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I clicked my way through the adventure and got the tome of ancient knowledge. I was paused at the time, if that makes a difference. I clicked Continue a few times and it didn't update. I tried to unpause and everything was frozen.

archers can't hit skeletons that get right up against them. one was directly to my right and all my shots blasted right past it.

Clicking wasn't adding resources while research was active? There wasn't an indication why.

it'll grey out if you don't have enough, but I often caught myself adding based on efficiency instead of worker availability. So we get how many units per worker, but we don't get how many workers are added at each level. that's simple enough to start, but once you get into the high levels and non-round numbers it's easy to lose track of whether something took 2 workers or 4 workers or 5, etc. Then I'll look back over way later and realize that my allocation was stupid or wasteful and I would have had way more workers ready to dump into healers if I did it the right way.

Seconding this, you eventually hit a point where you have to stop and do the math to remember what it was.

What actually is the randomization on attacks? Is it just a flat rand()? The attacks on Catapults that I was seeing from my stack of Rogues was 6%, 15%, 21%, etc. I don't think I ever saw an attack larger than 1/4 their max attack value?

Also one aggregated stack per unit type targeting one unit at random allows an exploit. You should basically never go into battle without having 1 untrained unit of every single thing you have. You'll flood your army with so many false targets that can eat an entire enemy stack's attack for that turn. At basically no cost. It's only going to be one attack for that unit but if only 1/5 of my front line is real units then the odds of going several seconds of combat without them taking any attacks is pretty decent.

It should maybe just consume the resources per second then? What's the use case for sitting on a stockpile and not just consuming it up front to add to the timer? The stockpile won't actually let you get high enough to cover the costs of autorenew. I was making enough per second but my stockpile would only get high enough to pay for one of the contracts, so the others would fail.

I adjusted my rate to overproduce to keep the stockpile high enough, so I'll see what happens when I roll over the next contracts.

Auto-trade doesn't seem to work? I had manual trades active then those timers ran out. But I had auto-trade active before they expired. It's been auto-deducting it all the whole time so these trades cannot be inactive.

I think Auto-Trade tried to just deduct the whole cost of the contract over again when it expired. But if it's going to do that, then what is the point of the per-second auto-deduction?

*edit* Can confirm that Auto-Trade is double-dipping and will fail if you don't have the resources in reserve. It's better to just buy up front.

I def need a better explainer on Military. There's enough here to be engaging with army composition but there's so much guesswork around what these stats mean and how an individual tick of combat works. I'm trying to bring enough rogues to knock out arty before it can get a shot off but there's so much guesswork as to how this all works. Is Defense health? Are all units attacking at once? How much healing does First Aid do? Does healing mitigate incoming damage in the same tick or do we take the losses and then heal up the next tick? Do Horse Archers still get the 2x damage to melee bonus? It's all guesswork and the Help page only explains the UI, not how battle works.

It also makes for an easier game, but zero risk of attack outside of actively engaging in battle was a bit of a bummer. I can just fully demobilize with no risk when I'd rather shift over to Research or Pop Growth builds.

I'm having a good time with this, though, even with UI clumsiness. It def makes my autism brain go brrr.

I'm still very early but it's basically never efficient to put pops into stuff like cooking or smelting. maybe I just need a way larger economy of scale, but the marginal rate is always better just putting that pop into extraction directly. I guess once I'm in the dozens or hundreds the diminishing returns will take care of that, but I haven't hit that wall yet.

UI/UX is a little rough, having to constantly expand and collapse and scroll and click to show info that should already be showing bc the whole row is large, etc. Not being able to fullscreen is def a hindrance on top of this.

Also the Production screen will show you the costs and upkeep of ticking one higher but Research does not, it only shows the current. You have no idea what the costs will be until you can activate it.

The bones are there, but it could use more visibility in terms of documentation. Stuff like Theory of Magic works bc there's a wiki. Even if I knew how many classes were in a tier so I wouldn't have to wonder if I've unlocked all the choices, that'd be so helpful. Unless there's a prestige mechanic I haven't hit yet, things take too long to encourage multiple runs just to discover the choices. Theory of Magic had that same problem. It didn't know how to lay things out to the player so they have to go to the wiki and all that magic of unfolding is lost.

