Thanks for the feedback, these are definitely things we thought about. I’ll give you my current thoughts and I’d be interested to hear what you think.
1. This definitely can be an issue, and the reason we have the compact as an insurgent faction is because it plays best when there is at least 1 militant faction looking to put buildings down. I could see the fly action be changed to some way of spending cards to drop loot, but it would have to be pretty pricy, not sure exactly what it would be.
2. The summon word was initially to indicate that they were coming to the mound regardless of where they were, not just from your supply. Not sure if it should be changed since it is different from other recruit-like actions.
3. This is definitely something worth considering, but I’m also hesitant to add extra rules baggage and mission creep (something a lot of custom root factions suffer from imo). The faction already incentivizes some level of policing from the politically vulnerable ability and so I’m not sure it needs more. It’s something I’ll have on my radar during future plays, especially because moving The Mound more central to the board definitely helps speed up Loot collection. Currently the downside to losing The Mound is that you miss out on your Birdsong summon and recruit, you can’t recruit and you can’t score with Loot until The Mound is recreated. Currently that seems like a fine level of downside but I’ll keep an eye on it.
4. I agree that they should be called markers, I had that thought late in development and it wasn’t worth changing before the submission window. This was made in canva and we didn’t have the Root font so every text box was typed out in a different program and then copied over as an image instead of a text box so it was hard to go back and edit lol. It’s something I’d change if we did another big pass but it’s functional so it wasn’t worth the change on the time limit.