itch.io

Huh, that's weird. I mean, theoretically save should be hosted on itch, no?

Very sorry that happened, but there's probably nothing I can do about it, unfortunately

Huh. That is a cool bug. I wonder how that happens.

How did you even discover it I feel like I would not notice 1 troop with million health? Thanks for finding this:)

Oh, I think I get it now. You mean like for the Tree cutting it takes two people, but after building 20 it says that it takes 40 people and you forget that it's two per building? I see.

You think if I add this info to "Cost" it will be confusing? Like, it will say Cost: 10 tools, 2 pops, but will subtract only tools

Actually, for me the buttons are greyed out when there is not enough, like in the picture below, 1 have 1 pop left, need two for the tree cutting, so the button is grey. Or are you referrring to showing how much you would need to add for the first time? I've added this info to mobile and coming steam version, but forgot to update the itch version, I will post it in the coming days.

Well, there's nothing usefull there for the first playthrough anyway. Otherwise you would've been tempted by the prestige option:)

Thanks for the feedback, initially that was the case, but now that buttons are trying to add as much as they can (if you do +5/+10 or +50), they always stay on. 

But maybe indeed they should be greyed out if pressing on them dioesn't add at least 1 to the building.

Hey, thanks for the positive feedback, glad you liked it!

It's in the "Menu" panel, "Player stats". If you have questions on what stuff is doing in there, don't hesitate to ask:)

Oh, usually everything from 2 eras back disappears, but here indeed it doesn't make sense. Maybe I should mark bowmaker as era 2 instead of 1. 

Oh, I didn't add it to the help button?

Capacity for military is 20% of total pops, it's a soft limit, you can safely go above it. What it does is simply proportionally increases the upkeep cost of military the higher over the limit you go. So if you can support this high upkeep, you can go over the capacity.

Hey, thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, there are a couple of stinkers here and there and sometimes indeed the production buildings are not necessarily an upgrade. It is still usually worth putting people in all of them, just due to the upkeep scaling, so diversified production is usually more sustainable.

Regarding the military, indeed the intention was to constantly upkeep the army and at least that's how I went through the whole game. When people started playing, a lot of them opted out for the going-into-red-to-overtrain the army, and that's when this issue became more prevalent. Originally if you stopped training unit strength would start slowly degrading back to 0, so first approach was heavily insentivised, but due to majority vote I removed this mechanic. I still don't want to auto-pause because it will too heavily skew the balance in favour of second approach, right now it compensates a bit by you having to micromanage your way through it

Oh, you are right, I've forgotten. There's also a flat mult reduction to all attack values, simply to extend the duration of the battles. Because otherwise with attack equal to defense for most units, battles would end in 1 tick.

The 1 unit strategy is the strat. congratulations for figuring it out. It looks silly, but it's an unavoidable outcome of random targeting. And since I didn't want to change random targetting, I decided to roll with it, so all future battles are balanced around this exploit.

The idea was to have it mechanically different from the other screens.

If it was doing per-second consumption, there would be no difference between this, and simply adding another produciton building. Whether it's a good implementation or not is up to the debate, but I thought that it should be at least different.

On top of it like this, it's the only place where the size of stockpile actually matters, since for some contracts you would actually need to bump up the production to reach the required stockpile size to initiate the trade in the first place (as you mentioned in your post). So it adds a bit of diversity to the routine.

It's a result of too much information being not useful. The contract cost is activation only, there's no per-second consumption. It's just people didn't know if they were actually producing enough to have trades constantly on, so they asked me to add phantom consumption on the resource screen. It doesn't actually consume it, it only shows the average consumption per second.

You can actually see that if you switch off all your produciton for valuables, the number you have in stock will not decrease.

Also FYI, all red number on the production screen are not necessarily ACTUAL consumption, it is consumption IF everything is consuming as it should. For example, your troops want to consume 1K/s food and 1K/s iron. You produce 1K/s food and 0.1K/s iron. The red number will still show -1K/s for both food and iron, even if in reality you consume only 0.1K/s of each (since that's the bottleneck). Previously it was showing actual consumption, but then it was confusing, how come I go increase my iron production and suddenly my food consuption spikes 10 times.

Hey, thanks for playing!

Every unit has 4 stats, attack (damage per attack, subject to randomization), defense (health), attack speed (well, more like delay, seconds between each attack, smaller is better, is slightly randomized +-0.1s after every attack) and range (in which column it sits).

All unit turns are processed individually, every game tick, so while the first tick it's indeed all at the same time, then attack delay difference and its randomization kicks in and they all desync.

Horse archers are cavalry, so regardless of range they get all cavalry bonuses and penalties.

