard to hit the buttons (at least personally)
The only issue I have so far is the buildings that take more than one pop do not tell you how much they need. IMHO the plus button should be grayed out (or turn red) when you have not enough unengaged pops left.
Thanks for the feedback, initially that was the case, but now that buttons are trying to add as much as they can (if you do +5/+10 or +50), they always stay on.
But maybe indeed they should be greyed out if pressing on them dioesn't add at least 1 to the building.
Actually, for me the buttons are greyed out when there is not enough, like in the picture below, 1 have 1 pop left, need two for the tree cutting, so the button is grey. Or are you referrring to showing how much you would need to add for the first time? I've added this info to mobile and coming steam version, but forgot to update the itch version, I will post it in the coming days.
it'll grey out if you don't have enough, but I often caught myself adding based on efficiency instead of worker availability. So we get how many units per worker, but we don't get how many workers are added at each level. that's simple enough to start, but once you get into the high levels and non-round numbers it's easy to lose track of whether something took 2 workers or 4 workers or 5, etc. Then I'll look back over way later and realize that my allocation was stupid or wasteful and I would have had way more workers ready to dump into healers if I did it the right way.
Oh, I think I get it now. You mean like for the Tree cutting it takes two people, but after building 20 it says that it takes 40 people and you forget that it's two per building? I see.
You think if I add this info to "Cost" it will be confusing? Like, it will say Cost: 10 tools, 2 pops, but will subtract only tools
Okay wow absolutely loved this game! The balancing act of this game was so great. Just a perfect idle game. Made it to Eternal Empire and got a note that I wouldn't be able to go further without Prestige-ing -- where/how do I do that?
Found it, thanks! I made it the whole way through my first run without finding that menu! I love the amount of details and options in this game (especially the "incremental/idle" toggle option) and all the many names/titles of things as you move through the ages are well-thought-out. Tickled my neurospicy brain in the best way possible!
What does "Over Capacity" mean for Military tab? Like what determines the limit, what is the downside/effect of going over? Not finding anything...just found the help button which shows the military tutorial, was looking in the "menu" button for a FAQ/help section.
Capacity for military is 20% of total pops, it's a soft limit, you can safely go above it. What it does is simply proportionally increases the upkeep cost of military the higher over the limit you go. So if you can support this high upkeep, you can go over the capacity.
Liking the game, but there are few annoyances or weird things. After unlocking something it can take a long time before getting enough upgrades to make it worth using. I've had pyres since the start of the medieval with them being deeply inefficient (except when I was desperate for heat when researching) and I've only just found the battle to get the first tech to improve them in the 6th medieval war. I don't think one tech will even be enough to make them major source of heat. Other things I've gotten tons of bonuses for, yet they still don't seem that great. Most become good eventually, though there are some I wonder if I'll end up skipping over for the next station.
When military units are at full strength it seems like training them wastes resources for no reason so I have to try to hunt down whichever have finished to pause them, wish it auto paused. Am I meant to be producing enough to contantly train? With my many idle pops it should be possible, but with the way costs scale up I try not to be excessive.
Am I missing something or are trebuchets really underwhelming? At first glance their stats seem great but they cost near 4 times the pop as catapults (and much more other resources but that's true of every higher tier unit) with only twice the defence, and their 5 times attack is made less useful by their higher time per attack. I'd rather just run more of the cheaper option.
I wanted to check if steel rams had the same issue, and they seem fine needing only 2.5 times the pop for around 3-5 times the power. Actually they are more than fine- they cost the same upkeep per ram despite their higher tier and high pop cost.
Yeah, there are a couple of stinkers here and there and sometimes indeed the production buildings are not necessarily an upgrade. It is still usually worth putting people in all of them, just due to the upkeep scaling, so diversified production is usually more sustainable.
Regarding the military, indeed the intention was to constantly upkeep the army and at least that's how I went through the whole game. When people started playing, a lot of them opted out for the going-into-red-to-overtrain the army, and that's when this issue became more prevalent. Originally if you stopped training unit strength would start slowly degrading back to 0, so first approach was heavily insentivised, but due to majority vote I removed this mechanic. I still don't want to auto-pause because it will too heavily skew the balance in favour of second approach, right now it compensates a bit by you having to micromanage your way through it
Auto-trade doesn't seem to work? I had manual trades active then those timers ran out. But I had auto-trade active before they expired. It's been auto-deducting it all the whole time so these trades cannot be inactive.
