So I don't comment on many games, though this one I really enjoyed and feel has so much potential for more.
Here is my thoughts in no particular order, where I go Good, Needs Improvement, Bad:
- Good - Solid game loop with good variability due to the number of cards
- Needs Improvement - I found like allot of people have commented, if your RNG is right and you get the right cards in the early rounds, the rest of the game just spend all cards, end turn, and you don't have to worry or think because your standing resting army outnumbers all but the last round main boss.
- Bad - Lack of tutorial, though I did pick it up, a nice tutorial is one of those things that is always appreciated
- Good - Art style, it's consistent, simple and does a good job effectively communicating what is what. It makes me think of Watabou and their map generators which gives me nice vibes
- Good - UI, it's clean showing only prudent information without flooding the player with too much info, and the way you consolidate unit counts shows you've thought how to keep a consistent aesthetic
- Needs Improvement - Super minor, but a simple tooltip over the sword, armour and hp icons, as though as a reasonably seasoned gamer I intuited them, you shouldn't assume everyone knows.
- Needs Improvement - Not such an issue once you get to that steam roller phase as it just stops mattering, but with the mods you provide to units, you do show in the popup when hovering over city areas what the are does, but don't have a way of viewing the consolidated aggregated mods for units.
- Or even allowing a hover tooltip for the unit icons
- Needs Improvement - Mentioning the city area hover, I really like it, the small improvement, which I think might be a bit challenging due to be aware you are keeping the "card" format, is that when you have an area above level 1, I would expect the panel to show the aggregated effect, not the standalone.
- Needs Improvement - You have overall picked a really good colour palette, strong contrasts, and again, I see influences of Watabou. A few minor tweaks that I think are needed to improve both accessibility and legibility:
- The `Income` field (and value counter) is too close to the background colour, I could read it, but early on it didn't catch my attention and took a bit to notice
- The `Merchant Guild` cards suffer from a similar problem, since the background is cream, while they are yellow, and the gold icon is yellow, the are legible just not comfortable and it feels a bit over saturated
Definitely a strong foundation, with many directions to go, and a really solid experience overall :)