The game does start you within a certain distance of key resources, but somewhat farther than your suggested 6 tiles. The maps are varied enough that some of them simply don't have a start like that! (I'd like to avoid softening up the map generation too much because the variety in maps, including the challenge of dealing with occasional difficult resources, is part of what keeps me having fun...)
You're guaranteed to start quite close to science. And the game even tries to give the human player the best spot it found. So you can at least be fairly confident the AI had to work hard or get lucky as well.
All that said, you're right that it can still be frustrating, of course, and sometimes the logic above is not perfect! I think a lot of the frustration comes from starting off exploring in a bad direction, which is just random bad luck.
I recommend using the "show more start resources" option when you play custom games. It's on by default in other modes. It seriously reduces frustration for me, and gives me some good options for starting directions. Beyond that, I find that using science to find what you're missing as early as you can also helps a lot!
[EDIT: Woops, I forgot I had already released the improvements I mentioned, so I rewrote the above a bit.]
Thanks very much for the feedback and for playing the game! This helps!
True! That's in my list, but low priority. I could prioritize it if everyone hates it. It seems rare.
That should be fixed in the latest build. Please let me know if you see that again.
That's intentional, but if you hate it I'd like to know. My reason was almost entirely "more variety from session to session". Basically, the map generation sometimes decides to make something like a gold-sparse map, just for fun.
I play the game regularly myself and enjoy more uniqueness in scenarios, which is part of why I drag my feet on trying to do a more even spread of resources. I may reverse my position on that at some point? Or add it as an option in custom games?
You are guaranteed a start within X tiles of every necessary resource (and within 2 spaces of science, so you can Detect the other things you need), but unfortunately you don't initially know where things are, so you might explore in a bad direction initially. I've added a feature (in the version I'm uploading today) in Custom games where more resources are revealed at the start. I might make this the default in all game modes, because I like it. It doesn't reveal all the resources you need, because that made the start boring, so some exploring (use the Detect button!) is still needed.
And, if you don't feel good about a particular start, I've tried to make it low-friction to just start a new game.
Which AI difficulty are you playing? On the higher difficulty levels (anything above Prince), the AI definitely cheats - the main way it cheats is it has lower costs for building things. It doesn't do any kind of sudden extra boost late in the game - I would hate that.
The AI is very complicated, and I've put a lot of work into making it competitive through logic, but like many games the higher levels have to have an advantage to be competitive against humans. I'd love to have non-cheating competitive AI, but it'd have to be human-level smart, and it's just not.
I've also tried to reduce the feeling of sudden loss, with things like showing AI progress on certain buildings, but sometimes the AI's win is still surprising. On advanced levels where they've built up a ton of income, they can pretty quickly progress through the stages of advanced buildings.
I've already been experimenting a bit with the idea that's #2 on your list. In my opinion, if too much is revealed initially, it kinda wrecks the start, makes it more of a chore and takes away some of the magic of finding resources you need. But revealing a few resources (not everything you need) is not so bad - it gives you some initial direction while still requiring you to explore and detect.
I'm thinking of putting that in the custom game options in a future build.
Yeah, it's unfortunately more of a crapshoot than I would like. The map generator tries very hard to put you in a fair (in fact the best) starting location, away from AI. But the very unpredictable nature of the map generation might still mean you have a good starting experience on one map and a bad one on the next, especially because you have to choose to start exploring in some direction without knowing yet which direction is best. There might be a beautiful valley of resources right behind you.
I agree about the snowballing, of course. The start is crucial. I feel the same way about every 4X game I've played, so at least I think we're still in good company.
I'm committed to the random nature of the starts (as opposed to, say, scripted or mirrored maps), but I agree it's sometimes frustrating. If I haven't built my first town in 50 moves, I often start a new game. The game carefully avoids any real penalty for starting anew. Start over all you want. It's another upside, I hope, to a game that takes only minutes to play.
Strategies:
When exploring, step on hills when you can! You see farther from hills, which helps find crucial resoures.
Make sure you get 2 science quickly, while continuing to explore, and use those immediately to Detect any key resource you're missing. Just remember you still need another science at some point to unlock Town building.
The map generator always starts you somewhere near a science resource, so if you don't find it right away, consider doubling back (through unexplored territory)
This is subtle, but: If you're ever waiting next to a resource, killing time, use that time to do the Discover Town Building action, rather than wait until you're about to build the first town. All actions take turns, so if you're going to spend a turn waiting for something, spend it researching/detecting/trading instead.
