Some Random Impressions from Day 120+

[Rithrin]

Disclaimer: This post is entirely too long and could probably use an editor, but it's late and I'm tired so this is what you get, sorry!

Overall I had an enjoyable time. Devs took inspiration from games like Kingdom Two Crowns, but have added some decent improvement to the formula. I found the boss to be very fun compared to similar games - it really shakes up the experience, giving you a feeling of actively engaging rather than passively watching your troops fight in static positions like the rest of the nights.

After beating the boss, I decided to just keep going in an attempt to pick up all of the achievements. Just missing the 10K Food and Wood, but it'll be there soon. At this point in the game, you have to be very efficient to keep everything running. Here's some feedback and impressions:

Towers: Eventually, I gave up on towers entirely. Early game, when you have few archers, they're valuable for the sole reason that they give proper firing arcs against the flyer demons. Without the tower, a group of 4 or even 8 archers has a hard time hitting fliers. Once you have a decent number of archers, towers really ceased to be useful. I clung to the towers for a long time as they make for a more aesthetically pleasing base, but eventually I deleted all of them and had no impact on my survivability.

"Who needs towers?": https://i.imgur.com/tanTTtS.jpg

Ballista: Much like the towers, these were very vital when I could only field maybe 8 to 12 archers per side. Even if I kept up on damage research, with that many archers they cannot take out a critical demon like an ESPer or Fog reliably as the common demons start piling up, blocking shots, whereas the ballista will pierce and damage all demons if fired into a stack. However, their damage leaves much to be desired. It doesn't appear as if they are affected by the damage research (it says "warriors" specifically), or does any scaling at all. It takes 3 shots from a regular ballista to kill a flyer, and seemingly only 2 from an iron ballista. Considering that an iron ballista costs about 160 iron in total, this meagre strength increase is just not worth the price. More importantly, it isn't worth the space taken up. Eventually I even deleted my rows of ballista, which was a shame because they also look nice and gave me a reason to train militia.

"Farewell ballista": https://i.imgur.com/wc5mTXD.jpg

Research: I also like the concept of this, tying research to enemies killed. One thing I noticed is that research speed seemed to always research each tech at the same speed. What I mean by this is that I believe it researches a % of the total souls cost of an upgrade every in game 'tick', regardless of whether it is 100 souls or 10,000 for that upgrade. So, for example, I spent most of the game with only 2 soul collectors and I had difficulty spending all my souls. Even though I was constantly researching, I would have thousands of souls in the bank. Then I tried researching some construction speed and my huge bank of souls was depleted almost instantly, because the construction research costs many thousands of souls. Speaking of, the 10th Construction research costs 38,400 souls. Really? I have 10 soul collectors, have stopped researching for 15 days or so, and am not even halfway to that number.

"Do they really think construction speed is OP?": https://i.imgur.com/4Dbs6FT.png

Hope bubble: I like the intent behind this mechanic, but it expands very slowly, and then has a very small maximum coverage that can never be improved upon. The game seems to imply very heavily that you should be building outside the hope bubble - there is an option for workers to return to the stronghold at night, an achievement for keeping one of your wilderness buildings free from damage, the thickets mechanic where you can clear some building space, etc - but this is suicide in the long term. At one point I attempted to expand my base just ever so slightly outside the hope bubble, just enough to space to build one house on the left side and one lumberjack hut on the right side. Multiple towers and ballista protecting them, with another wall at the edge of the hope bubble, protected by a smaller reserve force of archers and spearmen just in case a portal opened on the house.

In practice, the moment a portal opens behind your towers, you lose everything. Even if the reserve force is strong enough to defeat what comes out of the portal, whatever building they spawn on will be destroyed, and now your main wall cannot be repaired as the worker's path is blocked. You can have a dozen swordsmen with 20 health upgrades, but they can only take 1 hit from a crusher before they must retreat to a hospital, so swordsmen cannot hold a line, replace a wall (even for just 5 seconds), or save a building from being destroyed. Anyway, trying to build outside the hope bubble routinely cost me several hundred iron, stone, and wood every other night. I almost didn't recover and took 20+ days to get back up to speed, but contained within the bubble entirely.

