I normally never pay kreds for a game, but by now I've gotten now dozens of hours of entertainment out of your Enigmata series. You deserve the money dude.
I have played hundreds of flash games on Kongregate, and two dozen tower defense games. This is arguably the best I've ever played. Truly refreshing, well-balanced, dynamic, varied, and interesting. I wish I could give you a 6/5 score, and will in the future have to re-evaluate what it means to give a game a 5/5. Premium content purchased purely because you deserve it. I would've purchased this as a standalone game if I had known how good it is.
Strategy for Crazy: * Start in North America. The AI will fight in Eurasia * Conquer Canada/USA. On borders, match AI's army size (minimum 5); an AI will attack if threatened or there are no AIs to fight * Conquer South America/Greenland. Anger only one AI at a time * The AI cannot see through fog. Secure borders with 15+ armies behind the border under fog to not provoke counterattack. Use the "Y defense" to secure 2 borders at once. E.g. place an army in Paraguay to protect Brazil/Argentina from AIs in Africa/Antarctica * Save the game * One of the AIs should be stronger now than the rest. Preemptively attack that AI. Eurasia is vulnerable; it's (usually) best to go through Greenland/Alaska * If you attacked a weak AI, reload your save * Don't try to get bonuses. Focus on crippling the AI's bonuses by capturing large numbers of countries * Don't attack the AI's largest army. Recapture undefended countries it leaves behind. Eventually the AI will split their giant army, THEN kill it.
"A generic Risk ripoff? Gawd, where's the originality in that? Oh well, I like Risk and it's rated highly so I guess I'll play it..." *reaches level 3* *eyes widen* *awe* "I think I'm in love."
Probably the best team makeup is Tristam/Mage, Kaeli/Rogue, Phoebe/Fighter, Reuben/Healer. Reuben is the only healer who has an Regan All spell, and thus nobody else can provide that buff. Tristam get's a useless self-buff as his level 20 skill for Fighter and Rogue (since you'll be spamming AOE buffs anyway), but a powerful single target attack as a Mage. Kaeli and Phoebe are just filling in the remaining two class spots for their classes' AOE buffs, but Phoebe does get a very impressive AOE damaging stun, and Kaeli's Rogue is well rounded with high single target and AOE damage. In general, other than the AOE stun, I find the Fighter class to be a bit underpowered, and it might be interesting to make Phoebe a Rogue and make Kaeli a second Mage, as Kaeli has an AOE stun as a Mage too.
How to get the super secret boomerang at the start of the game:
Snaily: 5% Map, 4% Items, No Weapon.
Sluggy: 4% Map, 2% Items, No Weapon (24 seconds)
http://i56.tinypic.com/14t0q5x.jpg
I know this is an odd comment to make. But I actually dare say that my favorite ending is the one you did not let us vote for. The bad ending. While it was bittersweet, seeing a certain two siblings being able to live out their lives as humans was touching, even if they didn't remember anything from before. It was sorta oddly hopeful for the bad ending in a videogame.
I would suggest changing "happiness" to "stress". That seems to be more accurately inline with your goal with the stat based on what it affects and what it is affected by.
I really hope you don't let people get you down. This game is simply amazing. It's tuning is quite simply perfect. You managed to recreate the best parts of ye olde NES style gaming, without all the old cheapness like unresponsive controls and sloppy handling. It's frankly the best game I've played in ages, and I really hope you finish all 5 episodes. I particularly enjoyed hard mode. 3 health, 3 lives, and instant death spikes really feels just right. This is what videogames should be like.
The hit detection in the game seems to be quite spotty. In fact, I'd swear that the hit box was a perfect square around the character and all monsters and fire and stuff. That makes for rather frustrating deaths where you just clip the corner of two squares, while not even being close to the object.
This game is quite excellent, as are all your works. Look forward to seeing more. You are getting better every time. Love seeing the Death Slugs make their appearance in the Reemus story.
It appears level 4 is impossible to Ace on some computers, as it requires you to take a shot outside of the game screen. Only some computers will let you do that. That's a problem. Any way you could like somehow shift that level down like 3 pixels to make it Aceable on all computers?
Easy and fairly boring game. Best combination as far as I can tell is 3 Trikes, 2 Gold Dragons, and a Ghost. You should have no problem with anything because of your extremely high damage (Highest damage monster combo in the game)... but if you do, your extremely high HP, and max power Drain Spell should easily insure no character dies.
I used 188 commands, not very good... Very fun game, and I really hope you make a sequel. The level that really messed me up was level 10, I could not for the life of me figure out how to make a repetitive motion work for that level.
Out of all the people you could have picked to have as the secret character, you chose Mel Gibson? Eh, I suppose I can't complain, this was definitely the best Shift game out of the three (Though I miss the witty writing from the first game). Mel Gibson was definitely a big disappointment though.
@Timmyntc - I've seen things about people cheating on this game before. Apparently the way the game reads perfect is simply by passing a certain score, same as it does for bronze/silver/gold. That "passing" a certain score just happens to be the highest possible. People who cheat on this game just like, make a single note count for like 100,000 points or whatever and it gives them a perfect at the end. So the scores really only help those who are actually trying to get a perfect by knowing how close they are. *thumbs up at JohnnyBravo17*
At first I was rather critical of this game. The music IS fairly awful by comparison to the second game. However, as I worked towards perfecting songs in this game, I began to appreciate the things like the notification when you hit a note wrong, and such, which made perfecting songs less "Guess and check" compared to the second game where regularly you just couldn't figure out what you did wrong the past 10 times you thought you played the song perfect but didn't.
 "Enigmata: Stellar War"){kind=icon}
 "Kingdom Rush"){kind=icon}
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 "Rebuild"){kind=icon}
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 "Enough Plumbers"){kind=icon}
 "The Several Journeys of Reemus: Chapter 2"){kind=icon}
 "Pyro"){kind=icon}
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 "light-Bot"){kind=icon}
 "SHIFT 3"){kind=icon}
 "Dino Run"){kind=icon}
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