itch.io

- Dulcinea -

I started a new game with intention to make a beautiful, natural looking kingdom, determined to avoid typical square map and without any record breaking goals, expecting maximum pop. 3500 kingdom...

I ended the game with enormously sized, unnatural and ugly square map, almost breaking the record after prolonged self-tormenting 5 days long lag-fest...

...that ended to the crash. Runtime error around pop. ~5250, ~5200 money, and ~1430 cards:

"Function signature mismatch".

That's new one to me. :D

Start of The game can Be very RNG brutal. If your first island tiles are small and/or contain lot of rocks, easiest, fastest, and least frustrating way is just restart The game. Pile rocks to one corner of your island as you can only quarry them after having access to Stone House at population 50 or more. For saving money always play House cards first If you can as you get a new cardfor free from the deck. At The beginning It is advisable to designate sectors/directions for different builds: where you place houses, where is room for fields, and where to put Piers. Chaotic placement leads insufficient Space easily and tends to be economically inefficient and unsynergetic. Read what cards say and do, and try to keep your deck balanced. Do not hesitate to use remove card to badly blaced tiles, including rocks. Fields should be clumped together bY their type: hop likes More hop around it and wheat likes wheat. Prefer wheat as completed and Harvested Field grants a bakery. Use two L-shaped Fields of 4 tiles together leavings the center free for a mill, whenever possible for synergetic and economic reasons. When building House blocks leave room for bakeries so that every place for bakery has 4 adjacent House tiles. That maximises income from them...

Don't ever hesitate to restart The game if initial tiles are bad. You typically only waste your Time without much prospects. :)

- HIPPUSTAN -

Failed attempt to break demo's population record. Unlike usually, this time game ended 'normally' to the Game Over because of lack of rocks to quarry. My mistake was to start Stone House multiplication process a little bit too early and aggressively, and I ruined the deck balance and card-economy as a consequence. Biggest Card deck I have ever had, btw. 2346 Cards! Two very long days of gaming, with total playtime about 30h. It's damn time consuming to try to reach to a new record breaking grounds, and eventual end results of these efforts are always very ugly maps.

My fourth pop. 5000 or more kingdom.

GAME OVER. GG. :D

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PS. Late trend for ever tinier kingdoms for the record breaking purposes is slowly becoming visible. Efficiency in land usage is increasing.

Maps' bounding box measures and maximum amount of tiles within corresponding boxes included.

Some simple statistics:

(people/tile (grid) - money/tile (grid) - money/people)

Ixtlan 1.44 p/t - 0.48 m/t - 0.34 m/p
Hoptopia 1.63 p/t - 1.33 m/t - 0.82 m/p
Farfield 1.92 p/t - 2.24 m/t - 1.17 m/p
Hippustan 2.00 p/t - 1.17 m/t - 0.58 m/p

o_O

- FARFIELD -

Failed attempt to break Demo version's population record, using as small map bounding box as possible. Game ended to apparent memory related issues when drawing the map of pop. 5000 Farfield (below). New money record though: 5838 coins! There was real potential for the new record. In the game I tried same old ideas but with more rigorous and systematic application, yet there are still room for making some further streamlinings, for example always discard non-forced Bakery-cards after economy is enough robust. Same way with Fishshops. They are just a waste of space.

Development maps of Farfield drawn about 1000 population intervals. Map sizes included.

Another 35-40 hours well spent. xP

[Just a note. During this Hardcore Tiny Kingdom stint with record breaking goals, combined sum of score counts of the projects is 20000+ in population, and 13000+ in money, from about 20-25 new games started. Real time wasted to gameplay and map making is somewhere at ballpark of 150h. That's truly insane, even by my own standards, but..

You gotta make it a Kingdom, and make it Tiny, you know. :D ]

Few weeks later...

New TK Demo-version record numbers in both Population and Money, as far as is commonly known.

After intense agrarian revolution, Hoptopia ended to usual tilt after three long days of work soon after the situation drawn as above. 30+ hours.

