Some opinions after spending some time on it

[Ludomancer]

Very well done game, very polished and kudos to the devs, being a dev myself I can see blood and tears put into this one :) I imagine most of these are not new and will probably addressed soon, but if any was missed maybe this helps :)

1- It is very single directional: This meaning first researches you make do; can make or break your game more than it should. Since research is very slow you can put yourself in a situation as others stated you can't advertise your movies hence soft locking yourself pretty much since next research is at least 1-2 years away. Same issue happens if you don't research gifts, there is no other mechanic to reliably keep people happy apart from this it seems and I've lost a few games by researching marketing and gifts too late.

2- End game is quite buggy, I believe this must be a priority. As soon as you can start doing good movies the game sadly breaks due to a int overflow or division by 0 problem from what it seems. Similarly sometimes ending distribution doesn't remove it from the queue and it stays there forever with 0 income and with golden icon but latter does not seem to break anything else.

3- Artists can have more personalities such as when you want them to do a trick and they refuse, this can be done for nude scenes, genres etc. Artist should be a little more tricky to manage then showering them with cigars and whiskies I think. Every problem needs more than a single way to approach them I'd think.

4- Maintenance felt like it made no difference, I had medium one, only time I noticed this had any affect was when artists complained that it was to low and asked me to increase by an event. I'm sure they do affect happiness but I can't tell since UI won't tell me or I couldn't find it.

5- Balance end game seems off, around 1934 or so when you get a bunch of research going, you can consistently make 8-9+ movies even from 3-4 value scripts. You can essentially add a lot of value to any script by just using high quality sets and equipment. I feel this should change over time, in 1930 maybe there is a difference between 2 cameras, but once all industry starts using camera 2, maybe it should not increase the score anymore, but just prevent it from being going down due to using old tech. TLDR; Time periods may have minimum expectations in terms of tech.

6- QOL: Repetitive things like script writing etc could use some help. 1 issue I've found myself dealing with consistently was scripters, once they finish writing the script, give me an option to chose their next task right there. Currently you need to wait for UI open scriptwriters again and find the guy again to assign him to a new thing. Similar issue exists in many places as others have pointed out.

7- QOL: Assigning security to someone is necessary but really annoying. Every 45 days, I've found myself clicking continue/ lift security for each of my assigned security. That's 8 times a year, I deal with this a lot more than I deal with making movies or so in the game. Just make them recurring please.

8- QOL: Also Security related when we are asked to continue or lift off security game does not tell if the actor is currently working for you or not. I ended up having security to some older actors that I don't work with anymore. I understand there may be a use case for assigning security to other people than yours, but game needs to tell me this before I decide to continue or bail on security.

9- Politics: I quite liked having to deal with corrupt officials, but they are very light and almost never had to use them apart from Police for protection and tried a raid once but no idea what happened when I did that. I was hoping to piss their actors/actresses off but hard to tell if it did anything.

10- Mafia, Police Raids etc. feels like you can easily opt-out via using police and if you don't you tend to lose the game, as your happiness tanks faster than you can buy or give gifts. TLDR: Theses systems are pretty cool, but way they currently work makes them potentially very interesting but in reality mostly ignoble. This is aggravated by the fact that they change over time and you don't get to have enough meaningful interactions with them before they do.

All in all, pretty good game, waiting for some updates before I play again since I've reached the point where I intentionally do bad post-production to reduce film score fomr 9.9 to avoid breaking the game :)

Also: Boycot dialogue is missing localisation strings as it displays as {COMPANY_NAME} tag instead of my actual company name.

[Pl3xus]

im sad we have no involvement on the mayoral election.. like the opposite sides never got in contact to throw down the mayor kinda dealio

[Crazy8Chief]

Originally posted by Pl3xus:

im sad we have no involvement on the mayoral election.. like the opposite sides never got in contact to throw down the mayor kinda dealio

Let the devs cook... did you see the roadmap with all the upcoming features basically coming out monthly?