This game needs more reviews! I really liked it!

The good:

The AI seemed competent.

The upgrade system makes for an interesting choice between grabbing territory and investing in your current lands.

Fail states and win states both work (as I found out from experience).

The bad:

It was unpleasant to realize that when I moved a lot of troops into a block and raised the total to above 10, the total would max out at 10 and the excess troops deleted. It'd be much nicer if the GUI would stop you from committing more troops than the destination can handle instead of just destroying them.

Towards the end of the game, I would frequently find myself forced to click every single one of my controlled blocks, because I couldn't remember which ones I had already given orders to, and which ones were awaiting orders. Some kind of icon or color change would have been amazing for this.

Once I opened the GUI to issue orders for a block, I had to move my mouse to click the 'Close' button. Being able to use a hotkey to close the window would have been nice.

Moving lots of troops is painful because you have to click the "+" button 10 times and then choose the destination. Doing that in multiple blocks in the same turn meant that I often had to click 30 to 50 times in a single turn in rapid fire. My click finger desperately wants a "Commit All" button. :)




Fantastic game! I hope more people see it.

Interesting game. I think the previous comment is exhaustive. At first, I thought that pressing the space bar while in the building GUI would close the interface but I quickly realized that I skipped two or three rounds. x)
The AI is a big plus!
Well done.

I played a full round of this and I really liked it! I liked methodically updating my frontline.
I think it could do more to make the 'sacrifice' part more front-and-center. Still, it was a fun time for me.

The core game loop (upgrade-reinforce-push) is fun enough, I enjoyed playing through the round and I can see a lot of potential for extension.


Nitpicks:
I feel like there is not enough of feedback to the player. For example: once you have around a half of the map conquered I kept forgetting which tiles I have already used, this could be easily fixed by just changing the tile color, or highlighting it somehow(as that is already in the game)

For me the AI was rather laid back, it attacked only few times and most of the time it had a lot of units in the back. Maybe a coop option would be better (but I understand that single player is a better format for the jam)

Did not like the fact that the tiles were rotated, it was so confusing, mainly because the attack direction in the UI was not rotated. Seemed unnecessary.

Pretty fun! Though, there were areas it could certainly improve, it has a really nice base concept, and I quite enjoyed playing.

Things I liked:
* Enjoyable concept, and executed well. It was quite enjoyable to play! :D
* Nice play-area. It worked well for what it needed to do. Not too complex, not too simple.

Things I'd change:
* Things felt bothersome: Going through each and every square upgrading/moving pieces was a pain. Select square > do what you need > Move mouse down > hit back > repeat. And sometimes I'd have already done that square, thus wasting my time. To fix this, I'd consider having some indication of whether a square has used it's turn yet so the player doesn't have to go through them all. Maybe also a more efficient UI so that the user doesn't get annoyed clicking on all those buttons. Maybe instead of a whole screen, have a pop-up menu? Like, select square > Popup menu appears > Do whatever > Click off the menu to close. Maybe even a "Transfer all" button? Quick and easy controls.
* I didn't realize that the areas had names until halfway through the game. Maybe a text-color that stands out from the background, or a background for the text would fix this.
* Sounds/music could certainly help out, too.

Overall though, this was a nice game. Really enjoyed upgrading, transferring troops, and ***CRUSHING MY ENEMIES***.
Nicely done!

Ah, right. One more thing. When I first got the game on, I tried for a minute to find a way to rotate my view. Which didn't work out :P

Good game, I liked it a lot and thought it was very replayable. I would also like to see a game with more than one computer on a larger map to see how that would work.

Fun the first time, but it doesn't really have a reason to play again. The strategy seems one dimensional, since you're trying just to maximize troop output. Espcially since you can upgrade all units every single turn. I think limited number of actions, which you can distribute however you like (i.e. upgrading the same place multiple times) would help a lot too. All of the actions could also be streamlined, you shouldn't have to go into a menu for every single action.

