Played the demo; the game has potential but it also has some major issues that are somewhat numerous to list.
Off the top of my head I can say; the lack of inland water(this forces everyone to build on the coast), the 9-unit cap on the truck delivery system(this is particularly painful for water because the building outproduces its ability to send it to buildings that need it), the inconvenient construction system (notably having to actually build the building before harvester placement) and the lack of a codex explaining all the mechanics or listing the recipes(you have to build a building to see what it can make).
Hopefully they get ironed out in the future to justify the 15 dollar price tag.
Thanks for the feedback! It's an early build, lots is going to change. Take a look here: www.projectautomata.com/planne...
To address your concerns:
- Inland water (lakes and rivers) are coming. We recently rewrote how the maps are created
- Truck limit: gatherers do not have the ability to handle a billion trucks. That is what Truck Depots are for.
- Harvesters: what exactly is the issue?
- Recipe list: this will be made available today, was in the works :)
- The 15$ tag is to feed a team of 8, for something we've been working 2 years, with another one ahead of us
Well my issue with the harvester is that during construction you get a basic foot print of the zone of influence of a given raw material building but until you actually put the building down you don't know exactly the foot print and sphere of influence the attendant harvester would have. So you have to go by trial and error to get the optimal resource harvesting configuration, which costs you money because you'd have to demolish the harvester and sometimes even the core building to re-position it.
I recall other games that have this similar feature tend to let you put down the buildings and harvesters or other additive buildings first then let you click "finalize" before they appear and deduct the cost from your money pool. A good example off the top of my head would be the NOD Laser Turret in Command and Conquer 3 which consists of a hub building and 3 gun turrets, you put down the hub first followed by the three turrets before it is finalized and deployed, prior to that you can fiddle with its placement as you please.
An undo button would also do the trick I think.
Also with regard to train routes, there is a tab at the top that says Vehicles +/-, what does this tab do? Does it vary the frequency of the trains, etc? The most number of trains I've seen at one time on one route is 3.
Thank you for the reply.
Just to clarify; the number of vehicles tab on the route tab would denote how many trains would run the route on a given pay cycle?
May I also suggest adding a City tab that states in short hand or icons what goods a City produces and buys, and a button to zoom in on the said city with a click. This would be really helpful at the start of the game when figuring out which part of the map to plant your flag and how to orient your railroad network for optimal gain.