Remove card is the most important card of the game, thus those vast expanses of fields, of which about half are bulldozed over already existing housing-districts.

Hoptopia's prosperity money-wise is just a side effect of active efforts to maximize farming of Remove and Tavern cards.

Not sure how much tighter a map can be arranged with 5000+ populations. Not sure is it really worth of time needed for searching that out either...

Maps of Hoptopia 2114 (44x37), 3512 (47x50), and 5304 (56x58) in same scale. There are more screenshots taken, but I draw only these three maps to demonstrate how the kingdom grew. The Castle's relative place stays same in all above maps as the West and North boundaries were already "locked" in pop. 2114 map and further expansions were made only to East and South.

Hopefully at least somebody find these posts interesting enough to not to get annoyed their apparent bloggish nature. I've put hundreds of hours to this game (DEMO!) and to making maps from my game projects, wanting to share them to others. :)

Lol. I have had that feeling many, many times. xD

'TK Demo-scene' might be small sub-niche, but it's here, and extremely dedicated.

- IXTLAN -

New Demo-version Personal Best by Population count! For some reason the game let me play far longer than usually. Normal 'One lake/Remove+Tavern cards Farm/Heavy Bulldoze+Discard' -strategy with strict constrains to the landmass size (all land within 59x59 grid of 3481 tiles), worked amazingly well. Map composed from 16 screenshots. The game ended to freeze/tilt (probably memory problem). No serious issues before the end. Two days of 'work'.

I didn't lose much progress, only 14 pop. Screenshot from the Frozen game, just before the crash:

In theory I could draw every map from taken screenshots since population 2044 and make an animated GIF from those maps to see how Ixtlan grew, but that'd be absolutely insane amount of work to do...

I Love this game, but that was enough Tiny Kingdom to me for a while. Probably very hard to make better record any time soon! :D

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EDIT/ADD: APPENDIX

Post script. Of course I could not end playing. Addiction does that, so I intentionally tested how large map can reasonably be still being somewhat playable... with 30-60 seconds lags! However I tried my best to make it also aesthetically beautiful to look at.

Vulcanesia's bounding box is 154x120 or 18480 tiles (give or take), and when playing with browser every symptoms of immediate crash were there: Very long lags, the game dropped out from the full screen mode every single card played, 'page doesn't respond' pop up window appeared all the time, build/chance animations took very long to complete, music was reduced to 'industrial noise', etc...

Map making took itself a half of day. Maybe 100 or so screenshots. Enjoy!

The game is still going on, and in principle playable but I think it is already practically unplayable due absurdly long lags, and would probably crash soon anyway. So I leave and end it as drawn to the map.

EDIT/ADD2:

Yet another publication-worthy project: 'Venezzia'. Lost to the sea of lags.

Apologies for my long rants! -Serious hobbyist xD

GG! Only pop. 178 to finish the castle is very good result in accomplishing the Demo.

In this game, most of time you lose to bad RNG, and when not, it's the game crashing to a memory insufficiency with Pop. 1500-2000+ kingdoms long after the completion of the castle and the demo.

I have no accurate statistics to show, but for every pop. 1000+ games there must be at least 20-30 games ended to a bad RNG very early in the game.

The most usual end result for me is population 18, or less.

RECTANGLIA

The game suprisingly ended to a lack of resources to quarry, after extremely aggressive strategy to maximize amount of stone house cards in the deck. That, and bad card RNG ruined my economy which proved to be game ending. A lot of heavy bulldozing (also house tiles), and card discarding. Lags were tolerable until the last few hundreds of population when I was forced to place piers on the southern coast to make room for other cards on the hand. Taverns saved me several times from The Game Over, before they ultimately did not. Nice game of some 20+ hours of playing. You cannot make map much uglier than this. All landmass is within the bounding box of 48 tiles wide and 51 tiles high (2448 tiles). It's probably possible to get population over 4000 using this kind strategy of intentionally limiting expansion of playing area. :)  

The start of the game is very RNG heavy. Even if knowing how to optimize the start, the most usual end result is population 18. Good day. :)

Thx.

