(Part 7 (final I swear))
Also, does dual-wielding do anything mechanically other than give you off-hand stat bonuses and enable the dual wielding talent? Is there a mechanical bonus equivalent to fencing's attack speed or two-handed's damage bonus? I'm not saying its under-powered (given how well it scales currently with end-game dual rapier crit focus), its just unclear exactly what its adding early/midgame over the other styles.
Anyway, overall its an excellent polished game, appreciate if you've taken the time to read all this but figured I'd give some in-depth feedback while it was fresh. Hope to see you develop more stuff.
(Part 6)
While the quality of life benefit of leveling faster is cool, attack speed (from fencing and/or blitz) would be more beneficial to the player if it added a guaranteed 'you win the attack roll' attack every X exchanges based on the percentage bonus. So for instance a 15% attack speed bonus (approximately 1 in 7) would add an additional exchange after every 7 regular exchanges of blows where you get a guaranteed attack in, helping you retake the initiative with your 'finesse'. Combining it with blitz you could get an extra such exchange every 3 or 4 regular ones, for instance, which would actually help you win hard fights rather than just speeding up clear-time on trash mobs (which becomes trivial by the time you're fighting the rivals).
(Part 5)
This is a minor point, but the way the 'forge' works for the school, it makes weapons with lower base damage more powerful relative to higher damage weapons by increasing 'additively' instead of 'multiplicatively.' A 100% damage short-sword becomes a 300% damage sword at level 4 forge, a 3-fold (200% multiplicatively) damage increase. A 300% damage claymore only becomes a 500% damage sword at level 4 forge, a two-thirds increase (66.7% multiplicatively) :/. This, along with the aforementioned pain of meaningful gold gain and the reliance on critical hits makes non-crit damage builds, especially two-handed builds, essentially non-competitive (or at least impractical) in the late game (lvl 175+), when even your two-handed guys probably want to switch to rapiers whose damage is now actually catching up relative to claymores and who always had much better stats, especially for critical hit builds (all late-game builds).
(Part 4)
The endless money gaining technique is fine, in that I don't think it harms the game (I honestly think its mandatory for two-handed/barrage characters who are the most gear-dependent in the late-game), but I think its excessively hard on the player's mouse hand in an arthritic developing kind of way lol. Maybe you could add an award/option to give the player a very small 'interest' on their current gold stack, such as say .5% interest per second, and then have it disable whenever the player has sold an item in the last 10 seconds. This way you could choose between the fast gold progression of actively spamming 'max upgrade, switch to store, sell item, go back' over and over, and have a slower but idle method of gold generation that actually scales to the level you need (enemy fight gold stops being relevant after level 25 or so gearwise).
(Part 3)
Power attack is currently an active detriment on most characters because of the prevalence of enemies in 'guard' stance which makes it nearly impossible to hit them if your power attack is too high, at least without being a 'fencing' power attacker to generate enough accuracy to overcome the defense even after two rolls but thats a pretty niche build. Whereas combo still feels viable (just not especially helpful vs barragers) and counterattack still feels viable (if weak vs blitzers), power attack is such an active detriment that characters usually progress faster without it because they aren't getting stuck fighting 45 second+ battles against 'blue' foes every other match (and usually losing those fights to add insult to injury). I would recommend making 'guard' downgrade a power attack to a regular attack if the second 'defense' roll succeeds, rather than outright ignoring it, making power attack weak vs guard stance but not an active hindrance to progression.
(Part 2)
The different combat styles are all pretty well balanced against each other for early-mid game content, though this starts to slip in the very late game, where ballooning enemy health and much higher skill caps means pretty much every character needs to max out critical hit if they want to compete. Even my damage focused two-hander builds deal 3-5x as much with their crits as with their normal hits, and thats even with pushing their gear to level 70 or so with the gear-resale endless money method. Especially if you want to add more late-game content (as some of your comments have suggested), you'll want to flatten out late game enemy health and damage gains a bit to make non-crit builds more viable. Also, critical hits seem to ignore enemy damage reduction (and your damage reduction) from stances like 'defend' or 'guard'. Is this intentional? If so, its also contributing to critical hits ruling the endgame as hard as they do.
