This game actually got me to make an itch.io account, since I'd really like to see it go far, but— and I understand that this isn't completely finished— right now I think there are a few key issues. I've run through the game a few times, since this genuinely is the type of gameplay that interests me. And I'm also not great at video games, but in general I don't think I'm exceptionally bad at them either.

I get that this isn't meant to be an easy game, but right now it feels a little /too/ difficult, and not in a way that's necessarily fun. I can see that my heroes are really stressed, but it's really frustrating that I can't do anything about it— I never dipped below 30 tea/beer/food but they just never spent time in the tavern or teahouse. I also didn't realize that there's a default "guildhouse pays 20 gold for exploring, 20 for building, etc" thing, which feels like a bit of an oversight, since that feels like knowledge the player should definitely be privy to, but even when I set the pay to 0 for exploring my heroes just kept going out to dungeons and then getting themselves hurt/dying/unleashing monsters onto the overworld. This also may be an oversight on my end, but I have no clue what mana does. At the beginning, at least, I think it would be beneficial if the heroes weren't so exploring happy; slow paced starts and all that. It's a little overwhelming, especially when you're still kind of trying to pick up the ropes and adjust yourself to the map.

I think it might be better if you could have more than 4 heroes at once? And maybe if they were cheaper to recruit, though for balancing issues I get why that can't be the case (although maybe they could get more expensive the more you have?). I know that kind of contradicts what I said about the game feeling overwhelming, but it would be a lot less stressful if they didn't feel like extremely precious commodities. Plus, my heroes would usually have loneliness as a reason they snapped, but when there's literally only four of them, and I can't hold a festival or something to gather them all in one place, it's kind of hard to check that.

Characters' relationships with each other, aside from one notification about my wizard and my warrior having become rivals, don't seem to affect anything much, and I'd like to see more done with it.

The game speed button also doesn't always work. I think it resets back to x1 every time a hero gets into a fight, but that happens so often I'm genuinely not sure if that's the case or if there's a bug.

I might have more to say, but this is just what I thought of right now. I do like the game, I just think the balancing at the moment is kind of wonky. I get it's not supposed to be easy, and you're supposed to be aghast at your little guys for being murder hobos, but there's fun and unfun kinds of frustration.

Hey, fantastic feedback! I feel like you can see where I want to go with the game :) But I absolutely agree the game needs work. A big reason why I put the game out this early was to start getting feedback from players, smoothing the rough edges, and making sure the moment-to-moment gameplay is satisfying. (When you design a game and already have perfect knowledge of how the systems work together, it's hard to see what is and what isn't obvious when someone only has partial or imperfect knowledge of those. New players, for example.)

I think I want the game to _eventually_ be difficult, but it doesn't need to be as hard at the beginning. There's a few knobs I can turn here - cheaper hero recruiting, more gold from lairs, cheaper trading, etc. I'll think on what I can do here.

Managing hero stress is definitely one of the core 'loops' of gameplay, and right now the player is a little short on ways to affect hero stress. (Building a teahouse or casting the "soothe" spell, I think, are mostly it. Heroes with a "Friends" relationship can also take a relaxing walk together, but that's not something that happens often.) There will be more ways to deal with this in the future, but I think this is one of the tricky design problems I'll have to solve. (The problem, briefly, is that the core loop of managing stress is both a long-term thing and only indirectly affected by player actions. Figuring out how to give good feedback on player actions is tough with those conditions.) I like your idea of a festival! One-time things that trade resources for a little breathing room are cool decisions to force the player to make :D

I'll think about ways to better highlight the default pay rates for different jobs. You can't throw too much text at a new player, or else it all blurs together and information retention plummets. Maybe adding a line to the bottom of the Build Screen could be a nice hint: "Build jobs pay 20 gold per job, set at the Guild Hall" or something like that.

The Explore job refers specifically to going to unexplored tiles, rather than trying to conquer new lairs or maintain already-conquered ones. When a hero goes Questing, they could take an Explore job, a Conquer job, or a Maintain Lair job (or a Kill Monster job, if you've created any of those). Unconquered lairs also have gold inside already, which acts as a sort of "base pay" for the job that can't be modified by the player. Heroes do have a "New Guild Optimism" mood modifier - I could see adding in something where their Wanderlust meter fills up more slowly when they are new. (Once Wanderlust is full, the hero wants to go out on a Quest next.) That would decrease the amount of questing and danger for the first couple of days.

Mana is used to cast spells, which must first be researched. There are three spells in place, but more planned for. Your comment has convinced me to make the Soothe spell available at the beginning. This gives all heroes a mood boost for a day.

I do plan to increase the total number of possible heroes (up to eight, ten, or twelve, not sure yet). I _currently_ have a restriction that you can only hire one hero of each type, though I've considered opening that up. If I do, I won't have to implement another class before increasing the max number of heroes. (Side note: heroes are cheaper if you have fewer employed.)

I plan to go pretty far with relationships. One of my long-term goals is to have crazy things like "necromancer / zombie"  or "betrayer / betrayed" relationships. Shorter term, I'll be adding things like "dude, you just burned down my house" as negative relationship modifiers. If it burns to the ground, then that should be an automatic rivalry. (It's not all doom and gloom. Something like "neighbors" could provide a relationship bonus.)

One of three immediate problems that I'll be working on is what I'm calling the "coordination" problem. You might need three heroes to party up in order to take down a lair (like the Dark Tower). How should I try to get all these heroes to go questing at the same time? The spells Call Home and Call to Adventure can help with this party formation, but that's what I'd consider a "skilled" play (requiring knowledge of how the systems work). More automatically, I've tried to synchronize the sleep schedules for all heroes (even when a hero fills up their sleep need earlier). Then, all heroes are at least starting the day at the same time. More work to be done, though.

(The other big two problems are the "distance" problem, where heroes eventually spend most of the day wondering across the map as you expand outwards, and the "experience" problem, where heroes hired later don't have the benefit of easy early experience provided by exploring unknown tiles. I've got some ideas for these to try out, but I always love hearing more :)

Speed does reset to x1 when a hero is under attack. I could add some small effects to indicate this (maybe a small vignette effect when speed is increased?) and add a "zoom to combat" button to replace the "speed up" button when combat is occurring.

Really, this type of feedback is exactly what I was hoping for! Thanks for helping to make the game better :)

(On a small scheduling note, I've had to pivot focus to Neongarten in January to meet a publishing deadline. I hope to have a small update out by the end of the month (decreasing the difficulty), and a larger one in February.)