Good concept and the theme is well expoited!
It could be good to display informations with more icons, to have less text

Since i do like (economy) simulation games, i think this is really cool - even with this much text.
You have random incidents or even disasters, and also some beneficial things that can happen.

But in the end it looks like it will always go downhill at some point, so the theme was met very well.

Questions for you regarding game strategy: can i see somewhere, how many tons i would need with the current settings in that year (assuming no incidents)? And is there a reason why i would not set the "sowing on" to 100% if i can?

@sdelay Thank you :smiley: Yeah the amount of text is a bit much. If I had more time I would have worked most of the stats in the top left into visual bars on the interface.

@games-by-tom Thanks, I enjoyed putting in reasons for the variable harvests. Personally all my games have some kind of simulation element to them :P

Concerning strategy I didn't have time to implement a check to calculate whether your current supplies would last. It's something I would definitely add to a more polished version. Sometimes you will not be able to sow 100% of your fields if you don't have enough labourers or you might want to use less grain as seed in order to have enough to feed people. Maybe in the future there could be multiple tasks your limited pool of labourers could work on?

this idea is really unique, though it's hard to understand what happens at first (which, i think, is okay for a simulator like that). definitely would spend some time later to understand it better!!

This reminds me a bit of dope wars. Bringing back some nostalgia with this submission. Lots to explore in here, keep it up!

Very unique entry indeed, got some progress, but still don't feel like understoot it completly. Type of a game that will benefit from better UI and step by step guide or even better feedback of what happened after your sertain actions.

Not gonna lie, I had no idea what I was doing and why my city was failing for the firs 5 cities.

Even once i wrapped my brain around it, I barely understood.

Overall the idea and concept was really interesting. Once I was able to get a solid idea of what was happening it actually wasn't too bad however with the time constraint of a game jam it got a bit boring decently quickly due to the little variation in gameplay. I'd honestly be interested to see what you could do with more time to flesh the idea out.

@cover-club-media and @feesh thanks for the kind words :smile: the simulation is really pretty simple under the hood but I'd definitely like to add more to it.

@stasgrach, @corporation and @emberushi yeah it could be explained a lot better :sweat_smile: I did add a bit of text explaining the situation to the game description on the itch page but it would be better if it were incorporated into the game.

I'm definitely going to add an intro screen with explanation of the game mechanics and overhaul the representation of stats :)

Interesting concept! I included it in my Ludum Dare compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/PKNtuuCFWt0

Cool take on the theme. This is first economy-based game I saw during this LD. I think you could add more crops type, and the player would need to juggle workers/filed area between them, to get better yield. Good job with the game :)

I guess farming really isn't destined to become my profession after all, gotta really hope this game development thing works out then ;p

I really enjoyed it! It has a lot of text, but I think it's a good thing -> reminds me fondly of older paragraph based games where based on your decisions you get different story. I would only improve visuals and make more intuitive UI. Other than that its fun game! Great work! :)

Nice management game. Art is nice. Gameplay is a bit too simple (or i missed something), it feels like you dont have control over anything. Why would you want to harvest less ?
Also, wtf with rats ?? they ate 20T of food over the 30T available! What kind of rat is that? Stop growing vegetable and start breeding those rats, it'll make a lot of meat.

You should consider adding a bit of sound, it make a HUGE difference.

Good entry overall :)

@zimny11 Thanks, economy based games are pretty uncommon so I quite enjoy making my own :)
Good suggestions for ways to make the crop growing mechanic more complex. It'd be neat to have crops that grew quicker or slower and had different returns.

@cievers it's lucky to be living in the 21st century rather than thousands of years BC. Not very many game developers back then! :P

@janku I'm glad you enjoyed it :D yeah there is a lot of text and I'd like to make the information be presented in a more visual style with bars and animations.

@pepnou Yeah at the moment there isn't much reason to harvest less, better tactic to sell off land when you need more food. Haha yeah those rats are crazy, they can currently eat up to half(!) your stored food :o
I could add some sound, probably just basic beeps and boops though...

Always love a good Hamurabi game. Good job!

Took a little bit of time to figure out, and all the text does indeed look daunting at first. Especially since once you know how to play, you only look for very specific parts of the text and a lot of the rest is visual clutter. Loved the 0 rations option! :D

Nice take in the theme. Enjoyed driving my city into ruin. Felt the screen was a bit cluttered. Would have liked to know that the tonnes per year ration was for one person when choosing the ration level.

Solid gameplay. UX could use some work. I'm dreadful at managing a city as it turns out.

@luthwyhn I'm so happy that someone else knows of the game I took inspiration from :D

Hamurabi is great, not only for being one of the first city management games but also because it was shared with other people back in the day when game programs were simple enough that the source code (in Basic) was printed in it's entirety in a computing magazine! A shame that was well before my time but you can still find scans of the magazine [online](https://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=78)



@nyxkn @harmadillo and @rustywolf Yeah the amount of information presented to the user is pretty overwhelming and cluttered. It's more like a full debug display rather than an ingame one :/

I'm planning on completely revamping the display of information to only show the most important details with the others available on mouse over. It would be nice if the game told you if there was insufficient food to last till the next harvest too...

An interesting model! Add Graphics, set achievement goals, fix the UI and this game will turn into a diamond! I will be waiting for the release! :)

An interesting game with potential, maybe you can add more content/parameters to tweak and also give the players more info : like what does having lower rations do to the population. I felt the plagues and blights kept hitting, so there's no chance of recovery, maybe that's part of the theme but i would enjoy the game more if it gave a false sense of victory then comes the plagues XD

After 30 years of feeding my people half rations I decided it was time to retire :)
Cool game! I like how you got to see the statistics afterwards. Why not always give half rations? I saw no downsides with that hehe

@ksimaster next release might take some time but I'm happy to know you're looking forward to it :D

@theblitz the logic for plagues is very basic at the moment and I'd like to totally revamp it. Ideally a plague will only be possible once you've reached enough population and the effect will be based on how healthy your people are. Also I think there should be a mega disaster that eventually happens that all but guarantees your failure >:D

@notime4games heh I see someone hit upon the idea of always using half rations (which never actually cause any negative effects at the moment...) I've always liked having after game stats to look through too. Sadly what I managed to make for the Compo were very basic, as can be seen by those graphs going off the top of the chart :P