I think Auto-Trade tried to just deduct the whole cost of the contract over again when it expired. But if it's going to do that, then what is the point of the per-second auto-deduction?
*edit* Can confirm that Auto-Trade is double-dipping and will fail if you don't have the resources in reserve. It's better to just buy up front.
It's a result of too much information being not useful. The contract cost is activation only, there's no per-second consumption. It's just people didn't know if they were actually producing enough to have trades constantly on, so they asked me to add phantom consumption on the resource screen. It doesn't actually consume it, it only shows the average consumption per second.
You can actually see that if you switch off all your produciton for valuables, the number you have in stock will not decrease.
Also FYI, all red number on the production screen are not necessarily ACTUAL consumption, it is consumption IF everything is consuming as it should. For example, your troops want to consume 1K/s food and 1K/s iron. You produce 1K/s food and 0.1K/s iron. The red number will still show -1K/s for both food and iron, even if in reality you consume only 0.1K/s of each (since that's the bottleneck). Previously it was showing actual consumption, but then it was confusing, how come I go increase my iron production and suddenly my food consuption spikes 10 times.
It should maybe just consume the resources per second then? What's the use case for sitting on a stockpile and not just consuming it up front to add to the timer? The stockpile won't actually let you get high enough to cover the costs of autorenew. I was making enough per second but my stockpile would only get high enough to pay for one of the contracts, so the others would fail.
I adjusted my rate to overproduce to keep the stockpile high enough, so I'll see what happens when I roll over the next contracts.
The idea was to have it mechanically different from the other screens.
If it was doing per-second consumption, there would be no difference between this, and simply adding another produciton building. Whether it's a good implementation or not is up to the debate, but I thought that it should be at least different.
On top of it like this, it's the only place where the size of stockpile actually matters, since for some contracts you would actually need to bump up the production to reach the required stockpile size to initiate the trade in the first place (as you mentioned in your post). So it adds a bit of diversity to the routine.
I def need a better explainer on Military. There's enough here to be engaging with army composition but there's so much guesswork around what these stats mean and how an individual tick of combat works. I'm trying to bring enough rogues to knock out arty before it can get a shot off but there's so much guesswork as to how this all works. Is Defense health? Are all units attacking at once? How much healing does First Aid do? Does healing mitigate incoming damage in the same tick or do we take the losses and then heal up the next tick? Do Horse Archers still get the 2x damage to melee bonus? It's all guesswork and the Help page only explains the UI, not how battle works.
It also makes for an easier game, but zero risk of attack outside of actively engaging in battle was a bit of a bummer. I can just fully demobilize with no risk when I'd rather shift over to Research or Pop Growth builds.
I'm having a good time with this, though, even with UI clumsiness. It def makes my autism brain go brrr.
Every unit has 4 stats, attack (damage per attack, subject to randomization), defense (health), attack speed (well, more like delay, seconds between each attack, smaller is better, is slightly randomized +-0.1s after every attack) and range (in which column it sits).
All unit turns are processed individually, every game tick, so while the first tick it's indeed all at the same time, then attack delay difference and its randomization kicks in and they all desync.
Horse archers are cavalry, so regardless of range they get all cavalry bonuses and penalties.
First aid damage stat is their healing power, they don't deal damage. They heal everyone except themselves and artillery (to prevent softlocks) at the same time on their turn, they can overheal up to the initial health of the stack when it entered combat, but not above. So if you have 10 swordsmen, 1 survives, healers will overheal him until its 1 dude with the health of 10 (he still attacks as if he is 1). Since everything is desynced, healing does not mitigate damage it's all separate.
Defense walls only take part in battles labeled as defense.
Raiding (attacks on player) was a mechanic in the earlier stage of development, which we scrapped eventually because I couldn't make it fun in the general context of the game. Either raids are too weak and it's meaningless since they don't do anything, or if they are strong enough to be menacing, if a raid happens right before you want to attack someone, your troops die and you need to retrain them again, which was a bit infuriating. The alternative was to have two standing armies, one for protection always, one for attacks but it felt too artificial.
