itch.io

It's a shame the targeting is quite dumb, a lot of overkill - especially with the artillery and long travel time with the bullets
Also quite sorely lacking splash anti air

I'm sure I could have farmed prestige tokens faster (war points), but even so they felt really slow overall

Spawned units, they would barely visually appear, only one or two horizontal lines of them which sporadically disappeared whether just sitting there or zooming in and out. Army sizes then also reduced to '1' for who knows why. Catapults would not appear at all
Chrome

And it's not symbolic, it's trying to claim something which isn't earnt

Crazy how many plays this got when there's definitely games out there which deserve it more

A lot of people have already said a lot of things so other than that the core loop just isn't interesting, I guess i'll say that the multi-harvest upgrade is pointless. If you're holding down click (which is still the easiest way to do it), you'll stop moving as soon as you come within range of one tree and just never hit a second.
Hitboxes are janky enough that it's not worth trying to always hit a second tree, you'll just be slowing yourself down doing so (and needing significantly more attention for that slower speed!)

Abnormally slow load (as someone else said), mine boost also slows the game down
Tiny bit annoyed the 'create city' thing does nothing even when hung in your face from the very start of the game

Kind of not really enough even for a demo to get an idea of the main actual premise of the game - as it stands it's a laggier and slightly jank round-based collector
Not much 4x to it

As per title, has nothing to do with cookie clicker and practically nothing to do with total war either.
It's an incremental autobattler, closer to teamfight tactics than either of the other mentioned

Levelling is too slow, archers feel like they overkill a single unit (majorly less effective) and there's just very little you can ever do - no strategy or formations, just 'stuff'
And neither of those games have you failing a fight a hundred times just to progress the tiniest bit.

Sounds cool, has absolutely nothing to do with what it sounds like.
Oh, and sandbox seems to just flat out not work on browser. Not lag, the entire mode just is broken

Last little bit is far too slow, if not for that pretty good game

Collected 2000 gems at once, audio permanently broke
Could do with fullscreen, probably change pause to Tab or P, or both
Didn't find much use for missiles

Mostly a pretty good little game

Mostly good, not too big on that 'automation' and wouldn't lean so much into the magic
There's a house on the mountain which doesn't have a demo sign, but seems to be no way to get inside?

Good luck with development
Oh, and might want to be clearer how the math works about pot spawn chance

Scrolling should not be a tenth of the screen.
Helpers are not helpful. Buys don't actually say what they'll give you, and everything is too expensive to start.

Let alone how long an inspection takes, zzz

For how dumb the robots are they sure lag the game a lot.
Other basic qol like turning off a building, setting priority work, and of course turning the sound down would be good too

Hmm, still not exactly what I'd wish for but I did overlook it
Still has the annoying wind up and delay before being allowed to interact again

Needs a hotkey to place walls, and the delay between mining and actually reaching your base is extremely grating, pretty much entirely negates the early game.

Badly needs a fast mode
Other than that, seems you've become a name for good free games hey?

Minimal feedback of what things do, exponential scaling trees (+40%, +60%, +1000%), little inference
Numbers go up, get more things, pack them tightly, not too clear how to have an impact outside of that
To some degree probably also how the tree is laid out - explosive upgrades mixed with fireworks, cooldown randomly put behind a heat upgrade

Chaotic is certainly accurate, little cohesion
Would be nice if heat could do more eventually, I'm sure that's planned - becomes a little arbitrary and not important until the ending after not too long

No clue how the economy's working, it almost seems like things get more expensive *based* on your income, which then just punishes upgrading that and would be very backwards if so

Some general clarity on the different types would probably be nice? Explosive didn't seem to do too much to me but something like firework maxed out becomes insanely strong (eg, you can't see their late upgrade effects before getting there, so you don't know what you should be focusing on)

So yeah, a little directionless, just kind of 'do' and stumble along, but it's a good enough little game/demo

Prestige does not work at all and a lot of the things shown in the dev log (implying they are in this browser version) just aren't in the game at all

Nice little game, story and all good, would be nice to see a sequel one day

Biggest issue I saw was that in your initial runs before your first ending, it was very easy to hit a brick wall, needing something you already lost access to and being unclear whether you needed to farm or reset and go back looking for.. you don't know what at the time

Passing the automated system as a human for example, not knowing what it gives you, and needing the thing it would give you in the next area
It's kind of an issue in most exploration x prestige type games but it's just no less present here

There's absolutely an uncomfortable amount of monetisation present, particularly when this seems to be presented toward younger kids
Even just on the game side it would need some very basic upgrades, deciding where to go faster, being able to put equipment down and either waiting for all pieces or just being able to put down more - as it stands, every signpost you get is a further delay between spawning and actually going to do their job
Again, way too much marketing, makes it seem suspect, but otherwise would have to see if the game holds true to anything it claims to work toward

Just a reminder, you're allowed to say no to your boss - and if you're middle management, you *should* be saying no to your boss

(Good game, good luck with development and release)

It's not just because cookie clicker did it, there's fairly few other options for *how* to do it
By all means, make a game yourself with a different method and see how entertaining it feels

There are some alternatives which do work, but they are nieche, not always a good fit - you don't get infinite perfect options when constraining it into the shape of a game

