You're not wrong, and Konkr was the main inspiration. You can paste a Konkr v7 map into it and play it. What I tried to add on top is online multiplayer that works across browser, desktop and Android, so you can play the same match from any of them.
If you try it I'd honestly like to hear what Konkr still does better.
Well the main thing is the Konkr AI is far superior. Some top Konkr minds have taken a look and found it no challenge at all - that was my experience too. The AI builds spearmen too soon and chokes its production, leaving him easy to beat. It also doesn't cut aggressively.
Konkr's visuals are also better - cleaner, not cluttered full of visual noise. This is a typical AI (other sense) artefact, and I for one find it really offputting, though tastes might differ on that. K's UI is better - you don't have to click on the land to attack a new tile, in K if you have a free unit it will autoselect to attack. And let's face it, the land/knights/castles theme is far better fitted to the gameplay mechanics.
Finally, the AI-written instructions are absolutely terrible. Prolix and pseudopoetic, as AI tends to be. If I didn't already know how to play, I'd be mired in those chunks of opaque text. Konkr was entirely handmade, no AI at all, and it shows.
To your credit, you've got an ingame map editor and multiplayer, which K lacks and may always lack. I also liked the possibility of doing a really gigantic map - though the game engine takes far too long for a 16 side game to be remotely playable.
Konkr is the gold standard of slaylikes, and is tough to match, let alone surpass, so kudos for giving it the old college try. You might consider adopting unit ranges like iirc Antiyoy has - one of those Russian slaylikes I never really played much. Or throwing in some more new ideas, like the ion storms.
Thank you so much for the lengthy detailed feedback, truly means a lot for me.
On the visual side, my main inspiration was from "Chicken Invaders Universe" which admittedly is a bit goofy, however, I do prefer the space theme in general.
You are completely right on the AI/bots matter as well as the unplayability of the 16 player/bot version so I took a deep look into how the bots were planning and how the game was rendering. For that, I've just released the 0.2.9 version with which you should now see bots completing their turns around 20x faster, especially if you use the "Skip" button, a 16 player turn of bots should now complete under a second early on and much faster than before even with high unit counts.
On the UI and text copy side, yeah most of it was blurped together by AI which I will be fixing by hand in later updates.
As for newer features and roadmap, I want to arrive at a good spot for the base game and then start experimenting with newer features so definitely be on the lookout for that.
Thank you again for taking the time and effort to play and summarize your experience, it has helped me immensely!
If you are so inclined (and for others perhaps reading this comment later), check out the game on https://galac.site as well.
Mobile (both iOS and Andoird) and desktop (Linux, Mac, Windows) are coming soon!
