Far Away: A New Home by Skosnowich

Far Away: A New Home
In Far Away: A New Home you play a medieval war party, trying to conquer new lands, because your old home was getting too small for all the inhabitants. But beware there are other conquerors who try the same. You need to capture the castle of each land and hold it long enough and to be victorious. There is limited space after all...

Gameplay
The goal of this game is to capture the castle of the land and hold it for a certain amount of rounds. If you or the enemy hold the castle without the opponent attacking, the game is won. The opponent can try to capture the castle by attacking it.
This is a turn-based game. You and your enemy take your turns at the same time. Each turn you can take an action and then move (select move target on map by clicking on a tile - maximum move distance is 2 tiles) to end the turn. The actions you can take depend on the tile you are currently standing on.
The battles are also turn-based and mostly based on die rolls and several bonuses. There is a rock-paper-scissors-system in place (Spearman > Cavalry > Archer > Spearman), so the troop types get bonuses depending on who they fight against.

Used technologies
The game was developed using Godot and C#. The graphics are made by myself. Sadly I had not time to make sounds or music.

Downloads
Currently only the Windows and the Mac builds are tested (Mac must be opened with Command + right mouse click and then Open). The Linux version is untested as I don't have a Linux machine at hand.
| Itch.io (Windows) | https://skosnowich.itch.io/far-away-a-new-home |
| Itch.io (Mac) | https://skosnowich.itch.io/far-away-a-new-home |
| Itch.io (Linux) | https://skosnowich.itch.io/far-away-a-new-home |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/far-away-a-new-home |
Ratings
| Overall | 508th | 3.632⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 345th | 3.711⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 663th | 3.237⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 991th | 2.921⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 769th | 3.25⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 846th | 3.158⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 44🗳️ | 17🗨️ |
I found it weird that I couldn't change which unit types are used. For example, I could have used only archers to defeat a spearman farm, but I was forced to use cavalry.
Some music and sounds would have added to the atmosphere.
After two maps somehow I got bored, maybe it's missing more game elements. But I like the direction the game is going! Reminded me of Heroes of Might and Magic :)
Overall, I liked how polished this was. The UI was very intuitive, there was even a pop up window with explanations when you hovered over an icon, and I didn't encounter any bugs (besides the app crashing when I finished the 4th map). The gameplay loop was also pretty solid, gathering money, then troops and then capturing the castle to train your troops, but I didn't quite get the mechanic of having more gold than your opponent and why it was there though. The graphics also got the job done.
A very nicely designed game overall, congrats!
Your game is really easy to pickup and understand, it is very intuitive.
I would have loved an option to go Fullscreen as your game can not be resized and it's very small on my desktop.
The game works well, and the systems seem well-polished. I won with a consistent strategy of work-recruit-rush to the castle to fortify. I didn't really do much raiding. It seemed to me that I loose in a raid more than I gain. Maybe if I would really lean into infamy, there would be more benefit. But I didn't want to rule over ravaged countryside :smile_cat:
@christian-zommerfelds @jimbly Yes, the game would benefit a lot by adding the choice of which troops to send into the battle, I also noticed that during playtesting. In the beginning I implemented the battle system, so that proper "pairings" of troops were automatically chosen. So each side choose a beneficial pairings by turn, so that there is no advantage for neither side. Of course, doing that, a village with only spearmen only chooses cavalry as enemies - so that's a clear advantage for the village. I would've liked to change this system, so that the player could decide which troops to send in, but sadly ran out of time. I noticed the problem too late.
@fabula-rasa I liked the idea of choosing a "good" or "bad" approach to conquer the land. That's why I added the possibility to raid villages and yes, you're right there is no real benefit in that. That's why I introduced a battle advantage when you have a certain amount of gold to somehow make the "bad" approach beneficial, but that wasn't really thought through (@exofrenon). Especially because you could also get that battle advantage by working a lot in the fields.
In the end I think, I just should've gone with a simpler approach instead of having the choice between "good" and "evil" (kill your darlings).
@christian-zommerfelds @togis Yes, I definitely need to get into building a settings menu for changing window size, full-screen etc. for my next jam game. Didn't looked into this stuff in Godot.
@christian-zommerfelds @fabula-rasa I would've liked to add some sound effects and some music, but my time management was too bad.
The minimalist graphics give a good idea of what it could look like given more time, The map is clear and easy to read. The side menu, on the other hand, is a little rough and it lacks a bit of sound for immersion.. Anyway, well done, I enjoyed playing it!