I stumbled across a YouTuber playing this and the concept resonated, so came to try it out. I’m only 5 seasons into my first play through and I’m hooked. The overall pacing and length of seasons feels great. Game play loop feels fun, although by season three I did feel I had abused the tavern recruitment to get adventurers that were considerably over levelled and had very high stats, that I could easily ride up the ranks with.
The game is great as it is, but as a random person on the internet with zero game development experience and no sight of any development road map, I thought I’d offer my thoughts, even if it useful only to trigger some other thought process.
Quality of Life Issues
The Dragon Banner Patron: Required 180 Renown in first season, which was almost impossible – achieved in second season, after that the target only went up by c.100 more per year which was incredibly easy. Consider rescaling these targets?
Continue button: Unless I’ve missed a setting somewhere, continue moves the date forward to the next event on the calendar. I’m a micro-manager min/max-er so would like the opportunity to just advance either to next event or one day at a time. This is so I can take people off recover in training as soon as they are fully fit again. I’m also aware that fatigue & stress may be balanced around current setup, so changing this could lead to other unintended consequences.
Healer behaviour: I did feel occasionally my healer got trapped in a corner and even though my tank and DPS all had a priority of defend a wounded adventurer from an attacker, they all ignored the cornered healer. Some command that allows better switching or alternatively a command that could allow the healer to run towards the tank (rather than away from help) – albeit negative traits such as cowardly could overwrite this?
Future developments to consider (depending on roadmap, how much they might break other systems and generally unbalance the game…)
Difficulty: Consider some sliders for switching up difficulty. Such as adventurer strength, monster strength, upkeep costs, build costs, building times, recruitment costs. Some players will always say a game is too easy or too hard. Being able to switch away from pre-sets allows people to play with their own challenges and create their own narratives and groups of players agree their own setting sliders rather than having to balance them yourself.
Scouting recruits: There is potential to develop this area more for both rival guild adventurers and for the recruits in the tavern. An ability to invest and upgrade scouting facilities (in games terms some sort of try-out or evaluation gauntlet?). Maybe a limited number of chances to spend gold to get various bits of information…overall rating, traits, hidden attributes? Personally, I think it would be better if there was some range on the tavern recruits overall score, which was more tightly constrained the greater the scouting investment is. This could be a specific upgradable building / facility and possibly a recruitable expert to further enhance. (It seems a little overpowered to know that adventurer x is exactly rated 94 in burst for example)
Contracts: To me it feels like there is limited consequences of hiring people from the tavern and immediately releasing them if they have bad stats or too many negative traits. There could be more involvement in negotiating initial length and price of contract (and upfront fee) and consequences of early release (more than foregoing the upfront recruitment cost) – maybe 25% - 50% of outstanding contract. If combined with potentially more in-depth scouting, then it would give greater trade-offs between certainty of longer-term contracts and risks of a bad apple (and potential emerging narrative about trying to kill off said bad apple by sending them off to war and to risky tavern contracts).
Recruitment: I’m aware that this is something that could break the game and remove the fun if implemented badly…but it does seem if you can get a relatively strong rated adventurer then you can ride them all the way up the leagues. Maybe have some sort of formula that sets interest levels in being recruited…the lower the interest the higher the wage would have to be (and might be some instances of the interest being so low, an adventurer wouldn’t consider joining). There could also be a chance of a bidding war with another guild where both make offers. There are lots of factors that could influence this – league level, adventurer level, renown, traits of the adventurer, distance from home, how many days left before they leave the tavern (so they get less picky the longer they are left on the shelf)? It might be necessary to get higher potential, lower level adventurers in lower leagues (wonderkids in Football Manager terms); rather than recruit Messi to your bottom division team immediately. It might be you could have a specific recruitable expert to aid in these negotiations (increasing interest and/or reducing demands).
Transfer and loans: It would be great if there were more options to trade adventurers…build them up and sell them on for a profit or agree loans with some form of payment in or out of your guild, rather than only sell if at firesale stage and the occasional request for a loaned sending out a player on loan. I’m also aware this could break the economy of the game and if you could game too easily the other guilds into parting with their best adventurers or bloating their guilds with poor adventurers. In combination with difficulty sliders, I could envisage a subset of players wanting to try a world with really high costs that have to develop and sell on adventurers in order to stay in business. There could also be a backend calculation where guilds are likely to demand more to sell their best 4 - 6 adventurers (especially in higher leagues) and more open to bids for their developmental roster spots (over and above the higher cost for higher level / higher star rating players).
Again, I don't pretend to understand the amount of work required for any of these things and whether they would break other elements of the game, but I have at least tried to list them in what to an outsider would appear easiest to hardest to try to implement. Thank you for developing and updating this game!