So far all the Total War fans seem to like this game, so I'm happy it succeeded in that regard! I'm honestly also surprised it worked out as well as it did, since I've never done anything close to this before.

You're absolutely right about the difficulty being too low, and that was intentional. The players units are almost across the board a step above the Saxon soldiers, in fact if you double-click on the enemy unit banners you can even see the difference in stats. This was because I figured very few people in the jam would be familiar with the Total War franchise (though so far there's more than I expected), and I wanted anyone who honestly tried the game to be able to win. I had issues with my last game being so difficult a few people couldn't make it to the end, so I didn't want a repeat of that. The cavalry I specifically buffed so that players who were not great at micromanaging and cycle-charging could still keep them alive. If this were for a non-jam game, or if I had more time to add mechanics and balance values then I would definitely make the game more challenging.

I was actually going to make an intro cutscene for the battle but didn't have time to do so, so I'm happy the lore dump was sufficient!

The unit placement I actually relied quite heavily on a tutorial project by Jonas Mun, so all the credit goes to him for figuring out how to drag out formations and for being able to pivot the drag around a point. But I did have to sort out how to make units move to the destinations, and to break out that functionality so it would work on any units selected rather than just have one rigidly defined selection. I'll likely write up more on what I had to do after the jam.

Thanks for playing, and for the feedback!

Thanks for playing!

My main goal for this game was to capture the same sort of feel as Total War, so I'm happy another fan found some enjoyment in it!

The map is definitely the most undercooked part of the game, more detail or at least different textures would be much better. There are lots of trees, but off in the distance since they're just sprites. The game could chug at points even on my machine so I didn't wanna put too much detail into the background. But you're right about perhaps having some dirt, or rocky ground textures to break up the endless green grass texture.

I did purposefully omit objects that were not part of the ground itself though, as you may be aware as a fan of the Total War franchise, things like rocks and trees can really screw with unit pathfinding. And if its an issue for a big studio with years of experience it's absolutely gonna be an issue for me doing something by myself in a week. It would be neat to try out objects in the terrain in the future with this project, but I simply didn't want to risk anything that could really break the game.

The UI could definitely use sprucing up, but I intentionally left it minimalist to avoid cluttering up the screen. And I did look at free UI packs, but none of the ones I looked at really seemed to capture the feel of what I would have liked to have. So I just left it as default Unity UI look. And I do realize that it still has issues with confusing people even at a minimalist level, but I think the issue could have been exacerbated if I tried to make it closer to something like Warhammer 2 or Three Kingdoms.

Thanks for playing and for the feedback!

Yeah the camera controls were troublesome to get working nicely, I would've liked to make the scheme closer to the Warhammer entries in the Total War series but I didn't have time for that level of polish. So I just made sure to include an option to freelook around so the player can adjust their view as needed. Also that method is arguably the smoothest since that's how I usually move the camera in strategy games, so I guess my bias is to blame for some of the lackluster controls, sorry about that.

But I'm glad you liked it, thanks for playing and for the feedback!

Yeah the game suffers from a lack of overall polish since so much focus and effort went into the base mechanics. In general I usually end up focusing on features and then using free assets to fill the gaps, so yes the visuals are only meant to be functional at least to the point the player can differentiate between British and Saxons soldiers. It was also partially kept simple so performance wouldn't get too horrible, its the same reason why shadow distance is so low and why soldiers turn into sprites once the camera is far enough away.

Though I feel I should point out all the animations, clothing, hair, armor and a good chunk of the weapons I made myself (which is why they look noticeably worse than the characters themselves).

The interface does need more explanation definitely, it was purposefully minimalistic both to limit scope and hopefully avoid confusing players. Unfortunately it generally seemed to completely fail at the latter for those unfamiliar with the Total War series, even with friends who do like RTS games. Speaking of which I assumed most people in this jam wouldn't be fans of RTS games, since games with lots of values and mechanics usually aren't jam-friendly. And the utilitarian controls and visuals make for a rather plain experience so don't feel the need to apologize, the thought went into the controls and making sure the game didn't break.

Thanks for the feedback and for playing!

Yeah I briefly thought about making the game a bit more mythical in the vein of Age Of Mythology or Total War Warhammer, but good god making this game was hard enough with just base humans lol. Excalibur and the Lady of the Lake are mentioned in Arthur's unit description, and Arthur is technically wielding Excalibur (which is what in my mind is part of what justifies his higher attack strength along with ensuring he doesn't die in 10 seconds). But yeah the connection is pretty bare I admit. My idea was generally to be more in line with the Total War Troy approach to mythology, which is why the origin and power of Excalibur is left as rumors Arthur uses for propaganda purposes.

Thanks for playing!

Yeah I'm surprised the game actually came together this well in the end, one of the hardest parts was simply getting the grid formation code to work nicely with multiple units. My goal was to make it recognizable to Total War players and stable enough that it could mostly be played in the same way so I'm happy to hear it worked.

Thanks for playing!

Believe me I'm as blown away as you are, I actually ended up losing two days of the jam due to travel and other external factors. So the fact that this came together as something recognizable to Total War is great! I do have plans for a couple improvements post-jam, and I would love to work further on this but it'll likely be far down the pipeline as I got a couple other projects I want to prioritize.

Thanks for playing, sorry to hear about Arthur but hey at least the Saxons were defeated.