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Icqa3 years ago

Probably not the worst game I've ever played, but definitely the least fun. Everything about this game seems tailor-made to make you hate your time with it. I genuinely cannot find a single positive.

The market idea, while possibly decent in concept, is an atrocity to actually play with, same with the city. They just scale to "Screw you for trying to play" heights way too quickly. The whole experience just felt like an exercise in scarcity where you never will enough money, energy, engineers, or anything really to do what you want to do, which if intentional, then yeah you have a fine art piece, but that doesn't save it as a game.

I wanted to play through every game in the jam to 'completion' even if I hated them just in case they get fun at a certain point, but this game broke me. I just can't keep going. Currently I'm stuck grinding research for the 8000 research upgrade that makes coal plants produce more. If the games gets fun after this, I'm sorry, but I just cannot fathom that happening, so I'm jumping ship here.

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Semenar3 years ago

Thanks for the comment!

Several other people have already mentioned that it is too easy to start losing, and the negative loop fed by market prices makes it harder to get back if this happens. I think it is a major cause of situations when the game becomes un-fun for people, and yes, this is my fault. The engineers in the early game are likely too far and few to allow for decent running builds (and the engineer count in the endgame is too high by comparison, so I should have dropped the initial prices in favor of faster scaling after some point). The jam deadline is over, so it would be improper to actually go and fix balance issues; but you can try and give it another go tomorrow (if you had the stock exchange upgrade for 600 research, it would clear the upwards trend in the market, so the prices would start to fall after a significant amount of time spent offline). The game would continue to screw you up after that point, but less and less with each passing upgrade, until the market becomes completely irrelevant around e6 research or so.

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Icqa3 years ago (1 edit)

I took your advice and gave it a day off, and after two more days of playing, I've finally finished this game off once and for all. I can also safely say it never got fun and even if the market becomes less of a hurdle in the later parts of the game, it is still beyond a crawl and there was still enough randomness to have made my time with this absolutely miserable. Although, the final research did bring up the scarcity bit I had previously talked about, so if all this misery was intended, you did make a pretty decent art piece. I'll give you that much.

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