Beautiful idea, although quite uncomfortable UI. This type of games could be really nice in multiplayer

Nice work! Here are my thoughts:

- I'd like to affirm pretty much everything @erasmus-crowley said. I like the choice the player needs to make between upgrading a tile and moving its units, I noticed all of the same problems on my playthrough. The only difference was my experience with the AI. Not once did it successfully take over one of my tiles; even when it had more units than one of my adjacent tiles on its turn, it only sent a handful of those units over, so my number of units went down, but ownership did not change. Maybe it knew that taking over a given tile at a given moment would stretch it too thin and put it in a disadvantageous position. Maybe my strategy for this game was particularly powerful (I left all tiles with only one unit except the ones on the front line, placing as many units in each of them as possible, similarly to how I've played other Risk-likes). Maybe it never had a chance because of a possible exploit I found- see the next comment.
- I know that, when you perform a single action with a tile, you cannot perform another action with that tile until your next turn. So, I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature, but I noticed that you *can* move the same units multiple tiles in a single turn... if you move them in the right order. For example, say there are 3 tiles in a row named A, B, and C. A contains 3 of your units, B contains 5 of your units, and C is an empty tile. So, you can move 4 units from B to C, 2 units from A to B, and then you're done with your turn, right? Well, if you move the 2 units from A to B first, tile B is updated to have 7 units before you've finished your turn. So now, when you go to give orders to tile B, 6 units are available to move from B to C. In other words, those two units from tile A can be moved twice in a single turn. I assume this is unintentional. Since these movements can be chained together, they can be easily abused. Nearly every turn after I found this exploit, I carefully plotted paths that allowed me to move units up to 6 or 7 tiles away from their starting position within the span of a single turn.
- I'd like to know what the properties of each different building type are. I think I figured out that hospitals generate units faster, but that's all I could figure out on my own.
- Once you select Attack or Upgrade, you are not allowed to change your mind. An undo button would be nice.
- I'd like to see a local two-player mode as well, so you don't have to play against the AI.
- The sound was very low; I didn't notice there were sound effects until I faintly heard the win fanfare.

Despite all these criticisms, I did enjoy playing the game.

Really fun game. Although I felt it didn't really fit the theme, I enjoyed it. A pity there isn't a Human vs mode, since the AI didn't really stand a chance. The upgrade system is an interesting alternative, but having to choose it seems pointless, since you don't ever really want your territory to do nothing. The upgrade should've happened automatically to houses that didn't deploy troops. Also, as others have mentioned, the clicking did become tedious and with many houses it got confusing which houses had done their action that turn.

I enjoyed this game a lot. I think, with a lot more polish, and a much better control scheme this game could actually sell as a mobile game. I'd play it, if it were upgraded quite a bit. The premise is very solid. It could really use some sound. The control scheme is, while functional, pretty bad. There is a whole lot of clicking to get anything done. I think, a small fix that would help a lot is to have the number to move start at the max as most of the time that is what I want to do.

I upgraded, but I couldn't tell for sure when i was aloud to, and what that upgrade did. it would be nice to have a map indicator saying when a tile was upgradable, and a tool tip at least saying what that upgrade would do.

I really like playing that. I'll echo some feedback like not realizing the spaces capped out at 10. Once I realized I liked the challenge, just with it was more apparent when first playing. Some indication when a space is exhausted would be great as well. Maybe the space is just a darker grey so I quickly know I used it. Lastly, I think a 2 player mode would be amazing. Great work.

Hello,

@vimlark, @archimagus, @lohii, @birdwards, @xorboo, @benburgh, @roka-josh, @mrpiedpiper, @svobodajak, @hydezeke, @theog, , @erasmus-crowley and all the others, we are really happy you enjoyed our game :blush:

Also, thank you very much for taking your time to give lots of quality feedback.

We are planning in the following weeks to update the game more, mainly the UI/UX part, and some features we left out while developing as fast as we could for the game jam.
We might also expand the deployment to other platforms (Linux and Android), can't promise anything for some platforms (HTML5, iOS, MacOS).

