Replayability... skirmish mode?

[Cikkel]

I see in the product description there are procedural generation elements, but I get the impression there's only a story mode to play through. Is that the right impression or is there reason to replay through again after beating the campaign?

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

There is not a skirmish mode or anything approaching that. It's really not that kind of game.

I go into some more depth on the nature of replayability here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/2001070/discussions/0/596265478613180634/#c596265478613183342

The game is long and large, and this is not a traditional campaign from a strategy game sense.

It is hard to give accurate comparisons, because this game does a lot of things very differently.

In some ways, this is a bit like a serial tactics game like Fire Emblem: Three Houses, where you have a long series of story missions, and there are multiple routes, and the narrative matters a lot. A skirmish mode would not really make any sense in that context, as it would just be randomized useless fluff disconnected from anything of importance.

HotM is _kind of_ like that, except it's not so rigidly narrative as Fire Emblem, and it's also a lot more flexible mechanically and where you can make your choices, etc.

I wanted to create something that wasn't just endless Chess matches against meaningless foes. There are already a lot of games like that, including a number of ones I've made. I wanted something that would ground you in the world a lot more, but give you a new kind of freedom within smaller narrative stories that come and go.

In other words, there's not really a "campaign" per se, either. The tutorial part -- up through chapter one -- could be thought of that way. But that's the kind of "how you got your starting kit that you then have at the start of every time loop from then on" backstory, as well as being the tutorial.

What combination of narrative and mechanical elements you engage with in each new timeline is up to you, and each timeline has a city that is different in the details in a procgen sense. But your knowledge of the narrative structures, and how to manipulate them, is a strategic tool to use against the city in new timelines as you go.

Hope that helps at least a bit, but please let me know if you have more questions!