Is there any difference between this and Slay! ?
The game is totally an attempt to make my own preffered variant of Slay!, a game that has been my addiction for years :). So while it's quite faithful to it's core formula, there's a number of subtle but impactful differences that I found make the game more fun for me. Hopefully this also makes it interesting even for Slay! veterans:
- Towns in this game don't respawn, so cutting away chunks of territory or losing towns is a lot more impactful (also makes the late game much faster and brutal); on the flip side, you also don't need to worry about towns despawning when you merge provinces
- In this game AI oponents have a relationship towards you which affects their actions, so there's more to consider when chosing who and when to attack
- Bandits and bandit camps fill a similar role to Slays forests, but they work quite differently
- Towers (castles) are more expensive and have a maintenance cost in this game, but they also enable units to retreat; cut-off towers turn into bandit camps
- Upgrading units is more expensive in this game (you always need two units of the same kind to get a higher-tier unit)
Going forward, I hope another difference will be that this game will have a lot more interesting hand-crafted content (campaings, alternate modes etc.) and even better AI (though I will admit Slay! is not easy to beat in that aspect!), but time will tell :).