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(1 edit) (+3)

90% of what I play are city builders, absolutely love them. This is a good game with a solid foundation, but there are certainly a few things that go amiss in the first bit that I've played.  Some things that are not implemented which would be a good idea are: being able to remove stone resource nodes which are in the way of buildings, an "idle" citizen counter in the job window (rather than having to math it out), a window explaining current production and consumption numbers rather than having a simple count of the currently stored goods, a more detailed breakdown of what unhappy citizens are missing rather than one number line, an easier way to identify the current position of hostile forces, and an explanation of how many plots a single farmer can be responsible for (it is 9 plots per farmer). 

Also, I have yet to reach any point where I need to go to a different area of the island, but it looks like a logistical nightmare. Your townies may end up travelling across the entire map for food or resources, rather than giving up after recognising that none exist in a reasonable vicinity. If there is a system I have yet to encounter which allows for separate towns or districts, and the land-locking of citizens to those zones, then kudos. otherwise, it would be a great boon to implement something like that, given the size of the map.

This is a great little chillax city builder with simplistic logistical management, having enough depth to be fun without feeling overwhelming. But don't mistake a simplified system for an uninformed system. Production and consumption may seem kinda spreadsheety, but the math is happening behind the scenes whether we like it or not. Failing to accurately portray existing data does not equal simplicity, but instead frustration. Not needing a mill between farms and bakeries, and not letting food expire, is simplistic, and awesome for this type of entry into the genre. Not letting us know how much bread we eat every year is a royal pain in the butt.

There is obviously a lot of heart behind this project, and I plan to keep playing to unlock all of the current story and mechanics. Just try to keep an eye on the stuff you've already implemented, and try to improve it alongside the creation of new things, rather than only making new things :)

Love the style the game has!

(+1)

Yo bro!
Thank you so much for your detailed and thoughtful feedback!
Since the game is still a prototype, some quality-of-life features and buggy things can easily slip through the cracks during my own playtests. Working on impovements.

Were there any non-obvious things? For example, ruins exploration —i guess not everyone figures out how to send settlers there

(4 edits) (+1)

Best advice I can give on that is to assume that your playerbase is stupid lol.

Iirc, there wasn't a prompt to build bakeries to go with the farms, I just built them out of common sense, but some could miss that they're necessary. Actually, come to think of it, I don't think I got a proper breakdown on farms themselves either, nor how fertility works. Like previously stated, I mostly relied on common sense and what I know from other similar games, but not everyone will make those connections right away. Another instance of this can be found in the woodcutter. The woodcutter works on rules that are not rare in modern citybuilders, but again, relying on your playerbase to already know some mechanics is not a great idea. Let them know that it will auto-replant trees after cutting, and avoid the guesswork. 

I saw a comment near the top talking about felling orders not being fulfilled - I'm almost positive that this is happening bc felling is assigned to jobless civilians, and the hauling of logs is assigned to labourers (I think anyway). I had the same issue myself and got around it by purposefully not assigning a few ppl to any job. Having free jobless villagers fixed it, and the fell order worked fine after that. If this is intended then that's totally chill, but again, having an "idle" or "jobless" counter in the jobs window, as well as a description on the things those villagers can do, would be helpful in clarifying that. 

Also the "find someone who can read these runes" quest is really open ended, it's not exactly clear how to go about progression there. And speaking of quests, the first mission asks you to build a storehouse, but there is no building by that name. Changing that quest (and maybe the preceding dialogue) to say stockpile would help with the ambiguity. There is also not a proper teaching moment saying that roads need to be built before other structures. I found out I needed roads first by looking at the "you can't build here" popup, which is a bit unintuitive. 

With the ruins exploration thing that you mentioned, I'm pretty sure this could be rectified by making the explorable ruins and the destructible ruins more graphically different. Especially the explorable ruins - there isn't much way to identify the edges of them outside of clicking on them, which some ppl won't do unless they want to try and remove it for building space. Making them more visually distinct would highlight them as structures of interest rather than free stone lying around. I never once questioned if the shielded temple was a destructible object, for example. Adding a bouncing arrow over the closest structure after reaching that quest might also help lol, at least that way ppl get a hand to hold when trying the mechanic for the first time.

(+2)

As a huge fan of city-builders myself, I fell into the classic developer's trap of thinking "well, this mechanic is just common sense!" But your feedback is a great reminder that clarity is key, and guessing games aren't fun.