Adding that The problem seems to be the memory. If going to build big kingdoms (by population), a player must limit the size of landmass, and use it efficiently. This means that maps tend to become rather uninteresting, unimaginative square-ish circle blobs, lacking much aesthetical beauty. Forget large, ever expanding archipelagos, forget large meandering maze-like structures, forget multiple separate cities with wide wilderness ranges inbetween them. Hell, it seems that you have to avoid even building lakes as they seem to be someway more memory consuming map-feature than just placing piers on the coast of the sea.

"Ugliness" of the map becomes from the fact that it seems to be very hard to build both populous and aesthetically pleasing kingdom same time.

A player is not free with his map making choices, if going to aim also to a maximally populous kingdom. And, They are not that tiny in practice btw, most of play time goes to long lags and to scrolling around a map.

A game can suddenly end with crash, probability for that ever increasing. After some pop. 2000-2500, every move you make can be easily your last. The sudden death end is gonna be because of either 'Memory access out of bounds' or 'Table contents out of bounds', and that's the end of your kingdom (of maybe 20 hours of playing) with no possibility to take any screenshots (other than error messages). That's why I compose these maps from screenshots when I can. You get at least something lasting from your efforts, even if always losing some 'progress' to the crash...

Nevermind, I love this game. Much!

PS. Someone asks this anyway. How to "save" your progress? Answer is simple, don't close your browser, keep Tiny Kingdom -tab open, and let your system go passively sleep/dormancy without interruptions. You come back, and just continue. The entire game is in the memory when playing with browser, and doesn't require even internet access after first launched. You can always continue your game, if the game tab is kept open. Never refresh the game tab... Game saved!

Unfinished long-play 'Uglisle', population 2088. Normal, but still playable lag-fest with rather small deck size for over 2K population. The map composed from 23 screenshots. Trying to keep map's bounding box tight. Without crash too soon, Uglisle will be much uglier than this...

EDIT/ADD: The Principality of Uglisle collapsed eventually to usual "Memory access out of bounds" -stuff. The final population was 3410+, with some 170-180 Gold, and around 1050 cards in the deck. Last composed screenshot map... Ugly it is: 

No. But you can scroll over your realm and take zillion screenshots and compose a map of your kingdom. Yes, time consuming to do, but that's the only way as far as I know. It helps if you don't have any cards on your hand when taking screenshots. More effective area covered with less takes needed.

I used MS paint for map making.

Ocean (and error messages about memory) ultimately sank New Laglandis with population 3806. The last drawn map just before the end.

Pop 3800. Gee. Nice. After 25-30 hours of gaming. :)

Progress. Reached first time population over 3000. Keeping landmass tight (relatively speaking) seems to help with memory sufficiency issues. The game is still going on, and while lags are loooooooong, the game has remained playable and not giving a hint for immediate crash.

Btw, during this game I realized that a house (wood or stone) doesn't have to stay on map. You can delete those tiles and that doesn't affect your population. I accidentally placed a stone house to a totally unsuitable place, and removing it didn't impact the population. That counter can be thus considered like "score". It also very likely means that it could maybe possible to continue increase population far beyond current numbers, but deletions of house tiles also kinda defeat the very idea of building bigger kingdoms.

Map (as of now). My personal record by population count.

Yet another long play 'New Laglandis'. Trying to keep both the deck size and map's bounding box small and optimal for preventing insufficient memory/memory overflow caused game crash too soon... But crash it will.

