Awesome game, I didn't notice any real bugs or issues that took me out of playing (except how hard the blocking training got when trying to get that 300x combo!). So I don't have any fixes to point out, but I do say that I think you could add a ton of replayability by opening the gates for play-style changing equipment & skills. Right now, the only choices you have to make is which thing to focus on first, since eventually you max out one thing, then move on to the next. Being able to further focus your character on something (like dodging instead of blocking for protection, or poisons instead of regular physical attacks for damage) would make it much more replayable, as would more unique enemies that required using a different focus/strategy in order to defeat. Still, you've done an awesome job, and this game is more than complete!
Yes, I'm very interested in that question for the sequel. It's a tricky design direction, but I'll try to figure out something cool to allow more customization.
Solid mechanics, but as mentioned by many other people, the randomness can mean that a board can be finished trivially, or completely impossible. Using strategy is only helpful if you have actual moves you can make, and randomized drops often mean that the spheres end up in a completely unhelpful position. "Blasts" make it easier to get "blasts" in the future - but you might start out needing to make a dozen moves in order to get them into a useful position, wasting most of them to just get started.
I really like the idea behind this game! My minor quibble with it is the guarding system - I realize that protecting archaological expeditions is very important, but it seems kind of silly to have the actual archaeologists doing the guarding, at the expense of doing the excavation. Maybe a compromise might be weighing the cost of hiring someone to guard, with the risk that few guards would not be effective, and some guards might themselves be tempted to steal things?
The land mines only deal out a fraction of the health of the enemies that actually warrant using them. The level 3 Earth and Ultimate enemies are always the ones that have so much health that they get past my kill-zones. So I figure a land mine ought to finish them off... except it barely even makes a dent. Even the fully upgraded mines only do 1500, versus 7500 health for the L3 Earth enemies... which is nothing for how much you sacrifice to drop a mine.
@kogut9 - I agree with your point about the randomness, but I do feel like it serves a purpose in that it forces you to make an army that is a bit more diverse, like your hydra/minotaur heavy army getting stunlocked and smashed by Y25 unicorns or something. A good middle ground would be for the "rumors" to be a lot more useful. If those helped you to prepare accordingly, they'd be super powerful. Having one of the buildings (or maybe a new building, like an actual tavern?) unlock some rumors would then make it more useful and accessible, like to faith-minimal runs. Just having something to help players deal with the randomness as it comes should go a long way.
The highly random nature of the game feels fine on lower difficulties, but I'm working on Hard now, and it's downright infuriating. Every time I see my first 2 swordsmen get picked off by 1 swordsman and 2 militia I have to restart, otherwise it's a waste of time. Every time I get anything other than the Poacher den option, I have to restart. Damn near every time a unit makes a stupid decision and gets killed, I have to restart. And that happens CONSTANTLY - your last unit is locked in mortal combat with a hydra and about to kill it? Well, better switch attention to the militia that just moved next to me first.
It seems like the -X% fire rate 'bonuses' are handled the opposite of what you'd expect: a -20% adjustment will actually decrease the rate of fire by that much, despite being labelled in green. Additionally, on those items where the percentage scales with upgrades, it goes further into negatives, meaning fire rate drops even further with upgrades.
The balance of abilities in this game is infuriating - in the first act, you get summoners who can frequently summon multiple voidstalkers... who start with 50% action bars, and have the ability to impose a 30% miss chance on anyone in the party. Those are frequently teamed up with front-line warriors who stun. So if you're up against a 4-person fight, where your side randomly is shafted with low starting action, you can suddenly be up against a 6-person team, with your front line stunned or at 1/2 damage, with your poor cleric barely able to get off a heal in order to save just one of them. The difference between one of your characters having an action and being disabled can mean the difference between winning without a fight, and losing hopelessly. And so much of it is random, that it takes out a huge chunk of skill.
(continued) And as others have said, having these survivors eaten up by your upgrades doesn't improve them, or even allow them to function independently - you still have to go through the same boring defense missions, regardless of how built-up your tower is... even worse, building up your tower makes them even more likely!
This is kind of a disappointment, as the Decision games have gone. The combat feels exactly the same - I actually can't tell whether ANY changes were made to combat gameplay, except to give enemy leaps a really, really stupidly long range. The idea behind the changes to the city view seem like they are heading in the right direction, but in reality they just tack on tedium to a system that worked fine already - so I need X engineering skill, plus Y money and Z supply to build this already... why do now also need engineers and/or builders? What do they contribute? This is made worse by the balance of the upgrades - having an engineer in your team gives $150 per day, but consuming the engineer to upgrade your factory only gives +50$, plus the cost to build it? Really?
Great ramping of difficulty, and good controls. When I finally finished the 3-boss final arena level, it felt awesome. Also smooth animations, and I rarely felt frustrated when I lost. Getting perfect runs was a little bit frustrating, but I was able to do all of them. With the challenges, arena fights, and endless mode, I'd say this is about as complete and polished a game as you can get on here - good job!
If you overshoot your window for capturing a monster, you lose your chance to capture it. This, combined with the fact that you can only capture the last monster in an encounter screen made it very frustrating to try and catch a specific monster. Then, when I went to the DNA enhancement thing to try and rank up one of my monsters, I discovered that just because a monster is on the left side of the screen when you bring in a monster to upgrade, doesn't mean it'll rank it up. What the hell? What's the point of listing it there then? More frustration. If you want to try and entice people into playing a game, you do it by making the game fun to play all the time, not just when you've paid.
There's almost no point to manual reloading - why should it take so much longer for every tower to load if you're bothering to manually control it? It kind of defeats the purpose - the best way to get a gun to reload is not to actually pull it off and let it reload, but to upgrade it.
Also, the fairies are seriously aggravating. All strategy and tactic go out the window when you face an AOE invulnerability spell. You're lucky if you can run away at all, let alone without running into ANOTHER set of mobs and getting surrounded. The player has 0 options for removing this effect.
I really like the way this plays, but it does have a tendency to turn into "Oh look, I made it to the next level. What does this enemy do again? Oh, that's right, it prevents me from doing anything for the rest of my character's life." I'm not even sure what the full list of these effects are, because the game just goes from loss of control, to death, so quickly.
I accidentally hit 1-1, the usual keystrokes to fire my powerful single-target nuke/burn against my last target. The target had ducked behind a pillar, so it targeted me. The burning had me down to within 1 turn of dying, so I decided to heal myself. Apparently fire ticks before your spell can go off, so I burned to death despite having 75% of my health full on the bar.
The single thing I would say this game is lacking is a way to sort or filter runes. You end up collecting so many, and some of them will share the same names, and maybe even the same icons too, making it really tedious when trying to put together a good spell for a specific purpose.
It's a solid game, but I keep feeling like there's a lot of information that isn't available while playing. You can't tell how much movement you'll have left, so you can't tell whether or not you'll be able to run up and get a shot off, or run up and just end up getting shot instead. This is made worse by the fact that going diagonally up or down only costs one movement - exactly the same cost as going straight left or right, which doesn't really make much sense. Also, I can't tell what the best range is for each weapon, so I kind of have to move to each square, hover over an enemy, and see if that's any better. Just having an "optimal range" number on the weapon, when you equip it, would help there.
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Yes, I'm very interested in that question for the sequel. It's a tricky design direction, but I'll try to figure out something cool to allow more customization.