To answer a few questions:
@birdwards
* The AI might be a little bit clunky. It has no primary focus (attacking, reinforcing, defending). That is why he will not try to take one of your tiles with all his might. We didn't want to program the hardest of AI for this game mainly because the map is random so he might get unfair advantages early on (starting with hospitals tiles). We might make the map mirrored diagonally in the early future to disable that unfair advantages, and we will expand the AI further.
* We know about the exploit that you described. We knowingly left it as it is. Even more, you might be able to see the AI uses it as well (although his moves are not transparent enough, we plan on making it so eventually in the future updates - in an action log and maybe in delays between each of his moves). We thought about limiting this exploit, but we decided not to bother too much for this event's version.
* Behind the scenes, the buildings feature more properties that we started working on (a minimum level to start reinforcing, an updatable max unit size, reinforcement rate, building health that could go to 0 and transform the tile to an EMPTY tile), but, either to balance the gameplay or because of running out of time for the event, we decided to cut short of the features, and we either blocked them or stopped their development. Right now, leveling up a tile offers just more reinforcement rate. We will come back to the left-out features and expand on them. If you have more suggestions, we are happy to hear them.
* We thought upon adding an "Undo" button, but did not just to save time in the event. We might add one later though.

@erasmus-crowley
* We will add more button key presets that make the UI easier to control (scroll-wheel adds/removes units, ESC to close the UI, etc).
* We will also make the tiles simpler to see their action for the respective turn was taken.

Others:
Unfortunately, both of us are just programmers, with no good art-related skills, so we couldn't do more about graphic art and sounds. I used blender to create some easy tiles, and used simple programs to generate some sounds that I found might be useful. We didn't want to use free online assets.

We also know the map is rotated in a way that confuses players. We will do something it in the early future. We might not add a feature that allows the player to move the camera if we decide to not make the map bigger. 5x5 takes enough time for a match already, maybe a bigger map will only increase that time unnecessary and annoy the players. **We would like to know what your opinion is about this matter.**
We might make a "Choose arena" in the main menu to choose between different sizes for the map.

Although I don't have a great opinion of automatic-updates for the tiles if the player does nothing, we might yet add it when the player decides to end his turn and not do all actions on his tiles, but, as a popup asking if it is the desired choice of the player or he just forgot about some of his actions. That doesn't mean we will forget about highlighting in a way what tiles have had their actions performed.

We could also add multiplayer, although it might take more time than the other features as we developed with only 1v1 Player VS AI in mind, so we will leave it for later on. **With this matter at hand, we would like to know how you feel about a timed turn for the players.**

Thank you all again!

Nice game here, I just regret I can't really see what enemy do. But still great entry :)

Great game, I enjoyed playing it! In response to the developers ideas: I don't think the map size should be increased (maybe there should be an option for keen players) but I do think timed turns should be implemented.

I'd think about a map size selector. Like say, Minesweeper. You have the preset few sizes, and maybe a "custom" one too.

Timed turns might be needed it you're going to be adding online play. Maybe you could make sure that the time scales up with map size? (If you end up adding map sizes, that is.)

Also, I agree with @gaming-night . Having some kind of system to show what moves the opponent is making would be rather nice. At the moment it's like having the enemy in a card game make all of their moves in secret, then show you the end result. It's a bit less engaging.

I like it! With some music and some animation this would be a great final product. For a jam game I am impressed :D

This game is very cool!!! It fits the theme very well!!

It's nice to see a board game in Ludum Dare. I found the mechanics fantastics. The game is simple, but if played with strategy, it can be very complex.
The AI is challengeble. If you don't know the mechanics, you can't win; but if you do know, it's not hardcore and the challenge is very good.

An improvement suggestion is to remove the screen blur effect while clicking on a tile, and putting the action options on the top-right of the screen. Doing this, we'll be able to see the board, and will help on taking decisions.

The game is amazing, congratulations to the team!!

Nice gameplay and easy to grasp mechanics. The UI did feel a little clunky at times, and I defintely started to lose track of which tiles I'd used each turn. But other than that, I enjoyed it. Good job :slight_smile:

Great game ... I can imagine playing this game like 2 people play chess with one another. The A.I. was easy enough to win but for a game jam it was more than enough to make the game fun!

Good Job!

I had a lot of fun playing this. I mean, it's basically Risk. I thought the upgrade mechanic was brilliant addition to the RISK formula, as it creates an interesting risk-vs-reward decision making. The game seems biased towards the player with the most land mass, especially since each mass can only hold so many units. Maybe when programming this for multiplayer, consider adding mechanics that empowers those with less land mass than the other.

The UI could really use some improvements, though. Ideas include having actual arrows on the board depicting where the troops will go; clicking said arrow can bring a pop-up asking how many troops to send to that area.