All expeditions units have diminishing returns. The effect is amount^0.8.
Realm of War is a bit tough to get going but it does speed up a lot after you send your first artifact. You probably want to work on Prime Realm for a while before shipping to Realm of War. When you can make 1k nullstones in an hour or two you should start shipping artifacts.
Thanks for playing and than you for the detailed feedback. First let me say that what you are noticing is real and shared by many players including myself. I think it is healthy for a game to oscilate between feeling powerful and feeling challenged, and the beginning of RoW is certainly challenging. I think you will find things unfold better than you might expect. Shipping artifacts to RoW is a big boost that starts rapid progression in RoW (after you ship the first artrifact, the next one isn't far behind, and with artifacts you can get enough sword production to push the RoW expeditions for compounding progress). Additionally, the tier2 reset is not painful. You keep all your artifacts, both altars, prestige. You really only lose inventory which you will recover in an hour or two.
I don't claim the balancing is perfect, only that I try to notice when it goes too far in one direction and I correct.
As for having more interesting cross-realm mechanics - to be honest that was never the vision. Not because I don't think it's cool, but because I didn't think I could handle the complexity with my current game design skills. So to be transparant what you can expect moving forward:
Realms get more novel (R3 is very different, and the upcoming R4 even more so), but the cross-realm mechanics stay flat. Old realms become (check in a couple of times per day) as the latest realm is meant to capture majority of attention.
I don't know what you mean by finish, but I regretted the design decision to reset progress between universes in EverCraft 1 and did not feel like developing further under that paradigm.
It has a few new systems like research and expeditions. Universes are a thing sort of but they are now realms which play in parallal to the first realm and you can move some unique stuff between them so new realms start by getting support from older ones then later they send stuff to the older ones allowing progression in them.
Thanks for the screenshot. This may have been due to the game saving too frequently triggering a firefox limit. I uploaded a new version please try again.
Hmm. sometimes firefox disallows requestAnimationFrame until the iframe has focus. You clicked inside the game and still nothing happened? Any chance you can see if you get any errors/debug info in the console (F12)?
Thanks for the critique! Sounds are definitely on the to do list. I also think you are directionally correct about making the cards more minimalistic.
As for the cost of spells - I actually think that is good design. The cost escalation does reset on pink collection, so the escalation just ensures all spells are relevant every cycle. If you play a bit more you may come to agree.