First aid damage stat is their healing power, they don't deal damage. They heal everyone except themselves and artillery (to prevent softlocks) at the same time on their turn, they can overheal up to the initial health of the stack when it entered combat, but not above. So if you have 10 swordsmen, 1 survives, healers will overheal him until its 1 dude with the health of 10 (he still attacks as if he is 1). Since everything is desynced, healing does not mitigate damage it's all separate.

Defense walls only take part in battles labeled as defense.

Raiding (attacks on player) was a mechanic in the earlier stage of development, which we scrapped eventually because I couldn't make it fun in the general context of the game. Either raids are too weak and it's meaningless since they don't do anything, or if they are strong enough to be menacing, if a raid happens right before you want to attack someone, your troops die and you need to retrain them again, which was a bit infuriating. The alternative was to have two standing armies, one for protection always, one for attacks but it felt too artificial.

In the end I think removing them was a good idea, because turns out people really hate to see number go smaller in the incremental games. Majority of negative (and I mean, very negative, like 1-2 star review on google) feedback that I got over the course of these 2 month (not counting shitty UI, guilty as charged) was about production death spirals and how it sucks to be penalized for something. Then there was also battle readiness, which was degrading if you were pausing training for fully trained troops, also now gone because everyone hated it. So I dread to imagine what would have happened if someone got raided, lost, got his production hit and then it spiraled.

In short yes, the strat now is to win battles then unassign everyone and drop them into research to speed up things and then retraining everyone again.

Glad you like it, I pretty much made it for myself, because it was a game I wanted to play fpr my particular brand of autism. Then someone convinced me to promote it a bit more and publish on different platforms.

Yeah, the UI is totally the weakest link, I completely agree. But you can always use the Expand all button to have all of the production buildings expanded, and only expand/collapse the resource tabs.

But maybe indeed one could make building nodes have horizontal layout instead of vertical. The thought didn't occur to me until now, since on mobile it kinda has to be vertical to fit everything.

About the research though, I never had the need to know what it will consume in advance since it ultimately doesn't matter. It always takes 1-5 of some resource per person assigned, so you just assign as much as you want and then go to the production screen to increase production if you are in the red.

If you play on Standard difficulty and below, you don't need to prestige at all, all fights are balanced for no prestige run on those difficulties. But if you feel like waiting for technologies/training is an absolute slog you can prestige whenever you have ~100 points, which should give you 3x mult in both Research speed and training speed.

Hey, it does depend on the stage of the game. Also sometimes stuff that is not very population efficient could be quite resource-consumption efficient, so it's a back-and-forth kind of thing.

The furnace starts off a bit weak, but after you upgrade it, it becomes much better.

Overall boosters are very powerful, especially later on.

Thank you for playing, hope it stays fun for you going forward:)

Yeah, I've tried to close the loop of produce->research->produce better->win battles->unlock research etc. So you HAVE to interact with all three to advance.

That is fair, I accept your judgement.

Thanks for your interest!

I've made the game initially for the android and was intending to play it in relatively short bursts, so for me research was a thing to happen passively between play sessions. It shouldn't go much above 1-2 hours per research.

To speed it up you could save your army configuration, throw all of them into research to quickly finish all of it, then reload army comp and do a quick 10 minute meditate to retrain them, this would probably be the most optimal way to do it.

Alternatively you could prestige now and throw everything into research speed. This should net you about 2.5x permanent research speed (if you are in the middle of age 2).

Hey, thank you very much for positive feedback!

Regarding your suggestion, yeah, this is a big point of discussion usually, where it either works completely fine, or completely screws you over. Everyone encounters at least one death spiral at least once, and that is by design, I really wanted everyone to get that "gotcha" moment where they see that the usual approach of clicking the + button doesn't work, but I think most of my negative reviews on google play come exactly from this mechanic lol. What I can tell you is that pretty much everyone stops having these moments at some point when they keep playing, or at least that's what I gathered from people who actively discuss with me on discord.

For now there are two things that can help you a bit, there's "Show Details" button, that shows your stockpile sizes, how much you produces vs consume and how fast your stockpile will run out, so that can help with planning. Second is the "Consumption" button, this should have the functionality you described, it shows separately how much resources are consumed by Research, Military and Production respectively, this should make it a bit more bearable I hope!

Due to the popular demand I've removed the tutorials.

Hopefully this makes me into a dev-who-desperately-doesn't-want-everyone-to-pass-on-their-game-instantly.

Oh, you are right. I somehow thought that onlt paste didn't work, but I guess when I tested it I already had that save in the clipboard lol.

You can still export the essentials and write it by hand, its only ~40 characters long, but yeah, I'll need to look into solution

Hey, it boosts food production of other stations. Basically cooking consumes food produced by hunting and fishing to boost them and make them produce more food, hope this helps:)

Thanks for playing!
Yeah, this is a common feedback today. I will try to implement some sort of tutorial with the next update.

Thanks:)