itch.io

This is a fun game, and very polished- I'm impressed by what you've done with Twine, in particular the way you've used the engine to make a real-time game. However, I'm not sure if the game gets the inevitability of the failure of civilisation across- things feel extremely stable, even into the late game (here defined by having a size of 7 or 8), where it feels like you can keep on going indefinitely because of the slow scaling compared to the rate at which everything else grows. I found myself running everything on cooldown, buying more buildings and recruiting more fish, and still having plenty of fish to feed the shark without it being a significant limitation.

Very cool game, deeply compelling from a simple initial concept- I love how the dice let you plan for the random chance by showing the odds before the fact.

It's a compelling gameplay loop, occasionally frustrating in a good way (when you roll nothing but enemies and double oxygen loss) and occasionally frustrating in a bad way; I ran into a bug when picking up a die where it wouldn't attach to the cursor but instead hovered next to it, meaning it couldn't be put into a slot and thus hard locked the game; the only way I could resolve this was to refresh the page and lose all my progress. It'd be nice to be able to save progress, as far as upgrades and scrap balances go, so that running into that sort of issue isn't as much of a setback

There's something compelling here, in that it's entertaining to paint a map your colour, but there's a few issues I have with the game as it stands. The economy seems a little off- you can only build one object or unit per turn, so the most you're going to be spending is 6g per turn, and anything beyond that can't really be spent- there's no difference, gameplay wise, between having an income of 7g/turn and having 100g/turn; it would be nice to have some option to use that excess, to incentivise building cities, or anything other than massing assault units to slowly push the front lines forward.

In terms of the late game, chasing down the individual hexes the enemy takes after you've covered the bulk of their turf isn't the most engaging, due to the fact that it's already a foregone conclusion and that capturing territory is quite slow. It would be nice to have some actual conclusion to a match, rather than the game continuing indefinitely.

Outside of the game design, this is quite good- I didn't run into any bugs, and the graphics were easily readable. It felt like the AI acted more or less at random, which isn't ideal- I'd like to see the AI acting like it was trying to win the game, massing units and pushing them towards the player's territory more.  I feel like the core gameplay loop could work, but it's too bare bones for more than a single run through right now.