Post by ElecNinja in Feedback

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Good job on the tutorial that you added after the responses from reddit. While it's not 100% perfect, it does convey most of the mechanics.

4 suggestions from my time playing it.

The colors either need to be more distinct or there needs to be an identifier attached to them. Like a letter or number. So you can say the "O" resource or something like that. A lot of the time I built or traded the wrong item because I couldn't tell the difference between the light orange resource and the dark orange resource and other similar mistakes.
Progression should be based on the max population market or something instead of just days. That way you don't have people just wait for everything to spawn before building out. Every time I've started a game, I built a simple trade route for the initial basics and then waited until 1500 days or so as that's around the time when the next tier of starred resources appears. This is kind of weird and makes the initial stages feel pointless.
Add a way to delete a building. Many times I would place down a market with a workshop I didn't want but there's no way to delete that workshop or market so it would be nice to fix my mistakes.
As for the tutorial, not sure if it was mentioned, but there should be some focus on how workshop production works with demand. Understanding how demand impacts production was a bit of an issue.

That's about it from my time playing.

Tortue8 years ago

Thanks a lot for your feedback!

There is definitely something to add to the identification of resources, color is not enough (and not colorblind friendly...). I was thinking about adding a symbol because it's prettier than letter, but letter is easier to communicate.
Progression based on days was to simulate resource discovery over time and so different eras (like stone Age, Iron Age, ...). There is no logic to discover new resources when the population grows. But as you say this is a problem for initial stages and the course of the game. So we have to add some behaviors to make it more interesting, I think of different possibilities:

demand (needed quantity) for existing resources changes depending on population
invest in exploration to find new resources faster
other kinds of advances based on population (new market upgrade, exploitation upgrade, traders upgrade, means of transport)

You're right, I have to add a way to delete building. But it's not so easy because there are impacts on routes using a deleted market or traders waiting to buy or sell resources in a deleted market.
I'll add a little explanation about the functioning of workshop and profitability computation.

Back to work now but i think you have to wait until the beginning of the next year :)

Thanks again.

ElecNinja8 years ago

The issue with having progression based on days is that you have my issue where I would rather wait for all the resources to be discovered before even setting up any trade routes. This means that there is at least a minute of downtime before a player really wants to start the game.

As for resource discovery being dependent on population, the logic is that as your main market grows, the civilization grows along with it. More population = more advanced eras. You don't just wait for time to pass before you get to the iron age. You have the population grow and advance. It's not just time that causes advancement. It's people and time.

As for the other possibilities, they don't fix the core issue of not feeling like playing the game until all resources are shown. Because what's the point? A bad solution would have money decrease over time so that the player can't sit on their ass for the first 1500 turns, but that's just annoying imo.

You already have a good system for determining whether a player understands how the resources work through the population demand window. So once they get the resources demanded, then the next resource appears. This would be good design and would ease the players into learning about each resource.

That's another issue with having advancement based on time. The player doesn't get enough time to fiddle around with each resource before another one is suddenly thrust onto the field.

Tortue8 years ago (1 edit)

Ok you convinced me :)

I have to work on it now. One decision point is about general principle : consider the market with the most population (main market) then update population demand for all markets, or consider the population in the region (i.e. sum of all markets population), or each market has its own demand according to the population (small markets have less needs than big markets).

I was thinking about an other way to interest player to start playing early rather than wait until all resources are shown: buildings and traders leveling. The more an element do its job the more experience he gains. With experience he level up and improves its characteristics (auto or selected by player). For example, the more a trader travels the faster he goes, the more a workshop produces the less time it takes to produce...

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