Winning Strategy: Once I realized that building outside the hope bubble was futile, I completely deconstructed my base and overhauled the layout to be more space efficient. The base is entirely houses. farms, lumberjacks, and soul collectors, no towers, no ballista. Just critical mass of archers defending behind two walls. Soldiers only get trained in large groups on a 'training day' - once I have 6+ free settlers, I'll build a scout camp, activate the hide ability, then build my Archery Range, Arena, or Barracks outside the walls somewhere and just spend all day and night training, then deconstruct before the demons start spawning. Same goes for tools, weapons, and armor. If I need them, I'll just do a 'crafting day' outside the hope bubble. Basically, anything that only trained settlers/soldiers, or wasn't need 100% of the time like houses and farms only got built outside for the duration that I needed it, then deconstructed. Not sure if that was the devs' design intent, since things like the scout hut, archery range, etc, cost very few resources to begin with, but it felt like this wasn't really 'in the spirit of the game', so to speak. In Day 80+ your base is just a huge row of a big houses with two farms and a lumberjack, you barely ever even see 80% of the other buildings that the pixel artists put so much work into.

"Critical mass of archers": https://i.imgur.com/Fk7Q9vd.jpg

Crystal Upgrades: It didn't strike me as incredibly useful, but we only have access to upgrade 1 of 9. My guess is that we are going to be able to use multiple crystals at the same time, which would really help. Right now there are lots of neat bonuses you can choose from after doing the crystal missions, like increasing worker move speed, bonus archer range, etc. But many of them are just obviously outclassed by a few useful ones. Very few can compete with reducing enemy move speed by 30%, which as a consequence is basically increasing your wall HP (by reducing the number of demons which reach the walls), improving your economy (less demons at walls means less repairs), and increasing archer damage (by giving them more time to shoot). It's just too powerful to ever consider switching except momentarily like when you need to train a lot of soldiers at once. I think the requirements for leveling up your crystals are poorly designed in many cases.

For example, there is a crystal that gives +X% to farm output. It starts at roughly +10%, then you must level it up to get +15%, +20%, etc. Only problem is that to level it up even just once, you need to stockpile 3,000 food. The only time I would consider equipping this crystal is if I was struggling to manage my food, but if I am struggling to manage my food, no way am I going to have several thousand food sitting around, so the crystal effect is very weak and not useful. On the other hand, if the crystal has been leveled up and the effect is very strong, then that means my food production is already very strong and therefore no reason to use it. It should probably level up based on the total cumulative food produced by your farms that game, or by number of nights passed so it naturals scales into the end game.

Missions: I really like the thematic impact of these missions - sending small squads to help relieve survivors, or your swordsmen to participate in a tournament fight, or lost research. It makes you want to learn more about the setting and world. But not too much to cover here which isn't already discussed in other threads. I would like to see many missions available at any given time instead of just 1 per day, so I as the player have interesting decisions to make and opportunity costs. Later on I'd love to see if other cities have survived, perhaps we can send scouts as messengers to do diplomacy or more reliable resource trades rather than just hope the right merchant we need pops up on the map, but we might need to send large military forces to help them from time to time. Nothing too complicated, I am thinking something inspired from games like Frostpunk.

Military: Early game it was fun to play around with Swordsmen, Spearmen, and Archers working together. The swordsmen can block demons and tank hits, the spearmen can attack from behind the swordsmen in safety, and the archers protected far behind them. However, past the first week or so, even with health research, it felt like swordsmen were constantly dying in just seconds in combat and fell behind. Then Spearmen also felt less than useful because they have no one to hide behind. Only max 2 Spearmen can attack past a wall, so there is very little reason to ever built more than 2 per side, with maybe an extra 2 per side in case they die. There are, however, some interesting (and possibly unintended) nuances with the banner/squad system that allow you to bypass this, which I will discuss in a moment. But overall I would like to see a reason to build lots of footsoldiers like spearmen or swordsmen, rather than just spamming archers. At Day 120+ I had something like 60 or 70 archers on each side and only 6 spearmen total.