Balanced in terms of numbers is one thing, balanced in terms of method is entirely another.
Although I entirely understand that 'economies of scale' is not feasible or fun in a game, I do agree that cost creep is not the way to go about this.
Something more akin to degradation/running cost/entropy would be better I think.
Whatever it is it needs to be closer to the original intended idea (the science concept of the probe), this doesn't cut it currently

Ui feels pretty broken, hard to interact with anything that moves, didn't know you could move the screen for a long time (not through lack of trying, it just didn't want to move, its very particular about how it wants you to do it) - perhaps shift tool tips onto the screen if they would appear off screen also?
Need a better way to get wood or fertiliser, wood is the one thing the spirits wont give you and fertiliser rate cost creep scales way too fast to keep up
Some windows (Tree mastery) do update while you're looking at them. Others, like buying an upgrade in the book place, do not - as these do not change while looking at them, had no clue what buying the upgrades actually did for a long time also (even if that's just 5 minutes of trying to work it out, it shouldn't need that much work to stumble across)

If those basic things (actually being able to play the game) are addressed, yeah seems like it could be pretty good, good luck with development

It does not feel like there's a game in the current state.
Aside from the fact that all relevant information is only in the devlog and not the game itself, it's also not true
"You don't win by clicking faster" - yes you do
"You progress by understanding" - you can't even reliably interact with half the systems, and those that you *can* interact with are limited to the point where you still don't have control more than baseline automation

Turning on automated, progresses more efficiently than trying to manage anything (because you cannot focus investment) and beyond that the only intractability is clicking - the only way to win or do anything better, is by clicking faster! By killing faster, by collecting faster, by prioritising the highest value clicks (like any other 'click faster' game which you decry)

Can't get any reputation when deliveries are deemed as '0.00s', it doesn't tick.
A lot of the game is done in the wrong order, such as the order in which things reset, which allows you to get a tick of pre-prestige income, and given how utterly busted productivity is (should not be exponential) that income is typically e700+ and invalidates income in the next run too

Strategy mode is not viable. The economy does not allow it, it hardly allows incremental unless you get lucky with what enemy types show up vs what levels you can rush through

It's an idle game first and foremost, an autobattler.

If you have to put that many "it's just a demo" messages in the game, maybe that should flag to you not to lead the player on.

Ability to downgrade or something like that should've been a priority fix - fully maxed out with every upgrade, unable to reach the cave at all. Wouldn't have known there even was prestige without the comments here.
Meanwhile having to do it all again, able to reach the cave without even using coffee, just by not buying spawn rate *or* miner speed upgrades. (focuses them into a single tunnel more often, full speed spread out more)

Seems like an awesome little game, will be good to see it a lot lot bigger, appears to be going in the right direction, just remember to develop depth (more functions for what's already here) as well as width (bigger map, more things) - very easy to spread out and everything to feel less dense in dev

So, same two bugs everyone else has mentioned, but then also would love some collection upgrades, and drones are far too slow and weak to be useful
Oh and the non-existent weapon levels of course

Town is interesting, nice bit of slavery
Everything else, *everything* is too slow - Prestige gain, trade, even just normal dungeon fighting

And for some reason, forge refuses to level items beyond level 1, iron got to level 2 but then stopped there also

Honestly this was a really good game. I experienced a few bugs toward the end with resources not spawning at all or spawning differently each time after loading autosaves - and I wish the ending had been written a little tighter (discussing information I never learnt in the game, such as how long it had been) but these are things I can definitely overlook

Some post game bonus notes allowing you to read the various discussions of options you didn't choose in game would've been nice, interrogating either version of gail in a different manor

Also a little annoying (but not major) that choosing the second ending option forces you into [Ending 2] instead of the choice between 2 and 3 like the next option

And lastly, in answer to the final moral dialogue of the game - it does replace what came before. Maybe this matters less for dime-a dozen ai, although still a little - but for unique ai or people, this is a real loss on the level of killing someone. Life should not be made or iterated on, it is born and grows. And sometimes, whether ai or sociopath, it can be born wrong, sadly.
(Simplified the last paragraph, would spoiler tag if itch made doing so easier)

the pause is a nice qol touch

So how much of this is ai?
The description clearly is and the scaling is wank

So boring to limit the weapon tuning, there was no need for that
Game is entirely beatable with only 3 items, becomes a bit pointless after that - (Homing, Ricochet, Reactor core)
Pretty much all the prestige upgrades feel like they do nothing

Won't be coming back for chapter 3.

Is there meant to be an ending? Didn't get one.
Assume when you finish the other segments, something is supposed to pop up in the middle. But there was one or two segments which seemed to almost skip over a whole section of building and I worry this broke something.

Seems ripe for a more fleshed out sequel

The cats were heartwarming, thank you, and props to the maker

Not even saying it's a bad thing, the company has abandoned the game for a long time now and it's not even trying to capture the same particular nieche
Was a good game, played this a fair bit - soldier meat is strong and expansion is too punishing without it. Don't do nft.

Good luck

Is there a starcraft trademark that expired or something?
As for actual commentary though, the artifact is bad. In every way, none of the options were good - the one I chose, I thought would be 'this affects your current stats' not forever, not 'will get rid of future upgrades too' kind of thing.