In the end I think removing them was a good idea, because turns out people really hate to see number go smaller in the incremental games. Majority of negative (and I mean, very negative, like 1-2 star review on google) feedback that I got over the course of these 2 month (not counting shitty UI, guilty as charged) was about production death spirals and how it sucks to be penalized for something. Then there was also battle readiness, which was degrading if you were pausing training for fully trained troops, also now gone because everyone hated it. So I dread to imagine what would have happened if someone got raided, lost, got his production hit and then it spiraled.
In short yes, the strat now is to win battles then unassign everyone and drop them into research to speed up things and then retraining everyone again.
Glad you like it, I pretty much made it for myself, because it was a game I wanted to play fpr my particular brand of autism. Then someone convinced me to promote it a bit more and publish on different platforms.
What actually is the randomization on attacks? Is it just a flat rand()? The attacks on Catapults that I was seeing from my stack of Rogues was 6%, 15%, 21%, etc. I don't think I ever saw an attack larger than 1/4 their max attack value?
Also one aggregated stack per unit type targeting one unit at random allows an exploit. You should basically never go into battle without having 1 untrained unit of every single thing you have. You'll flood your army with so many false targets that can eat an entire enemy stack's attack for that turn. At basically no cost. It's only going to be one attack for that unit but if only 1/5 of my front line is real units then the odds of going several seconds of combat without them taking any attacks is pretty decent.
Oh, you are right, I've forgotten. There's also a flat mult reduction to all attack values, simply to extend the duration of the battles. Because otherwise with attack equal to defense for most units, battles would end in 1 tick.
The 1 unit strategy is the strat. congratulations for figuring it out. It looks silly, but it's an unavoidable outcome of random targeting. And since I didn't want to change random targetting, I decided to roll with it, so all future battles are balanced around this exploit.
If you play on Standard difficulty and below, you don't need to prestige at all, all fights are balanced for no prestige run on those difficulties. But if you feel like waiting for technologies/training is an absolute slog you can prestige whenever you have ~100 points, which should give you 3x mult in both Research speed and training speed.
I'm still very early but it's basically never efficient to put pops into stuff like cooking or smelting. maybe I just need a way larger economy of scale, but the marginal rate is always better just putting that pop into extraction directly. I guess once I'm in the dozens or hundreds the diminishing returns will take care of that, but I haven't hit that wall yet.
Hey, it does depend on the stage of the game. Also sometimes stuff that is not very population efficient could be quite resource-consumption efficient, so it's a back-and-forth kind of thing.
The furnace starts off a bit weak, but after you upgrade it, it becomes much better.
Overall boosters are very powerful, especially later on.
UI/UX is a little rough, having to constantly expand and collapse and scroll and click to show info that should already be showing bc the whole row is large, etc. Not being able to fullscreen is def a hindrance on top of this.
Also the Production screen will show you the costs and upkeep of ticking one higher but Research does not, it only shows the current. You have no idea what the costs will be until you can activate it.
Yeah, the UI is totally the weakest link, I completely agree. But you can always use the Expand all button to have all of the production buildings expanded, and only expand/collapse the resource tabs.
But maybe indeed one could make building nodes have horizontal layout instead of vertical. The thought didn't occur to me until now, since on mobile it kinda has to be vertical to fit everything.
About the research though, I never had the need to know what it will consume in advance since it ultimately doesn't matter. It always takes 1-5 of some resource per person assigned, so you just assign as much as you want and then go to the production screen to increase production if you are in the red.
This is a really fun game. The goal of growing the tribe is clear, and the efficiency upgrades through research add a lot of enjoyment to the progression. I’m currently researching the furnace, and so far it’s definitely a captivating game.
There is a lot to like here. It's rough around the edges but with a little work I think it could polish up into quite a gem. However I worry that it's going to be a slog as by the middle of age two which already had taken me several hours to get to, researches were starting to take upwards of an hour to achieve with the wonder research taking almost an entire day at the point I'm at. Are later researches going to keep scaling up longer and longer or will I eventually get some research building or something that shortens them? I been considering resetting for prestige even though the game has said I shouldn't need to.
I've made the game initially for the android and was intending to play it in relatively short bursts, so for me research was a thing to happen passively between play sessions. It shouldn't go much above 1-2 hours per research.
To speed it up you could save your army configuration, throw all of them into research to quickly finish all of it, then reload army comp and do a quick 10 minute meditate to retrain them, this would probably be the most optimal way to do it.
Alternatively you could prestige now and throw everything into research speed. This should net you about 2.5x permanent research speed (if you are in the middle of age 2).
