50 Crowns for 50 Kings by juxipolo
In 1776, thirteen colonies in the Americas joined together rebelled from their king and gained their independence. They could find common cause in the fight against England, but could not reach a compromise to join together in a common union.
In 1788, George Washington I was crowned the first king of Virginia. The other colonies soon crowned their own kings. Today, these lands host 50 staunchly independent nation states in an unstable state of short term alliances and border conflicts.
That was more than a century ago. The recent situation here in Europe is tense, and war between the great European powers may be inevitable. The unstable situation situation in the Americas might be just what we need.
Pack your bags - you're headed to the new world. Your mission is to collect as many allies in the new world as possible before a potentially catastrophic war in Europe begins. We will likely need to call on them in the dark days ahead.
About
50 Crowns for 50 Kings is a turn-based grand strategy game, where you control the agents of a major European power in an alternative 1911. Send out your diplomats and spies to the kings of the Americas. Ally with the kings and use your influence to help your allies and weaken those who ally with other European powers.
Gameplay
Gameplay is inspired by the mechanics of board games. The player with the highest score at the end of 13 turns wins. Each player's score is the total score of all of their American allies, which are based on that kingdoms economy and military. Each turn, players take turns distributing their spies and diplomats across America. Diplomats strengthen your relationship with a king, and spies allow for tricky plays and subterfuge. Then each player may play cards from their hand. What cards you can play and which actions you can take depend on where you placed your diplomats and spies.
Controls
You can do everything with mouse and keyboard, but there are a couple useful keyboard shortcuts. The number keys will change between visualizations, and enter will end the turn.
Updates
10/4/21 - fixed several crashes from testing
10/9/21 - fix crash in some non-english locales, fixes for low resolution displays
10/17/21 - check out the post mortem here
| Link | https://mercurywave.itch.io/50-crowns-for-50-kings |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/50-crowns-for-50-kings |
Ratings
| Overall | 93th | 4.12⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 169th | 3.96⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 64th | 4.12⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 157th | 4.18⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 748th | 3.6⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 990th | 1.75⭐ | 18🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1038th | 2.471⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 640th | 3.5⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 23🗳️ | 6🗨️ |
Haha I didn't expect that there would be such a problem across languages. It is true that I am not using an English system. I also learned from it.
It's impressive to find a strategy game in LD. It's a game with depth of play, which is very exciting~ I've only just finished one round, and I think I can continue to play another one. Nice Work!
Willing to do such an idea is insane but effectively achieve it is quite the feat. I can't express how impress I am by what you did, especially knowing you're a one man band! I had a ton of fun playing it.
Bravo!!
What is refreshing in particular is the amount of code you wrote. I don't mean to hate on game engines, but this approach should be valued more in LD events.
Despite your nice effort to inject tips into the game, it is still hard to just pick up and play, as there is lack of idea of what the general strategy would be. Of course once some effort is put in and shit starts happening I started to get idea, but still it does demand more focus than what usual LD guy who is checking the game out is willing to give. Also it would be nice to see faction names on the map all the time as I'm not great with geography. And the fact that win condition is to gain trust of as many states as possible, it does become a bit tedious work where one has to scatter attention all over the place, at least for me personally as in strategy games I prefer to focus on as few regions as possible.
Despite all that pretty impressive job with camera works and interface. I praise in particular the mouse wheel zooming where the cursor is pointing approach, even some high profile strategy games fail to implement that useful thing.
Were it developed over a longer period, an tutorial section where maybe you just play in the original 13 colonies, or New England, etc, would help introduce the concepts and how everything connects a little better. As it is now, it's pretty overwhelming when you first load it up.
I feel like this is something you could really sit down and play for a long time. Really well done!