Empire Under the Clock by juxipolo
Empire Under the Clock is a real-time 4x game, where turns occur every 10 seconds, whether you're ready or not. Place your orders for the upcoming years and then see how those actions play out. Recruit armies, research technology, and improve your infrastructure. Expand your empire by building new cities or conquer your neighbors.
Reviewer Note: a full playthrough of the game will take 35+ minutes depending on how much you pause. I fully understand that is a lot to ask for LD -- if you feel like you've got it after a few minutes, that's totally okay.
--==Controls==--
Space Bar -- Pause the timer
Left Click -- Select a territory with an army to order them to move
Right Click (with an army selected) -- Order an army to move. Right click again to move the whole army (default moves half).
Number 1 -- Click a region to recruit troops (requires a city with an encampment)
Number 2 -- Place a new city in a region you control
Numbers 3-7 -- Place or upgrade a building within of city of the specific type
W/A/S/D, Arrow Keys, hold left mouse and drag -- Move camera around the map
Mouse Scroll -- Zoom in or out of the map
--==Things the Tutorial Doesn't Explain==--
Each 10-second turn you are queueing up orders, and then all orders for all players are run at once in between turns. Each zone can have 1 domestic order per turn (build/upgrade or recruit) and 1 military order (move or attack).
You can only build a city on a territory you control that doesn’t have a city. There’s also a hammer cost for new cities that increases based on the number of cities you have, but that isn’t displayed anywhere.
You can only recruit troops in a region that has an encampment. It costs 3 gold per soldier to recruit. The encampment recruits 3 soldiers, and upgraded buildings recruit more.
Buildings have an increasing hammer cost (which isn't really displayed) with each level you've researched and must be built in a city. Ineligible regions will be greyed out, but there isn't any feedback on why. When you select a category of building, selecting a region queues up an order to build the first or next level of that type of building.
The tech popup works a bit like other orders, where you’re selecting what to research, but it’s only locked in at the end of the turn (or if you click dismiss).
If you don’t have enough money to pay your troops, some will desert. If happiness is low enough, troops will also desert. These combined means expanding too aggressively early can cause your army to just crumble.
Other Simulation Details
Your final score is derived from mainly population, plus number of buildings built and technologies researched.
Each region with a city produces its base food value each turn (which can only really be seen when founding a city). Behind the scenes there are also a number of (invisible) farms per region, which is the lower of that number or population. Those also produce food. In each region, two citizens eat one food each turn. Granaries, sewers, street cars and highways increase that ratio by 1. If you have 40 excess food at the end of a turn, 1 citizen will spawn somewhere in your empire. That number increases by 1 with sanitation and medicine techs.
Gold is a sum of the base gold value of the region, plus the tax per citizen (starts at 1 per). Each soldier gets a salary of 1 gold each turn. If you can't pay your troops, they're likely to desert.
Science is the sum of base science values of each city, plus the number of citizens (plus bonuses).
Each turn a happiness delta is calculated. Each building creates 1, plus bonuses from buildings and tech. Each citizen effectively uses up one of those happiness, and that's the delta. That gets added to the happiness at the top of the screen, which is capped between -40 to 40. The farther below 0 you go, the worse it is. Soldiers will desert and citizens will leave your empire. There's no bonus for high happiness.
Each city produces the base number of hammers per turn, and each citizen produces one additional, then bonuses are added. The total number is capped, but that cap can be raised with techs. There are some buildings that cost more than the initial cap, but the game doesn't show the costs or say why you can't afford to upgrade.
You have an army cap per region, which starts at 20, and is increased with later techs. You can't recruit in a region if you're at the cap, but you can move in additional troops from other regions. Armies larger than the cap will shrink by 1 soldier per turn.
Combat is some fairly basic dice rolls behind the scenes. Effectively, each individual attacker lines up against each defender. Both pick a random number up to their combat value (starts at 6, that's upped by technology). Winner kills their direct opponent. If there are more units on one side than the other, the remaining troops get effectively free attacks in.
--==Updates==--
10/4 - fixed late game crash and some annoying/weird bugs
10/6 - fix escape button cancel, some map generation issues, and obscure crashes
TODO: test different screen resolutions. touchscreen/trackpad mode
Ratings
| Overall | 459th | 3.632⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 473th | 3.5⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 472th | 3.447⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 946th | 3.237⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 739th | 3.395⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 612th | 2.786⭐ | 16🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 700th | 3.324⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 10🗨️ |
- Somehow can't move units after founding a new city.
- An enemy was moving troops next to my city and tried to move a unit to battle but nothing would happen, the red arrow would never stick anywhere.
- Same with founding more city.
There are a bunch of cool systems going on here, and the art is very nice.