I've found a bug that you may wanna work out. If you save a template with 1 of any/all troop types and if you make a large amount of that type, let it train, and then load the template setting the troop(s) back down to 1 it actually saves all of the training onto the single troop making it incredibly strong. This can be abused to make an army of single troops that each have a power level that you could only achieve normally if you devoted your entire economy to that single type of troop. Combined it eliminates the need to actually think of what type of military units you should be training as well as makes the military need almost no pop or resource upkeep once you have performed the bug on each troop you have access to.
congrats on releasing such a big project! i love a sandbox civ management type game, and the idle/incremental elements are a really fun and natural addition to the genre. i think a lot of us love those genres (i know i check the management tag and the idle tag for new games regularly), so i imagine you might get some strong criticism from people who are comparing it to the game of their dreams. anyway, just wanted to encourage say—there is a lot of good stuff in here! it's a pretty ambitious project and i think most of what you have works well. (fwiw i didn't mind the tutorials lol)
I think my biggest request would be some more balanced recovery mechanics? I keep getting too excited about researching things, accidentally running out of food or fire, and then I pretty quickly have to click the free all pop button and watch my population dwindle until it's small enough to live off the few resources left after the death spiral. sometimes i tried to rebalance my workers for a while before admitting defeat and freeing all, but I haven't been able to manage it successfully. maybe some kind of supply & demand visualization would help players rebalance things more intuitively? it took me a while to even realize that the research is what was sucking up my resources. idk, just brainstorming.
Regarding your suggestion, yeah, this is a big point of discussion usually, where it either works completely fine, or completely screws you over. Everyone encounters at least one death spiral at least once, and that is by design, I really wanted everyone to get that "gotcha" moment where they see that the usual approach of clicking the + button doesn't work, but I think most of my negative reviews on google play come exactly from this mechanic lol. What I can tell you is that pretty much everyone stops having these moments at some point when they keep playing, or at least that's what I gathered from people who actively discuss with me on discord.
For now there are two things that can help you a bit, there's "Show Details" button, that shows your stockpile sizes, how much you produces vs consume and how fast your stockpile will run out, so that can help with planning. Second is the "Consumption" button, this should have the functionality you described, it shows separately how much resources are consumed by Research, Military and Production respectively, this should make it a bit more bearable I hope!
we'll see. i'll give it an actual shot now and then submit my feedback to the dev-judgment committee.. i warn you though you may be awarded a seat on the committee but not recognized as a dev-who-desperately-doesn't-want-everyone-to-pass-on-their-game-instantly.
Hey, it boosts food production of other stations. Basically cooking consumes food produced by hunting and fishing to boost them and make them produce more food, hope this helps:)
Yeah, I've tried to close the loop of produce->research->produce better->win battles->unlock research etc. So you HAVE to interact with all three to advance.
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It took me 179 days to beat the game, with difficulty set to Easy for most of the time, and several (I think 3) prestiges.
The claim is that the game is balanced around no prestiges :/ uh, how?
It is balanced around no prestiges meaning that all battles are beatable on normal without any prestige bonuses.
There were also a bunch of people who completed the game before I even made the prestige system, so I don't know.
Admittedly, I have never played from start to finish in one go to time it, but it took me 3 weeks to reach mid-point I believe (on normal), so I expected the overall time to be close to two months.
Did you play in the Idle mode or incremental mode?
I played a mix. Idle during the day and incremental during the nights, to maximize efficiency
Had a power outage while this was playing and when I came back, I somehow lost manual and auto saves going back all the way to last month. Bruh... that is so crazy. I was in the 4th era or whatever with like 360k pop... now I'm back at 31k
Huh, that's weird. I mean, theoretically save should be hosted on itch, no?
Very sorry that happened, but there's probably nothing I can do about it, unfortunately
The game is better on desktop/browser than on mobile, where it's hard to hit the buttons (at least personally)
The only issue I have so far is the buildings that take more than one pop do not tell you how much they need. IMHO the plus button should be grayed out (or turn red) when you have not enough unengaged pops left.
Thanks for the feedback, initially that was the case, but now that buttons are trying to add as much as they can (if you do +5/+10 or +50), they always stay on.
But maybe indeed they should be greyed out if pressing on them dioesn't add at least 1 to the building.
Seconding this, you eventually hit a point where you have to stop and do the math to remember what it was.
