Unique game! It was a bit confusing at the start but started to make sense after tweaking those tax sliders for a while. It would be even better if you add give more controls to the user when they reach another milestone after a population of 100, e.g.: maybe when they reach 5k population.
Viewing post in Subterranean Capital jam comments
If it helps, I could make a walkthrough of the early game. Already made a trailer, but that's more showing off what's possible, rather than walking people through.
5k population is the cap, so if anything, I'd add a trophy when you get there ;)
In terms of additional controls, I think most major macroeconomic things are already in (or at least the ones that don't need a textbook page of explanation). I was thinking of allowing players to manage hamsters on a more micro level, being able to see the companies they work for and give certain companies monopolies/breaking them up, but that would have been a whole other can of worms. Tell me if you're interested in seeing that feature in the future
I guess a walkthrough is the major need for now. For psople who don't know much about macroeconomics (like me), its just moving a bunch of sliders till the population starts to grow blazingly fast. So a walkthrough would truly help for users starting out.
As the population starts increasing, the houses occupy all the places and in order to fix that I had to keep spamming clicking on lvl1 houses and delete all lvl1 type house from a button. That kind of starts to get annoying at some point maybe fix that, if it was not intended.
And yes, the feature that you mentioned, managing hamsters at a micro level sounds great! It allows users to dive deep into the city they built and learn the role played by companies in the economy of a city. This may even turn out to make the game a bit more complex but it surely adds a new dimension to the game.
I'll throw in some GIFs in a "how to play" section.
For the house deletion, my trick is to turn down housing spending to 0, wait a while (cause it takes a while for the housing money reserves to deplete), then mass delete lv 1 houses. Probably should have thrown in a more visible indicator, since rezoning is quite gimmicky right now.
Thank you so much for the detailed feedback :)