I was playing on normal, and I found that I had time to maybe cultivate and make one pill each time at most and it wasn't enough.
It's possible that I could have done a bit more if I had let the monsters beat on my base. But that doesn't feel intuitive. Especially since the tutorial is pretty insistent on responding quickly.
Monks were also completely useless. They got deleted by enemies instantly. I stopped rehiring them after wave 4 because it felt like a waste of spirit stones.
This game is pretty brutal. By the time I got to wave 6 I was far behind enough that the next wave spawned before I could kill the first one. That was the point I knew I had lost the run.
But the problem is that the monsters are too easy to kite. I flew around them in circles and kept them from killing my base for another 3 waves. And I probably could have kept going longer but I got bored and just let them kill it.
If you're going to make it so hard to defend at least make losing faster so we can do another run quickly.
There are too many painful points to list them all. If you absolutely insist that the player need to do it manually, then at least give each skill its own dedicated training spot.
I will list four examples.
First the menar tree that you can't cut down. This is good because you can just spam the action key. There's no unnecessary dialogue. You don't stop training until you want to.
Second the crystal ball in the reliquary. It has two options, mana control and starsight. You can't spam the action button if you want to do starsight because it defaults to mana control. So you have to navigate the menu and push enter each time. Which takes longer even if you do it right, and if you do it wrong, well that's a wasted action.
Third reading the books in the office. You select the book from the list, and then it takes you to a continue or leave menu instead of back to the full book list. This lets you spam the action button. This is much better. If you're going to have spots that can train more than one thing do it like this please.
Fourth woodworking with menar wood. Mr. Harris exclaims "Where did you get that!" and then pauses every single time before it gets to the menu to actually do something. There is admittedly not a lot of menar wood so you can't really spam it. But you can still do it several times in a loop so it gets annoying. It's also weird. Why is he questioning me about Menar wood when he literally just said that. Maybe only have him do it the first time each loop.
In summary, I don't mind the grind so much as all the unnecessary button presses and waiting. Lets us just mash the action key if we want to train something. Training the different magic things is also painful because even though you can just hit the action button it has several lines of dialogue each time.
Alright after defeating the world tree sapling I have a few comments.
1. A lot of the time in combat I ended up defending in order to regain stamina. That would be fine until I got more than two actions. At which point I had to press defend a whole bunch of times and you only get stamina once per turn. That was a lot of unnecessary button presses. It would be good if there was a skill to regain stamina or a way to just defend and pass the entire turn.
2. In a similar vein spamming the buttons to do an action multiple times was painful. I mean literally painful. My hand hurts now. Some of the actions defaulted to the same button, like chopping menar wood, and even that was rough. But the ones where it exited the menu and you had to go back were even worse. And the ones where you had to navigate to a specific dialogue option were just terrible.
This was why the clock option to skip a loop was useless. Having to scroll down to the required choice each time, and read the time dialogue, and get back and scroll again, 15 times. Was just too much time and work. It was legitimately faster to just run down to the specific activity.
Let the clock just spend all 15 actions on the same action. There's almost no reason you'll want to train different actions in the same loop if you're doing the clock skip. Also let the classes be really impactful. They didn't seem to offer much training.
3. Some of the actions had a little bit of dialogue when you got to the point where they no longer offered training. Given the button spamming nature of it I missed most of these as they flashed up on the screen. Please have them repeat both so people can read them if they miss them. And so they don't waste time if they come back to the action later and forget they already finished it.
4. Some method of seeing how much experience we have in each skill would be nice. I've seen that sort of thing in rpg maker before so I'm pretty sure there's a plugin for it.
All that said I liked it. I think you have a good basis for a game here. I'm looking forward to your updates.
I've given this a few more plays and have started to grasp the mechanics. However there are two issues that I've been having. The first is that the energy supplier radius doesn't seem to be supplying the bigger cytosomes all the time. I don't know if they don't work in parts of the radius, or if they need to be replaced or what.
The second thing is that I saved and exited so I could change the options file, for the ui scale, and when I came back in all the floating bits were gone. Which kind of put a stop to my game since I hadn't gotten my resource collection automated entirely yet. I started a new game and the bits were gone there as well, though they did start spawning in. No spawns on my saved game though.
Anyway besides those issues this is great, and I'm definitely looking forward to where you take it.
I got through three sandstorms, but they seem to be getting worse and I can't really tell how the sand blocking works. What counts as behind the walls or buildings? Also will there be an update for this. I can't seem to build camel pens or smithies, and of course monuments are listed as coming soon.
I like the concept and the implementation, but the prices are way too high. It shouldn't take ten minutes of upgrading and resource collection to afford the first new node. I mean by the point I managed to unlock the poisonous mushrooms I had three level twenty grasses. If I didn't boost anything it would take another 8 minutes or so before I'd even be able to buy the first one. It's just kind of ridiculous.
Well the only real benefit I can see of not simulating the factories is that it will take into account the actual time for each machine to produce and the items to move on the belts. This is a little more intuitive than it just using the highest machine time and ignoring transport. So that would incentivize making efficient factories. But on the other hand I don't see any reason why you couldn't do that kind of thing inside the factory simulation. It might be a bit more computationally complex, but it would just be once instead of all the time when the factories are actually running.
I do like the fact that changing one machine propagates the change to every other instance of the factory, but again I don't see any reason why you couldn't do the same thing in the kind of factories assembly planter uses.
Also I don't know of any other games that do this kind of recursive factory building, and I would very much like too, but I do know the factorismo and compact machines mods for factorio and minecraft respectively do it.
Also I was intrigued enough to purchase assembly planter. And it's great fun, but after a while playing it I want to reiterate on my point about categorizing factories. If you're going to be making dozens of factories they need to be manageable. Give an option to rename them, sort them, manually change the icon, and it would be ideal if you could split them into separate folders or tabs. So you don't have to deal with all your low level farms when looking for a higher level manufacturing complex.
Since this is a prototype for the factory shrinking mechanic I will focus on the factories. First it was not immediately obvious how to get back out of a factory. I had to get read the instructions again. Maybe put a button for that somewhere. This experimentation with exiting left me with multiple extra factories. Which leads to my second suggestion. Give an option to delete factories. Maybe limited to only factories that have no instances placed to prevent complications. Being able to rename them from the outside and maybe even sort them would be nice too.
In regards to the prototype itself my main other issue was not having enough belt options. With the belts only being able to split equal amounts in opposite directions it substantially limited how well I could place factories to take advantage of large producers.
I got stuck a few times when I left my city power too high and it ended up draining everything. Eventually I managed to get it to the point where I unlocked alternate power sources at which point I just abandoned the nonrenewable ones and let it sit until I had enough research and money to build the spaceship.
The main problem was that there's no good way to tell if you're power plants are working or not. You can't see how much power you are actually generating only direct it. And if you have more than one engineer buying resources it's hard to tell if one of them is not making a profit or not.
Plus the market seems to imply that the prices will go down with population, and that never seemed to happen. Prices only went down once I stopped buying them.
One actual bug I saw is that the geothermal plants get covered up by the credits.
I liked it. It was a fun little game with an interesting mechanic. I did feel like there were two walls where I had to wait a bit to be able to afford the next section. The first was between the 4 and 6 upgrades. With nothing for the 5 tiles I had to idle a bit to afford the 6 tile upgrade. That got me pretty smoothly through the rest of the game until I hit the 9 tiles. Then I had to idle again as the shards dropping didn't quite keep up with the cost of mining a 9 tile.