Actually, for me the buttons are greyed out when there is not enough, like in the picture below, 1 have 1 pop left, need two for the tree cutting, so the button is grey. Or are you referrring to showing how much you would need to add for the first time? I've added this info to mobile and coming steam version, but forgot to update the itch version, I will post it in the coming days.
it'll grey out if you don't have enough, but I often caught myself adding based on efficiency instead of worker availability. So we get how many units per worker, but we don't get how many workers are added at each level. that's simple enough to start, but once you get into the high levels and non-round numbers it's easy to lose track of whether something took 2 workers or 4 workers or 5, etc. Then I'll look back over way later and realize that my allocation was stupid or wasteful and I would have had way more workers ready to dump into healers if I did it the right way.
Oh, I think I get it now. You mean like for the Tree cutting it takes two people, but after building 20 it says that it takes 40 people and you forget that it's two per building? I see.
You think if I add this info to "Cost" it will be confusing? Like, it will say Cost: 10 tools, 2 pops, but will subtract only tools
Okay wow absolutely loved this game! The balancing act of this game was so great. Just a perfect idle game. Made it to Eternal Empire and got a note that I wouldn't be able to go further without Prestige-ing -- where/how do I do that?
Hey, thanks for the positive feedback, glad you liked it!
It's in the "Menu" panel, "Player stats". If you have questions on what stuff is doing in there, don't hesitate to ask:)
Found it, thanks! I made it the whole way through my first run without finding that menu! I love the amount of details and options in this game (especially the "incremental/idle" toggle option) and all the many names/titles of things as you move through the ages are well-thought-out. Tickled my neurospicy brain in the best way possible!
Well, there's nothing usefull there for the first playthrough anyway. Otherwise you would've been tempted by the prestige option:)
Should bowmaker disappear for era 3. id think not since it affects longbowman but idk
Oh, usually everything from 2 eras back disappears, but here indeed it doesn't make sense. Maybe I should mark bowmaker as era 2 instead of 1.
What does "Over Capacity" mean for Military tab? Like what determines the limit, what is the downside/effect of going over? Not finding anything...just found the help button which shows the military tutorial, was looking in the "menu" button for a FAQ/help section.
Oh, I didn't add it to the help button?
Capacity for military is 20% of total pops, it's a soft limit, you can safely go above it. What it does is simply proportionally increases the upkeep cost of military the higher over the limit you go. So if you can support this high upkeep, you can go over the capacity.
You did add it to the help button, I just couldn't find the help button because I was looking in the menu for it not the main screen.
Liking the game, but there are few annoyances or weird things. After unlocking something it can take a long time before getting enough upgrades to make it worth using. I've had pyres since the start of the medieval with them being deeply inefficient (except when I was desperate for heat when researching) and I've only just found the battle to get the first tech to improve them in the 6th medieval war. I don't think one tech will even be enough to make them major source of heat. Other things I've gotten tons of bonuses for, yet they still don't seem that great. Most become good eventually, though there are some I wonder if I'll end up skipping over for the next station.
When military units are at full strength it seems like training them wastes resources for no reason so I have to try to hunt down whichever have finished to pause them, wish it auto paused. Am I meant to be producing enough to contantly train? With my many idle pops it should be possible, but with the way costs scale up I try not to be excessive.
Am I missing something or are trebuchets really underwhelming? At first glance their stats seem great but they cost near 4 times the pop as catapults (and much more other resources but that's true of every higher tier unit) with only twice the defence, and their 5 times attack is made less useful by their higher time per attack. I'd rather just run more of the cheaper option.
I wanted to check if steel rams had the same issue, and they seem fine needing only 2.5 times the pop for around 3-5 times the power. Actually they are more than fine- they cost the same upkeep per ram despite their higher tier and high pop cost.
Hey, thanks for the feedback!
Yeah, there are a couple of stinkers here and there and sometimes indeed the production buildings are not necessarily an upgrade. It is still usually worth putting people in all of them, just due to the upkeep scaling, so diversified production is usually more sustainable.
Regarding the military, indeed the intention was to constantly upkeep the army and at least that's how I went through the whole game. When people started playing, a lot of them opted out for the going-into-red-to-overtrain the army, and that's when this issue became more prevalent. Originally if you stopped training unit strength would start slowly degrading back to 0, so first approach was heavily insentivised, but due to majority vote I removed this mechanic. I still don't want to auto-pause because it will too heavily skew the balance in favour of second approach, right now it compensates a bit by you having to micromanage your way through it
Auto-trade doesn't seem to work? I had manual trades active then those timers ran out. But I had auto-trade active before they expired. It's been auto-deducting it all the whole time so these trades cannot be inactive.