I did experience a lot of confusion interacting with the UI. I know this kind of stuff can be hard to detect for yourself as the developer, so I tried to screencap specific examples of me being confused.
I hope this is helpful! I wouldn't go into detail like this if it wasn't a very cool entry, so plz don't take this as negative feedback!
In this example I am trying to place my first fort. I am confused because I keep clicking but nothing happens! The message that I need to select a city doesn't go away. As I keep clicking the countdown timer turns angry-red and I am harried. What am I doing wrong?
Answer: I did successfully build the fort, and the message that telling me I need to select is misleading, because it doesn't disappear once I do select. The game has changed state but I have not noticed. My failure was that I did not see the few pixels hidden behind the LVL UI that indicated I was already successful. (I don't figure out that it worked until I restart the game and play again 3-4 times)
In the next example it's turn 2 and the tutorial has told me to select what I should research.
I click Granary. It highlights granary but nothing else happens. It still says I need to select research. Have I selected it? Do I need to hit an OK button? There isn't one, but there is a button called "Dismiss". That sounds more like a cancel than an ok. I spam click granary while the countdown gets angry. My turn ends and I see no change. I guess I didn't research it right. I quit and restart the game 2 more times and experiment with whether clicking "dismiss" does something different. No. I try hitting enter. Oh woops that's the key for End Turn. I never figure it out... until I give up and play on and then a bunch of turns later it says "You researched Granary!" I can't remember if that was a run I hit Dismiss or not, so I still don't know what is right.
In this next example I am trying to expand to a new city:
It says to click a city (left) and then I do, and it slightly highlights the region. So I feel like I did make a choice. But nothing ever happens. Is it that I couldn't pay the cost? I think the popups in the "select a region" are telling me a cost. I check that I have the right resources. This is difficult in realtime because the resource cost display lists the resources in a slightly different order than the resource inventory display at the top of the screen.
I actually never figured this one out.
But I did play on a bit more and after figuring out that I did indeed build a fort, I was able to raise an army, and while I could not expand myself I did defeat some intruders and expand that way. I guess I misunderstood something really fundamental.
I bet there are things that signal the state changes I'm not following (such as the fort pixels, and now looking at the screenshot, do I see Granary pixels too?), so sorry for not having a sharper eye!
So I feel like I didn't connect with your intended player experience, but I did spend some time with the game restarting and playing around a bunch. I think this is a cool entry even though I struggled, and I see you have a bunch of other interesting-looking games in your history. I'll add you to my follow list and keep an eye out for what you do next time!
Maybe I can fill in some of the blanks for you and other folks. Each 10-second turn you are queueing up orders, and then all orders for all players are run at once in between turns. Each zone can have 1 domestic order per turn (build or recruit) and 1 military order (move or attack).
It sounds like there isn't enough feedback when you queue up one of those - which I was totally blind to. This is particularly confusing because clicking again will cancel the order. It keeps you in that state so you can queue up multiple orders. That is somewhat important when you have a bunch of territory in the late game, but it looks like I need to revisit that behavior.
The tech popup works a bit like the orders, where you're selecting what to research, but it's only locked in at the end of the turn (or if you click dismiss). I should probably change it so that the popup just closes when you click one.
You can only build a city on a territory you control that doesn't have a city. (There's also a hammer cost that increases based on the number of cities you have, but it isn't displayed anywhere)
While I'm pointing out hidden mechanics - if you don't have enough money to pay your troops, some will desert. If happiness is low enough, troops will also desert. These combined means expanding too aggressively early can cause your army to just crumble.
The game has a lot of sharp edges, but obviously more than I knew about. Thank you!
I encountered a lot of the same confusion as pkenney. I was especially stumped by not knowing how to settle a city. It showed me all of these places that look settlable but the city was not settled, and the tutorial didn't seem to be giving me any new instructions on how to do it.
After reading your comments I realize that I needed to recruit some soldiers and move them into empty territory in order for it to become settlable. You might want to copy paste all of the info from your reply to pkenney into the game description in order to help other new players.
Another huge point of confusion for me is what to do with my resources. Is food consumed over time? Are smiley faces population or happiness? I don't see any cost indicators for recruiting troops or settling cities, or any of the other buildings.
Probably a good way for the game to communicate some of this info would be that if the player tries to perform an illegal action like settling outside of your territory, the game could say why it is not possible "You can't settle outside your borders" or "You need more food to do that" or "You are already at the population limit"
Overall great game, and good job!
Did get confused by the tutorial somewhat, but once getting past that initial confusion, really cool. UI is simple, but fits considering the 10s intended turn timer limiting time to get the information to the player. Could do with a little more clarification here and there though.
Really reminds me of the days of Civ 2/3 too, though can't say it has quite the same level of "One more turn..." energy as then, but it's close. Overall extremely fun though. Good job!