Looked confusing at first, but got used to it. A bit of audio might help here. Made me laugh when my Marshall killed the Chancellor - that was unexpected :smile:

Somehow I got confused how this all should work. The idea is nice of task-person mapping but it was not clear to me when a turn ends, and why some tasks fail, some others dont. I think some feedback on whether something is failing by random chance or by player failing would have helped. And yes the Marshall killing the Chancellor was a nice move :)

Oh yes, the assassination moment was so nice.

cool game, would be nice to have sound but its kind of fun

Nice experience albeit a bit rough around the edge. I'm really eager to see your post about the portraits implementation.

interesting idea, but the integral mechanics are not communicated well enough. Still a great feat for one person in 48h.

Cool see that you generated the art using styleGAN! Wonder if guided diffusion/CLIP could be used make the portraits look a little more fitting to their title and little less generic?

Made it to turn 109! Did I miss it, is there a way to increase stability? When do I conquer the world? Still had lots of fun trying to manage everything as it all started falling apart!

Nice concept. I liked how you put a very simple idea of task attribution and found ways for the player to make decision matters.
The AI generated portraits are cool and made me want to experiment with styleGAN too!
The game could use a bit more feedbacks to help understanding the rules at first, the first tries are a bit cryptic.
This was fun! Thank you for your game!

Made it to 103! Got the rules only in the middle of the game =) Anyway nice idea and art (gan)!

Nice stratege game! Was enjoyed by the main mechanic. But the progress not feels when you clear grey objectives when you dont know if game have finish point or some score at least. But it was pretty fun, spent some time on it

Was brought here by your face generation post. Feels good to see a success story when it comes to implementing fancy features.

And I quite like the game, as these days I happen to be interested in seeing some original political/management implementations in games. It runs smooth and turns out to be fun, there is nothing much to complain about this game as it is seems to be exactly what it intended to be. Good job.

INCREDIBLY fun game so far, but do you have any tips for winning? Once you clear the 3 gray tasks, it seems like it's an inevitable fall to doom because the crown quests take forever to come (unless there's some trigger I don't know of), and your stamina keeps dropping and can't keep up with the quests.

Edit: nm, I think I might have something here...

Well, I ended up playing *quite* a bit, the longest of any game this jam. Unfortunately I think the game is either bugged, or the RNG chance for crown events are way too low, as I'm on turn 187, with all 3 officers at lvl 40, stability of 5, Nomans Steppe unlocked, but still no crown event.

The reason I can get far is because I use a small trick of placing officers down to delay the turns counting down. Afaik you MUST play like this. Playing normally will simply get you killed due to stamina attrition. Example opening:

1. Orange on green card
2. Orange on orange card
3. Green on blue card
4. Green on green card
5. Blue on blue card
6. Blue BACK to the roster area. Never ever hit next turn if you have a green checkmark because they don't get stamina back returning this way.

Example of being on turn 26 with no life loss and full stamina:


In instances where you have 2 cards with 3 turns on them, you can dance units on them to "mark" them for easy kills later with this trick. With all that said, I couldn't beat the game lol

Regardless, the game is very well made and I clearly had enough fun to keep chipping away at it. I love how the instability of empire growth is completely modeled in the game mechanics. The more you open up the map, the more crap you have to deal with. This is very boardgame-esque.

Tbh, the dancing around strategy I mentioned actually made this game even more fun. That, coupled with making sure everyone's around the same level, and risk/reward of using the right colors, made this a totally unique experience and a great use of the theme. My favorite game so far!

First of all, gotta thank everyone for their comments!

@concker-88 I made a [post](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/unstable-empire/how-i-used-an-ai-to-generate-in-game-portraits-for-my-game) about how I generated the portraits, if you missed it. I also included the code, that lets you play around with it, but it's still a little rough around the edges.

@tomorrowtoday I used StyleGAN mainly because I had a lot of experience with it writing my master's thesis. And yeah, I think I will try out guided diffusion to get a little deeper into it, just not when there is a strict deadline.

@peachtreeoath, thanks for an extensive analysis. Some of the tricks you mention are intentional, others are just messy code. And it is actually possible to win the game, BUT when your deck of events gets too big, the crown cards are just super unlikely to be drawn (I probably shouldn't have made this purely random, huh). In my experience, Marshal's chain of events is most stable, as the first card ("War declared!") is guarantied to come the next turn after you solve a gray task. Chancellor's chain is, in contrast, most unstable (and probably even bugged) because I never managed to finish it myself.

Great game, I will play it some more later. I am still not entirely sure what the colors mean on the tasks, anyway I figure it out later if I have more time ;)

It was cool, but unfortunately my English is very bad, so it was a little hard for me to play, because not constantly translating phrases). But overall, it was fun to play and manage the marshals).

Nice game but I didn't understand why I lost, I managed to win all gray quests, twice !

Interesting but difficult, I liked the portraits. An interesting approach with a neural network

@parttimeindie Thanks. Colors denote different areas or, i guess, occupations. All orangish tasks are connected to army, all greenish - to money, all blueish - to politics, religion, and general mood of the people.
If you match task's color and minister's color, you have a chance to solve a task of a higher level. Or fail a task if you mismatch.

@paulsams For the record, what is your native language? I will probably look into localizing the game to oter languages.

@ommadawn All great empires are destined to fall. But seriously, when you solve a gray quest, you only unlock the area. To conquer it, you need to solve a crown ♕ quest that will randomly appear after some time.

A nice gameplay overall, a bit confusing on some aspects but once I got a grasp of the system, it became very interesting. Would love to see the idea pushed, with a nice graphical aspect. Your idea of portraits is great, and I would love to see it in a nice UI/UX ! Great job.

Very fun game, but I felt like there was no possible way to win, best I ever got was one 1 crown and 2nd crown on the board when I died.

I might be missing something that makes it slightly less hard or its just crazy hard. regardless loved it and would definitely play a more fleshed out version

Great job making this game! It's impressively complex! I wish I could appreciate it more but I got overwhelmed with information. I guess it's just not my kind of genre so it's totally not your fault.

It still had some fun and surprising moments! I just now saw that you generated those portraits using AI, that's really clever and nicely done! I totally though they were real-life portraits!

I played it and recorded it during my stream. I don't know if it will be helpful because this is clearly not my genre. But maybe you'd still like to see how first-time player interacts with your game :sweat_smile:
https://youtu.be/KdS9PsTVR1o
Your game starts at 1:38:04

Довольно интересная задумка, стоит развить, правда все слишком сильно завязано на счетчике ​

I have 20 ++ lvls officers, but task with the crown never dropped. This sad :(

However, the game is nice. Very pleasant management. I like it.

➕ редкий жанр для джема

➕ интересный сеттинг, даже немного образовательный

➕ простое управление

➖ применение темы косвенно

➖ не все правила быстро понимаются через UI

➖ высокая сложность

⚡быстрая правка⚡: механика "усталости" невеселая, сделать более быстрое восстановление