I didn't find that many of the quests to be overly grindy. There were usually enough screens to get them done just by fully exploring the area without dedicated farming. Towards the end I did start ignoring them, not because I wasn't fulfilling the 'kill twenty of this thing' clause, but because retrieving the reward entailed backtracking, and wasn't worth the time. This was especially true on the southwesterly island.
@urmelhelble: only some rocks/blocks/gravestones are pushable. Many are not. There is no way to tell which is which other than trial and error. Some of the dungeons use this guessing game as a puzzle mechanic and it's not fun, just annoying when you have to reset a room because the block you wanted to push turned out to be unpushable and now you're stuck.
One thing boosting my scores now is realizing that my combo stops when I stall too long on a planet, not when I get to too slow of a speed. Even if you're crawling on the surface, just keep jumping.
My biggest peeve is when I've lost my chainn and the game zooms way, way in. I need a little more vision if I'm going to pick it up back up again and the limited game screen feels extremely confining. Perhaps that sense of helplessness was what you were going for, but if otherwise, consider your viewpoint decisions.
I don't like my units getting stuck on the side of the screen trying to fight offscreen necromancers in survivor mode. Using pentagram portals to spawn units would have had the benefit of never fighting something offscreen.
And also, I've been loving the challenge of rushing for the 'Perfect' scores. Sure I could durdle around rebuilding every ruin I've created, but it feels more difficult, and in fact puzzle-esque, for me to determine the line of play that leads to the quickest victory.
As to my game experience, I've mostly been enjoying this. What I didn't enjoy was the very first level - I almost didn't come back to the game at all. Gold generation being soo slow, if I lost a unit because I quite frankly hadn't figured out the game at all yet, building another one was unforgiving. If you simply added one more land plot with a gold mine to the start, the first level would be less challenging and more enjoyable as a result.
There's a reason games like this usually use build times on units and queues at each unit-generating building - the opponent being able to instasummon units to the castle on the border makes attacking very aggravating. As a matter of fact, I would go so far as to say that if they AI were any good, many of the maps would be entirely unwinnable. Fortunately the AI is terrible, and I don't mean that in a rude way, but in the way the boss in a platformer is terrible and you can use its own attack patterns against it. Although I'm still having quite a difficult time trying to punch through map 7 in the cultist campaign... my strategic sense says attack the bottom castle first for the land plots but my units keep getting distracted by the magic tower in the middle.
No depth of play. I charged through the missions, upgrading the two monsters I was given and two I randomly picked up from my first search. My line-up was fine. At no point did I have to switch out a monster or find a new one to exploit a weakness in the monsters against me at a given mission. Half an hour at most to brute force my way through the story with very few losses. This isn't a game.
Since I'm only given one spare move, I feel like this game is taunting me with its readily available walkthrough rather than letting me enjoy my pursuit of efficiency.
Instead of things requiring different sizes of Iron, Amethyst, Gold, etc. why not just use a base amount (since converting is tedious). You could still create a technology like 'large-scale ironworking' that must be completed prior to doing any upgrade that uses the highest level if you want to retain certain things being offlimits initially
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