Banners/Squads: Very refreshing to have direct control over your units and their positions (coming from Kingdom Two Crowns). You can assign multiple soldier types to each group to create mixed squads which is exciting, but mechanically you're encouraged not to do so. For example, you might naturally want to create one squad to defend one wall from a versatile assortment of enemies, so you put 2 swordsmen, 4 spearmen, 8 archers and attach the banner to the outermost wall. You are thinking that the spearmen will attack past the wall, and if the wall is destroyed the swordsmen are there to protect the spears and archers, then the archers will just DPS the whole time. However, you'll soon quickly figure out that the swordsmen block the spearmen from attacking past the wall due to the formation, so you kick out the swordsmen. Then you realize only 2 of those spearmen can attack past the wall, but all 4 will get damaged if a Fog or ESPer gets near, and if the wall is destroyed by a crusher you might lose all 4 instantly. It's all downside to have 4, so you kick 2 spearmen out. Then after losing a wall, you click the banner and tell your spearmen to move in order to protect them, only to discover that now all your 8 archers stop shooting because they are attached to the same banner and that allows the demons to completely overrun your position! So now you kick the archers out from that group.

Now, we've gone from having 1 simple banner for a versatile combat team, to have 1 banner for the swordsmen (to call them forward in case of breach), 1 for the 2 spearmen sitting behind the wall, 1 for the 2 spearmen in reserve, and 1 for the 8 archers, for a total of 4 banners. Now repeat this for both sides of your base, and you're already sick of all the banners you need to manage. To make matters worse, you discover that if you take both squads of 2 spearmen and attach their banners to the same wall, suddenly all 4 spearmen can attack past the wall when only 2 could when they were in the same squad! So if you want to have 8 spearmen manning the same wall, you have 4 banners just for them! It also doesn't help that the tower/squad bar at the bottom of the screen can only display 6 banners before you have to start scrolling. This should just be much wider by default, showing at least 15 or 20 banners. There's nothing else competing for that screen real estate as far as I can tell.

If you read this far, congratulations. I think this is a promising start for an EA title. I am looking forward to seeing many of the items listed in the roadmap. Just a little more complexity in some areas would be good, like better functioning squad formations or just more ways to defend your base than archer spam, ways to increase the hope bubble beyond the current max, that sort of thing, would all elevate the game.

TL;DR - Fun core gameplay, but hope bubble seems too constraining on the player, and many mechanics result in player behavior that may be unintended, like bases with no towers or ballista, or not building over half the buildings in the game.

Edit: To the devs, I just want to say I think you've done a fantastic job. I have something like 20 hours in the game so I've definitely got my money's worth as-is. Will be watching to see what new content is added in the future.

[Solodric]

I got this game with a similar impression that building outside of the hope bubble was intended, and I'd simply take a significant efficiency hit from workers returning to the bonfire at night. Realizing the demons demolished anything beyond the hope bubble made me slowly rethink the right strategy for the game, and I came up with the same solution you detail here - which sounded incredibly boring. The roadmap says an update is coming that allows for the hope bubble to be expanded with flying buildings, and that cannot come soon enough.

[allenosborn1013]

Yes.

[Cronicneurotic]

Great points I totally agree

[Marble Leaf]

Hey Rithrin!
This is just incredibly valuable information, thank you so much for sharing your experiences! We will think about everything you said.
Some of these things don't work as intended because the game is still in early access. For example, in theory, at day 120 you should already have troops of level 2 or 3 that have special abilities, such as temporary invulnerability for swordsmen or long-range attacks for spearmen.
Nevertheless, your experience is very valuable to us, thank you very much!

[Rithrin]

Thanks for the response! I'm just glad you found the feedback useful. I already saw the update you released with the champion unit, can't wait to see what's in store with the leveled up units and things in some update later down the line.