Also I saw that it locks you out of the settings menu while it's active, so you have to lose first before you can even turn any of that down. it didn't end up being consequential here but if it's repeated anywhere else with a battle or something then it could be a larger issue.

this isn't a similar game, this is the exact mechanics being used to tell another story in a different genre, down to the card catalog and archival boxes and hunting own names. I think that's great! I just think it could bear shouting out what has to be a clear influence.

The sneak UI in the storehouse is basically impossible if you have text speed turned up.

idk abt too random but certainly the randomization could be surfaced more. like there is zero explanation or visibility into how stats do anything at all, we don't see the roll, the outcomes always end in a death that is rarely ever shown, etc. don't just put it in the code, put it on the screen or it might as well not exist.

I think the keys are backwards. 0 is generating large places and 9 is generating small ones.

There's a bug where you can back out of the raid menu and keep adding 100% of your idlers to a raid party amount that doesn't clear. This lets you stack the deck for raids, and it also messes up your population count. rn the sidebar and main page say I have 32 goblins draining resources but I only have 22 goblins that are useable.

Also the sidebar housing limit doesn't ever update. Idk if it's just the string that doesn't update or if the Huts actually aren't functional.

The final check leaves something to be desired but it's super good. A little weird that A Hand With Many Fingers isn't also listed as an influence when this is a 2d version of the exact same game mechanics.

A villager will just automatically attack a chicken if it paths into it. Absolutely not intended behavior and there's no way to stop it.

Same deal w Cooked Food shooting out of the fire, it autocombines if they group together so you won't be able to split it between villagers.

*edit* Biome just says "like a tree but infinite" but it sure was spitting out enemies over and over and I wasn't given the expectation that I should keep an eye on it.

A few high-impact bugs. UI sorting is all over the place, traits are constantly disappearing behind the backdrop - especially the sign. The sign itself is almost never accurate bc the collision box counting who is in the center is way off. I have no idea if this impacts calculations or anything.

The villagers should maybe never be able to overlap. Rn if they overlap in any way then a click and drag is going to bring along multiples. And if the overlap is significant there is literally no way to separate them besides dragging them back to the middle and resorting.

I also don't know what it impacts, but it seems like growth happens before death? So idk if I'm hitting the cap and not able to fully grow and then losing the oldest generation. That would feel bad and would explain why I can never sustain a large younger generation. Even trying my hardest idk how to get more than five unmarried men per turn. The population cap is necessary bc of the click-and-drag UI but idk if this sort of biological growth model even works under such a low number.

Knowledge needs to do something besides RNG events that basically never occur and feel isolated from the systems. By the time I got to the first "reset" event I had basically nothing to even do with my people besides make sure to produce just enough food. Since Knowledge is never used I felt I always had a comfortable buffer.

The text on The Colony says that it multiplies life production, but it doesn't actually do that. It's just the next x10 tier additive.

The time on the Ash Time tooltip is incorrect. It doesn't seem like it's accounting for the full animation. I timed Autoash between deposits for Level 26, which says 0.65s. It took approx. 9.79s for all five cycles, so in actually that 0.65s was more like 2 seconds each.

it looks like each stack is applying exponentially rather than summing up all modifiers before multiplying. it works out, it's just unexpected and could maybe be pointed out/a little more transparent. In general I'd love more stats and breakdown. even just a little tooltip over Execute that says how much blood/cash it will generate or something.

Also auto-XYZ happens so slowly that I'm melting through heat using autocapture. I'm basically burning 2 heat with automine bc it runs a full capture cycle for every single person it sends. Maybe a secondary upgrade to set a rule so that autocapture won't run unless below a % or numeric value?

game basically feels done by the time you hit Supernova 25? if there's more I think it should be signposted? unlocking challenges feels like a "game over" in all but name.

Bailed between the end of research and the beginning of Life. had this open in another browser but the grind is WAY out of pace with the entire rest of the game to that point. I was getting double-digit Sx by the end. Two more orders of magnitude on top of that is rough.

Not sure if the roguelite or incremental stuff is implemented yet? There isn't really a meta element between runs that I found?

I've never cried harder over a four page PDF of RPG rules.

Really cool. Can be hard to follow resources and who is in what clique and why they're fighting. Ran into a couple bugs with day reports stopping halfway through and some teens being left off the ending roster. Everyone had a crush on poor Zoe and she died and nobody even remembered her at the end.