I think Auto-Trade tried to just deduct the whole cost of the contract over again when it expired. But if it's going to do that, then what is the point of the per-second auto-deduction?
*edit* Can confirm that Auto-Trade is double-dipping and will fail if you don't have the resources in reserve. It's better to just buy up front.
It's a result of too much information being not useful. The contract cost is activation only, there's no per-second consumption. It's just people didn't know if they were actually producing enough to have trades constantly on, so they asked me to add phantom consumption on the resource screen. It doesn't actually consume it, it only shows the average consumption per second.
You can actually see that if you switch off all your produciton for valuables, the number you have in stock will not decrease.
Also FYI, all red number on the production screen are not necessarily ACTUAL consumption, it is consumption IF everything is consuming as it should. For example, your troops want to consume 1K/s food and 1K/s iron. You produce 1K/s food and 0.1K/s iron. The red number will still show -1K/s for both food and iron, even if in reality you consume only 0.1K/s of each (since that's the bottleneck). Previously it was showing actual consumption, but then it was confusing, how come I go increase my iron production and suddenly my food consuption spikes 10 times.
It should maybe just consume the resources per second then? What's the use case for sitting on a stockpile and not just consuming it up front to add to the timer? The stockpile won't actually let you get high enough to cover the costs of autorenew. I was making enough per second but my stockpile would only get high enough to pay for one of the contracts, so the others would fail.
I adjusted my rate to overproduce to keep the stockpile high enough, so I'll see what happens when I roll over the next contracts.
The idea was to have it mechanically different from the other screens.
If it was doing per-second consumption, there would be no difference between this, and simply adding another produciton building. Whether it's a good implementation or not is up to the debate, but I thought that it should be at least different.
On top of it like this, it's the only place where the size of stockpile actually matters, since for some contracts you would actually need to bump up the production to reach the required stockpile size to initiate the trade in the first place (as you mentioned in your post). So it adds a bit of diversity to the routine.
I def need a better explainer on Military. There's enough here to be engaging with army composition but there's so much guesswork around what these stats mean and how an individual tick of combat works. I'm trying to bring enough rogues to knock out arty before it can get a shot off but there's so much guesswork as to how this all works. Is Defense health? Are all units attacking at once? How much healing does First Aid do? Does healing mitigate incoming damage in the same tick or do we take the losses and then heal up the next tick? Do Horse Archers still get the 2x damage to melee bonus? It's all guesswork and the Help page only explains the UI, not how battle works.
It also makes for an easier game, but zero risk of attack outside of actively engaging in battle was a bit of a bummer. I can just fully demobilize with no risk when I'd rather shift over to Research or Pop Growth builds.
I'm having a good time with this, though, even with UI clumsiness. It def makes my autism brain go brrr.
Hey, thanks for playing!
Every unit has 4 stats, attack (damage per attack, subject to randomization), defense (health), attack speed (well, more like delay, seconds between each attack, smaller is better, is slightly randomized +-0.1s after every attack) and range (in which column it sits).
All unit turns are processed individually, every game tick, so while the first tick it's indeed all at the same time, then attack delay difference and its randomization kicks in and they all desync.
Horse archers are cavalry, so regardless of range they get all cavalry bonuses and penalties.
First aid damage stat is their healing power, they don't deal damage. They heal everyone except themselves and artillery (to prevent softlocks) at the same time on their turn, they can overheal up to the initial health of the stack when it entered combat, but not above. So if you have 10 swordsmen, 1 survives, healers will overheal him until its 1 dude with the health of 10 (he still attacks as if he is 1). Since everything is desynced, healing does not mitigate damage it's all separate.
Defense walls only take part in battles labeled as defense.
Raiding (attacks on player) was a mechanic in the earlier stage of development, which we scrapped eventually because I couldn't make it fun in the general context of the game. Either raids are too weak and it's meaningless since they don't do anything, or if they are strong enough to be menacing, if a raid happens right before you want to attack someone, your troops die and you need to retrain them again, which was a bit infuriating. The alternative was to have two standing armies, one for protection always, one for attacks but it felt too artificial.
