I’m very sorry for not conducting thorough game testing. This bug has been urgently fixed.
Played through it and experimented around. Awesome start, and it has great potential. Gave me a slight Overlord vibe I appreciate. Really enjoyed the strategic elements and I can't wait to see where it goes. Same for the story.
My biggest suggestion would be to reduce the duration of the infusion pregnancy. As it stands it's the energy cost and slow progress makes it not worth doing especially with the lack of experience gained during the pregnancy. Reducing the energy cost, or accelerating it to taking off a full trimester would greatly help incentives using that mechanic. Regardless the natural progression needs acceleration as well. You have roughly a 120 days before end game so it's not even possible the get through a pregnancy without infusion. Something like a 2 week/day natural progression and 3 month infusion or 1 month for normal summoning energy cost would make that mechanic much more usable. Some form of experience gain during pregnancy would help too.
That one is more of an observation then a suggestion, just noting it in case. The other current issue with the infusion which is that the summing RNG makes it just be diminishing returns at the moment. Even using saves as a cheat to reroll for good mates from the slave market and leveling them up, I didn't actually get anything better then the infused offspring. From my observations Willpower only seems to help with passing along the base characters stats and doesn't take into account the partners stats, because every combination only seemed to reduce the offspring's base stats compared to the better parent. I hopeful that adding additional partners to infuse will solve this with more variety, but it may take some RNG tweaking.
A couple of possible bugs I noticed:
-The population cap for the Hamlet caps at a 1000 before you even got all of the upgrades, and the housing seems to have no effect at all as of yet, for both the canines and felines as well as humans.
-Same for the food with no effect. Tried to go the evil route to see what happened. (Dark Humor Warning) You make a lot of money when you let people freeze and starve. Points for the realism.
-I did have a slave market girl randomly become marked for incest for some reason. Not sure what happened there.
-You lose all rewards for skipping the battle which makes gaining population difficult if that is the end goal, not sure yet.
-The Calvary is overpowered. You don't need a single tower to defend, and they didn't take any damage during the battle. I had to try to loose.
-I have to have to game in full screen for the menus to work properly.
-I noticed an inconsistency in the size of the character images in the chambers menu. They're consistent in the windowed game but full screen they are all over the place in image size.
Figured I mention these in case they are bugs and not just work in progress or on your radar. Hope all of this is helpful. Keep up the good work you're doing great.
Thank you for your detailed and thoughtful feedback! I’m thrilled to hear you enjoyed the strategic elements and the Overlord vibe—it means a lot to know the game’s potential is shining through, even in its early state. As a solo indie developer, your insights are incredibly valuable for shaping the game’s future, and I’ve taken note of all your suggestions and bug reports.
Response to Suggestions
Infusion Pregnancy Duration and Incentives: You’ve hit on a key issue with the infusion pregnancy mechanic—its high energy cost and slow progress make it feel unrewarding, especially with no experience gain. I completely agree it needs rebalancing to be more engaging. My plan is to reduce the energy cost through upgrades to the infusion device, though these upgrades aren’t implemented yet. Your suggestion to accelerate natural progression (e.g., 2 weeks/day) and shorten infusion to 3 months or 1 month for normal summoning energy cost is fantastic—I’ll explore these timelines to make the mechanic more viable within the 120-day endgame. Adding experience gain during pregnancy is also a great idea, and I’ll look into tying it to the mother’s activities or traits to reward players for engaging with the system.
Infusion RNG and Offspring Stats: Your observation about the summoning RNG leading to diminishing returns is spot-on. The current system, where only passes base stats and offspring stats are often weaker than the better parent, isn’t ideal. I’m planning to expand the infusion system to include multiple partners for greater variety, as you suggested, and I’ll tweak the RNG to ensure higher-quality offspring are achievable. This might involve factoring in both parents’ stats more effectively or adding a trait inheritance system to make infusion more rewarding.
Bug Reports
I’ve logged all the potential bugs you mentioned and will investigate them for the next version:
Population Cap and Housing: The Hamlet capping at 1,000 despite upgrades is definitely a bug. I’ll ensure housing properly expands capacity.
Food Mechanics: The lack of impact from food (and the unintended profitability of letting people starve) is not intended—dark humor aside, I’ll fix this to make food management meaningful.
Slave Market Incest Flag: The random incest marker on a slave market character is odd and likely a bug in the character tagging system. I’ll track it down.
Battle Rewards and Skipping: Losing population rewards when skipping battles is unintended and makes population growth too hard. I’ll add partial rewards for skipping to balance this.
Cavalry Overpowered: The cavalry being too strong (no damage taken, no need for towers) needs tuning. I’ll adjust their stats or enemy strength to make battles more strategic.
Fullscreen Menu Issues: The fullscreen requirement for menus to work properly is a UI bug. I’ll test across resolutions to fix this.
Character Image Inconsistency: The inconsistent character image sizes in the chambers menu (only in fullscreen) is another UI issue I’ll address to ensure consistency.
General Thoughts
The game is still in active development, with many mechanics (like infusion) being experimental. Your feedback has been a huge help in refining these systems—particularly the infusion mechanic, which will see improvements based on your suggestions. I’m currently working on fleshing out species level systems, and the next version (due in about a week) will introduce a core evolution mechanic to make breeding more rewarding. Thank you again for taking the time to provide such detailed observations. It’s players like you who help me understand what’s working and what needs work. If you have more ideas or want to discuss further, feel free to share here or join our Discord community. Keep the feedback coming, and I’ll keep pushing to make this game something special!
If it help with the UI issues, battle and building are the pages I found that have significant issues in operating. No change between 2560x1440 and 1920x1080. Also accidentally found another bug looking at that. If you go into the build menu mid battle it breaks the game. you lose navigation and can't leave the build page.
I'm looking forward to the additions. Don't go too hard on tweaking balancing in the mean time with other mechanics coming out. No point in fine tuning a half built engine you know. You'll just be retuning once more cogs are added. Good luck I'll be keeping an eye out. :)