Screenshot composite map after 2.3K population and 1K+ cards. :)

Actually, The game instruct player on stackability of a card. That light brown box in the below image pops up when hovering cursor over the stackable card on hand. Don't worry, I felt complete moron myself when after few hundreds hours of intense game playing I realized that mills are stackable too. :)

Anti-Agonia ended to the Crash with Pop. 2770-80, and some 850 Gold, and about 1300 Cards. Screenshot from error messages at the end:

Anti-Agonia 2.5K+.... Quarrying district expands at SE parts of the land, and seems becoming increasingly more and more uncleanable due maximum stone extraction levels for more stone houses. Used Markets only to multiply Hop, Wheat, and markets. Most of remove cards goes to clean piers for making room for new piers, and practically all cards have been playable a quite while now; no needs to discard anything. The Game seems to be now in "the perpetual mode", only thing preventing it to continue to the eternity is that it's so laggy that after every action I repeat mantra: "Please don't crash, please don't crash, please don't crash!!!". And it probably will. Over 3K population seem to be far reach...

The game still going on, and I'm keeping game's browser tab open and letting my system go peaceful dormancy after every play session, to keep it going. Only unlucky, unexpected and absolutely "necessary" Windows system update can ruin my fun now! :D

Start of this game is very RNG brutal, but you can get a decent start with rocks if you just use remove cards to them (generally not advisable to erase resources). Typical pattern for games by population goes like this: 10, 28, 16, 34, 12, 78, 18, 12, 134 (2 castle parts), 18, 18, 24, 64, 14, 104, 224 (with 3 castle parts and 4th in the deck), 16, 34...

Still, It feels almost mundane to finally get demo "completed" with 4th castle part. Usually that happens between 170-280 pop. When that has achieved, you need typically over 1000 population more to reach a situation where a deck size (and RNG factors related to the deck size) allow you to really transfer to 'a perpetual mode': i.e. to risk of losing to a bad hand diminishes, being smaller and smaller.

Key lesson: Try to arrange your map such way that you get a situation where you can always play all cards, regardless of what you may get on your hand, and continue to build your map such way that you ever-increase that buffer. Immediate optimization of a play of individual card isn't necessarily same as longer-term optimal. You try reduce the impact of RNG as small as possible. After some 1.5K pop. most important thing is to be ready to handle with intense lags: Let game do what it needs to do after every action without buffering game with more hasty actions. It gets very time consuming...

Current, still ongoing game 'Anti-Agonia' at Pop. 2022, 592 Gold, and 964 Cards, after over two days of gameplay. It will crash sooner or later (probably sooner). Ability for 'Zen-Laggism' is required when playing. Mosaic/composite map from myriad screenshots. :)

Ok. The game finally ended to system/browser freeze. I'm not entirely sad that happened as I just couldn't  end playing, and nothing hinted in the game it would been near anytime soon. Final landmass of Millia is at least 50-60% larger than on the map above. I managed to take screenshot from the freezed game screen in the end. New personal record with some 900 more population. :)

The same game still going on. Now population over 2K+, and deck of cards over 1K+. Hilariously long lags and very time consuming to play at the moment... I fear I'm addicted to this game. Thanks Neltile! :D

My current game. 'Millia' Population 1510, 213 gold, 884 cards in the deck, and all cards on hand playable (mills). I made this map using dozens of screenshots, copy-pasting, Microsoft Paint, and apparently too much time. The game is very, very laggy and last time I made it anywhere this far, my game ended to crash at pop. 1670-90, thus I wanted to make sure there is atleast something left that lasts if game crashes again. Let's see... :)

My Tiny Laglantis sank at:

Population about: 1670-1690 (or something like that)

Money about: 60-70

Deck size: 870-890 Cards

The Game was hellishly laggy toward the crash at the end, 5-10 seconds per card action. Some error messages appeared after the crash.

Nice game. :)

New personal record with Population 190. This must be really close to maximum possible with ever-worsening rng in the game. The game was not even perfectly conducted as that one tree was prematurely surrounded by field-tiles, when that move was not forced. I managed place all available tiles too. Probably won't get bigger and better Tiny Island than that any time soon. Great game! :)

Really nice and relaxing game. Enjoyed a lot. After few days of grinding I managed to get this rather populous and nice little place. It's hard to build islands far over population 100. :)