In the end I think removing them was a good idea, because turns out people really hate to see number go smaller in the incremental games. Majority of negative (and I mean, very negative, like 1-2 star review on google) feedback that I got over the course of these 2 month (not counting shitty UI, guilty as charged) was about production death spirals and how it sucks to be penalized for something. Then there was also battle readiness, which was degrading if you were pausing training for fully trained troops, also now gone because everyone hated it. So I dread to imagine what would have happened if someone got raided, lost, got his production hit and then it spiraled.
In short yes, the strat now is to win battles then unassign everyone and drop them into research to speed up things and then retraining everyone again.
Glad you like it, I pretty much made it for myself, because it was a game I wanted to play fpr my particular brand of autism. Then someone convinced me to promote it a bit more and publish on different platforms.
What actually is the randomization on attacks? Is it just a flat rand()? The attacks on Catapults that I was seeing from my stack of Rogues was 6%, 15%, 21%, etc. I don't think I ever saw an attack larger than 1/4 their max attack value?
Also one aggregated stack per unit type targeting one unit at random allows an exploit. You should basically never go into battle without having 1 untrained unit of every single thing you have. You'll flood your army with so many false targets that can eat an entire enemy stack's attack for that turn. At basically no cost. It's only going to be one attack for that unit but if only 1/5 of my front line is real units then the odds of going several seconds of combat without them taking any attacks is pretty decent.
Oh, you are right, I've forgotten. There's also a flat mult reduction to all attack values, simply to extend the duration of the battles. Because otherwise with attack equal to defense for most units, battles would end in 1 tick.
The 1 unit strategy is the strat. congratulations for figuring it out. It looks silly, but it's an unavoidable outcome of random targeting. And since I didn't want to change random targetting, I decided to roll with it, so all future battles are balanced around this exploit.
How often should I prestige
If you play on Standard difficulty and below, you don't need to prestige at all, all fights are balanced for no prestige run on those difficulties. But if you feel like waiting for technologies/training is an absolute slog you can prestige whenever you have ~100 points, which should give you 3x mult in both Research speed and training speed.
I'm still very early but it's basically never efficient to put pops into stuff like cooking or smelting. maybe I just need a way larger economy of scale, but the marginal rate is always better just putting that pop into extraction directly. I guess once I'm in the dozens or hundreds the diminishing returns will take care of that, but I haven't hit that wall yet.
Hey, it does depend on the stage of the game. Also sometimes stuff that is not very population efficient could be quite resource-consumption efficient, so it's a back-and-forth kind of thing.
The furnace starts off a bit weak, but after you upgrade it, it becomes much better.
Overall boosters are very powerful, especially later on.
UI/UX is a little rough, having to constantly expand and collapse and scroll and click to show info that should already be showing bc the whole row is large, etc. Not being able to fullscreen is def a hindrance on top of this.
Also the Production screen will show you the costs and upkeep of ticking one higher but Research does not, it only shows the current. You have no idea what the costs will be until you can activate it.
Yeah, the UI is totally the weakest link, I completely agree. But you can always use the Expand all button to have all of the production buildings expanded, and only expand/collapse the resource tabs.
But maybe indeed one could make building nodes have horizontal layout instead of vertical. The thought didn't occur to me until now, since on mobile it kinda has to be vertical to fit everything.
About the research though, I never had the need to know what it will consume in advance since it ultimately doesn't matter. It always takes 1-5 of some resource per person assigned, so you just assign as much as you want and then go to the production screen to increase production if you are in the red.
This is a really fun game. The goal of growing the tribe is clear, and the efficiency upgrades through research add a lot of enjoyment to the progression. I’m currently researching the furnace, and so far it’s definitely a captivating game.
Thank you for playing, hope it stays fun for you going forward:)
There is a lot to like here. It's rough around the edges but with a little work I think it could polish up into quite a gem. However I worry that it's going to be a slog as by the middle of age two which already had taken me several hours to get to, researches were starting to take upwards of an hour to achieve with the wonder research taking almost an entire day at the point I'm at. Are later researches going to keep scaling up longer and longer or will I eventually get some research building or something that shortens them? I been considering resetting for prestige even though the game has said I shouldn't need to.
Thanks for your interest!
I've made the game initially for the android and was intending to play it in relatively short bursts, so for me research was a thing to happen passively between play sessions. It shouldn't go much above 1-2 hours per research.
