Circaea's Comments

If you move a gem mid-wave and it blocks the path, the monsters refuse to move. However, if you are then out of gold, you can get stuck having to remove the gem if you can't remove random blocks to make a new path. In an ideal world the game should only deduct the cost of the move once the gem is placed, and should verify if paths are blocked before allowing the gem to get placed.

If you move a gem instead of selecting a new one at the end of a wave, you lose the chance to pick the new one (they all go to rocks). The fact that you can just do the move after makes this seem like a bug. If you have already selected "move" during a wave, and the wave ends before you place it, you also can lose the next round of gems.

I think I was able to reproduce a "ghost" gem scenario when placing a gem from loot, in the path of monsters, while the monsters were still moving. At the time I assumed it was a feature to avoid having to recalculate monster routes mid-wave.

My third priority quality-of-life improvement would be the ability to rotate the board. That ought to be possible since you can rotate individual objects — just rotate each placed object 90 degrees. Might be a performance hit.

This is not a bad game for its scope, although you rapidly run out of things to do. I admit to having tried to give my residents the longest commutes possible, which is weirdly satisfying.

If the developer touches this again, my personal first priority would be an escape function to deselect all purchases from the pointer, so that it would be easier to see. Second would be improvements to zoom. The first ought to be absolutely trivial, the second maybe not so much.

I realize that the developer isn't touching this anymore, but if anyone picks this up once it is open sourced, please add some content related to actual groundhogs (Marmota monax, not time travel phenomena).

Not that undefined is likely to return to fix anything, but . . . Excessive use of the Rain spell can slow the game down a lot, and eventually crash it. This is bad if you had upgraded Freeze traps to the point where creatures can't get off them, because you have no other way to do damage to anything your units can't target. It is more efficient to sell the Freeze traps out from under them.

Or rather, if I save then reload the game with the negative population, I don't have the excess transportation costs. But I still have the zombies (negative population). Maybe I just chased them off the roads. It's hard to refill potholes or plow streets when there are zombies in the way.

As to the negative population, I think it was also charging me for the subway system of the London scenario I had previously played. I tried several new maps and it kept having 6k transportation costs at the outset. Reloading the game fixed it.

You can get into a state where you have negative population. I'm going to interpret that as an undead apocalypse, which is why once it got to that point, the number only goes down. Clearly other potential citizens don't want to live with the undead.

It would be nice to have a timer on the Focus buffs to show time remaining.

Having _everything_ gated behind research and then have research no work offline is bad. It's not always practical to leave an idle game running all the time, so having some way to get offline gains can help with playability. Maybe make research work offline, even if nothing else does?

If I could have one feature added, it would be the option to buy a quantity other than one or all of something. That would change gameplay a lot, though. I'd suggest shift-click or control-click, except that for some reason ctrl-click already doesn't work for me on the cows.

Surprisingly fun game, for something that simple, but shortly after I had 1B grass, it crashed.

The art in the map backgrounds is interesting enough that I wish I could click on it and have stuff happen. It doesn't even have to be useful. Of course, I might have missed some easter eggs.

The Magic Staff says "Restore charge of a random scroll". There are no scrolls. Everything it recharges is called a staff.

The red and orange don't have much contrast on my monitor. :(

Frustrating, but completable! I ended up inventing the internet before a lot of basic things like concrete or boilers. It would be nice to have more than one combination to get to the same things, since many combinations seem like they logically ought to do something.

Nice game! I don't think it scales well as you get more and more balls (it would be nice to have level numbers!). Eventually it's unplayable due to the rough animation.