(Part 1)
Hey man awesome game, much more depth and well though out mechanics than its humble initial appearance lets on. The emergent rock paper scissors balance between the three advanced stances is surprisingly fun to try to overcome with your style of choice, and the school/new recruit prestige mechanic was nicely thought out lore-wise to feel like you're still 'in world' instead of just feeling like a gamey progression mechanic tacked on.
As far as what I've observed balance wise playing through the current content (currently 'beat' the game in that I have 18 stars and mastered everything necessary to train up whatever kind of character to level 200 or so in a run.):
Fun premise that is a bit bare bones at the moment. In addition to the quality of life and user interface concerns others have noted, I'd recommend having mages contribute their research to gold production or some other tangible benefit after you've finished unlocking everything, having a world map that shows you the areas you are conquering so that the game has a feeling of progression as well as a definite 'endpoint' since its fairly short for an idle game anyway, and since its a dungeon, maybe occasional hero raids that you can fight off for a cash influx, maybe as an 'active' component of the game you need to watch for.
Nice job man. This kind of game is sold entirely on the likability of its characters and the level of immersion you feel in their lives, and you really nailed it there. Where many RP-heavy games fail with bloated walls of text, you are concise and to the point but still convey the necessary emotional depth to identify with the characters. The limited amounts of player agency and choice were good where they came in, and could stand to be even more common. In all I see this game as fitting into the adventure/story game mode popularized by Telltale Games, essentially as an interactive storytelling device, somewhere between book, film, and game. Keep up the good work - you might consider releasing one or more followup episodes to this game so we can see where the story goes.
Thanks a million man and thanks for the long feedback, these kinds of messages are always helpful. I plan on making a sequel much further down the line when I'm better as a designer overall so I can really do the sequel justice
I feel like there should be a cap on how wrong in distance you can get penalized. If I get 8 or 9 within 100k then miss one completly, its still basically a game over. Maybe have a maximum of 1,000 or 2000 km for a completely wrong part of the world guess.
"It takes you 2 minutes to harvest one strawberry?" "Hey I'm only level 336. Maybe if you spent another 10 quadrillion dollars on me like any decent employer I'd harvest it .01 seconds faster!"
For those who want to go idle at max upgrades: Infinitum +36 ore/bar/mail with infinity +48 enchantment on Insane sale price appears to be the highest sustainable income without needing to click.
On a side note, at max upgrades, there isn't enough ore to smelt, nor quite enough bars to turn into mail, though I guess it doesn't really matter since you're clearly addicted to the game if you've sunk that many hours in. I also appreciate that there is a 'max' upgrade level so that I can finally be done and return back to normal life lol.
Oh deer...I tried using 'your face is ugly' to demonstrate the negative consequences of always telling the truth to Kant, yet he dismissed it. I guess he never heard of white lying.
In all seriousness, as a political theory grad student, I thought this was an excellent way to convey a lot of complex ideas. The format was a bit frustrating though, since I often had an idea in mind for a counter that the game didn't expect, making out like I 'had nothing' when I simply had a different angle of attack. So much for infinite diversity of moral answers to the problems :p
 "Sword Fight"){kind=icon}
 "Idlefall"){kind=icon}
 "Idle Dungeon Master"){kind=icon}
 "Home"){kind=icon}
 "Globe Master 3D"){kind=icon}
 "Idle Blacksmith 2"){kind=icon}
 "Witch Hunt"){kind=icon}
 "Save the Earth! - The Incremental -"){kind=icon}
 "Idle Blacksmith"){kind=icon}
 "Nether Runner"){kind=icon}
 "Man or Monster"){kind=icon}
 "Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher"){kind=icon}
Thanks a million man and thanks for the long feedback, these kinds of messages are always helpful. I plan on making a sequel much further down the line when I'm better as a designer overall so I can really do the sequel justice