To speed it up you could save your army configuration, throw all of them into research to quickly finish all of it, then reload army comp and do a quick 10 minute meditate to retrain them, this would probably be the most optimal way to do it.
Alternatively you could prestige now and throw everything into research speed. This should net you about 2.5x permanent research speed (if you are in the middle of age 2).
I've found a bug that you may wanna work out. If you save a template with 1 of any/all troop types and if you make a large amount of that type, let it train, and then load the template setting the troop(s) back down to 1 it actually saves all of the training onto the single troop making it incredibly strong. This can be abused to make an army of single troops that each have a power level that you could only achieve normally if you devoted your entire economy to that single type of troop. Combined it eliminates the need to actually think of what type of military units you should be training as well as makes the military need almost no pop or resource upkeep once you have performed the bug on each troop you have access to.
Huh. That is a cool bug. I wonder how that happens.
How did you even discover it I feel like I would not notice 1 troop with million health? Thanks for finding this:)
congrats on releasing such a big project! i love a sandbox civ management type game, and the idle/incremental elements are a really fun and natural addition to the genre. i think a lot of us love those genres (i know i check the management tag and the idle tag for new games regularly), so i imagine you might get some strong criticism from people who are comparing it to the game of their dreams. anyway, just wanted to encourage say—there is a lot of good stuff in here! it's a pretty ambitious project and i think most of what you have works well. (fwiw i didn't mind the tutorials lol)
I think my biggest request would be some more balanced recovery mechanics? I keep getting too excited about researching things, accidentally running out of food or fire, and then I pretty quickly have to click the free all pop button and watch my population dwindle until it's small enough to live off the few resources left after the death spiral. sometimes i tried to rebalance my workers for a while before admitting defeat and freeing all, but I haven't been able to manage it successfully. maybe some kind of supply & demand visualization would help players rebalance things more intuitively? it took me a while to even realize that the research is what was sucking up my resources. idk, just brainstorming.
Hey, thank you very much for positive feedback!
Regarding your suggestion, yeah, this is a big point of discussion usually, where it either works completely fine, or completely screws you over. Everyone encounters at least one death spiral at least once, and that is by design, I really wanted everyone to get that "gotcha" moment where they see that the usual approach of clicking the + button doesn't work, but I think most of my negative reviews on google play come exactly from this mechanic lol. What I can tell you is that pretty much everyone stops having these moments at some point when they keep playing, or at least that's what I gathered from people who actively discuss with me on discord.
For now there are two things that can help you a bit, there's "Show Details" button, that shows your stockpile sizes, how much you produces vs consume and how fast your stockpile will run out, so that can help with planning. Second is the "Consumption" button, this should have the functionality you described, it shows separately how much resources are consumed by Research, Military and Production respectively, this should make it a bit more bearable I hope!
why uh.. why does loading the game blast you with 100 tutorials on screen at once.
what in the dev-who-desperately-wants-everyone-to-pass-on-their-game-instantly is this?
Due to the popular demand I've removed the tutorials.
Hopefully this makes me into a dev-who-desperately-doesn't-want-everyone-to-pass-on-their-game-instantly.
we'll see. i'll give it an actual shot now and then submit my feedback to the dev-judgment committee.. i warn you though you may be awarded a seat on the committee but not recognized as a dev-who-desperately-doesn't-want-everyone-to-pass-on-their-game-instantly.
That is fair, I accept your judgement.
....okay what in the blazes? Why does cooking destroy your food supplies? That makes NO sense!
Hey, it boosts food production of other stations. Basically cooking consumes food produced by hunting and fishing to boost them and make them produce more food, hope this helps:)
Okay I missed the production research, that seems to help with the early game food a lot.
Yeah, I've tried to close the loop of produce->research->produce better->win battles->unlock research etc. So you HAVE to interact with all three to advance.
The copy to clipboard function only works in app which means the export feature is rather useless
Oh, you are right. I somehow thought that onlt paste didn't work, but I guess when I tested it I already had that save in the clipboard lol.
You can still export the essentials and write it by hand, its only ~40 characters long, but yeah, I'll need to look into solution
The game throws a lot at you to start, it would be better to unlock things over time as you progress.
Thanks for playing!
Yeah, this is a common feedback today. I will try to implement some sort of tutorial with the next update.
Thanks:)