This was a very unique take on the theme. I feel like I was a little too close to the subject matter to wholly enjoy it, but as a game it's very fleshed out and mechanically feature rich. The premise works really well!
A few critiques:
- The menus don't pause when a dialog is raised. While this is useful later, early on alot of these dialogs have alot of text to read, so an option to automatically pause or slow the timescale when a dialog is open would be useful.
- The Upgrade menu closes every time one is chosen, but later in the game where you're trying to spend 1000s of skillpoints it can be a hindrance. It would also be nice to be able to buy some of the skills in bulk.
- The timescale can really tax the computer when turned up to the point it made the game unresponsive. Perhaps using a form of stochastic approximation might help with optimization (ie. based on certain values, certain countries exhibit a certain amount of events within a time step, evaluate those events in bulk and then apply them)
- In the screen where you can see each country's progression, it would be nice to be able to sort by name or progress. It would also help to be able to click on a name to select the country and move the camera to center on it.
- For countries within other countries, it's sometimes hard to select them without selecting the containing country (ie. San Marino inside Italy)
I didn't realize that the stream was dropping frames once the game started, so the VOD is mostly me talking through the game. The start of the VOD and the restart of the VOD are linked below, and will be available for 60 days
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2574269144?t=1h7m49s
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2574322878?t=0h0m10s