Food is (usually) far more common than other resources, so I try to avoid spending a Detect on that. I figure I'll find some eventually. I'm only sometimes wrong. :)
Standing on a resource will mean you get it rather than an AI standing next to it. (note: doesn't override buildings, just other AI heroes). And in fact the AI will often give up and leave if you're standing on the resource they want.
There's a lot more that can help, but I think these are some good basics. Feel free to sugest your own strategies here! I find the start of the game challenging, and I'm always trying to optimize my starts.
Hi! thanks for the suggestion. I'll have a look at it!
Edit: This is done. Anything over the "action panel" on the left doesn't click through to the map. And I needed to update the current itch.io build anyway, so there's a new version today with some other changes as well.
Thank you! Your comment makes me happy. :) I intend to bring the game to Steam, and the delay is just that this is a side project for me, but comments like this help motivate me to work on it!
Very helpful! Thanks for following up. Turns out it's a rounding error, and happens if you wrap around like that and have 3 claims on one resource. This is a display bug only, and won't change how many resources you actually get. In any case, it's fixed, so it'll be in the next published version (not sure when). Thanks!
Hmm... Yeah, that's odd! Why isn't that top one a full 2 swords? I'll look into it.
Edit: I can't repro this at all. Any idea what's causing it? From what I can see, you ought to have 2 full harvest dots in the upper image and 4 in the lower. Nobody's competing for those swords.
Thanks! There are infinite puzzles! I have some players who have collected all the collectable shape-faces and still play the game because every challenge is new.
Thank you! The AI doesn't specifically target you or your space - they just wander learning about the world and then deciding the best place to put something. When there are a lot of AI and not a lot of space, they're just also likely to find the good spots you want for yourself. :) You can try bigger maps in the Custom game type...
Weighting resource collection by how long you've stood there: Very interesting! I hadn't thought of that. How would it weight buildings, which stand there the whole time? That logic for collection probability is already fairly complicated, but I'm interested in thinking about this suggestion more.
I agree that combat is lacklustre! I'm planning on reworking it (yet again!) but don't have a concrete plan yet. Your ideas here are interesting, but I've been very careful to try to keep everything as streamlined as I can and avoid introducing special cases, so I'll be hesitant to make building rules more complicated. I might prefer simplifications like always giving resources to buildings instead of heroes, or something like that.
Towns/cities attacking: Cool idea - I'll think about this, too.
Thanks so much for your feedback and suggestions! This is definitely what I need. If nothing else, then for motivation to keep making improvements. :)
We can save to localstorage, but that data can be lost - I have players reporting that they're surprised their progress has suddenly gone away!
Is there any updated news about an itch.io storage API?
I'd be happy to use something like PlayFab or Firebase with a custom player ID, but I'd have to get a reliable player ID (e.g. an itch.io account ID name/number) for the signed in player. I don't think this is currently possible . Is it?
If you have the option checked, the game will autosave (and restore later) if you close the window or refresh the page or something. If you exit a game, it thinks you're done playing that game and throws that one out. I can see that being confusing. Maybe naming that option "Quit Game" would be more clear.
Thank you so much! Still working on it, making things better, but I don't have a new build to push up yet.
I almost never win Deity. To the point where I got really frustrated and took it out of the current development build. I'm trying to rework the difficulty a little.
I mean, I agree - it's pretty awesome when I do win a Deity game, but sometimes it feels like a Deity loss was completely out of my control, and that's just a drag. :-/
When the bottom row goes over 2 and you click on the card, the extra spills over onto the next page (e.g. extra bottom-row dogs give more cat cards), but there must be something broken there. I've finally got time to look into the reported bug...
And yeah, to get that many cards is a crazy number of games played!
Yep! The AI cheats horribly at the higher levels. I think at the King level, everything tries to be as fair as possible. At the Warlord level, the AI is actually dumbed down. At the Emperor and Deity level, the biggest form of cheating is that the AI has cheaper construction costs.
Thanks. I've uploaded a new version that I hope avoids that error. I tested in Waterfox in Windows, but wasn't able to repro the original bug. If you have a chance to confirm the fix, I'd appreciate it. And maybe let me know what platform you're on?
Yeah, some of the terrain types are technically the same, from a gameplay point of view. Just to review:
mountains, lakes, ocean : impassable
hills : when you stand on one, you can see farther
forest, plains, desert : normal
They do produce different resources (e.g. "rare plants" vs. "nomads", but those differences are only visible in tooltips. :)). I may make those have some different impact at some point.
