My thoughts so far

[Aristotle]

I just worked it out, it's going to take about 2 hours for me to get enough wood to up grade the lumbar a level. Why would I want to "play" a game when it just requires me to have a window open in the background while I'm doing other things.

Because it is fun? It is called asynchronous gameplay and it is actually very popular. It isn't everyone's thing, which is fine. We are trying to support a variety of ways to play the game.

As I've posted a few times, I think the Market will help out people who play the "grindy" way where they just blast through the battles. They can take all those triad coins they earn and spend them on resources.

Also, if you want a realistic generalisation, no one is on here saying what an amazing thing you've created where you have to wait hours for resources to be able to upgrade the stations the resources come from to be able to get more resources.

Forum feedback right now represents less than 5% of the playing population. We've received tons of feedback by other means from people who don't have the same problems with resources you are having. This is largely because they are playing in a different way.

Maybe if you got more resources by playing older levels it would be more fun, seeing as the game play is really in the conquests.

The Market will be the closest thing to this without trivializing the city development part of the game.

[Aristotle]

Okay, now I understand your thought process behind your game design. That makes me feel a little better about it. And yeah, it probably is a good idea to build your resources throughout the day.

Even if you only get a few extra "cycles" at various times, it makes a pretty big difference.

We are trying to support two very different styles of play. My names for them:

1) Asynchronous: People who like to "check in" with their game numerous times throughout the day, do a few things, and then come back later. They play the game in shorter amounts of time: 15-30 minutes at a time or less.

2) Grinders: People who sit down to play for a few hours and want to blast their way through the game.

Play style #1 is having absolutely no problems. The pacing of the game and resource gathering are fine for them.

Play style #2 is experiencing a massive exceess of money (triads) and to a lesser extent food. We need to do something here. The current plan is the Market.

Thoughts?

[sonikku2008]

Hmm... when I have a chance, I think I'll start a new city and play the game the asynchronous way, and see how much fun I have with that.

Unfortunately, it looks like this game isn't really viable for speedrunning, unlike DoE which you can beat rather quickly once you know what equipment works best for you and you memorize the recipes for them. At least, not on Hard. Easy might be viable for it as things stand now, but only if the timer on those frozen runes is a lot slower for levels 37 and 38 on Easy. XD

summersheep: Calm down, please. Vent your frustration by yelling at your computer screen like I do, not by typing furiously on these forums. While I do agree with a couple of your points, I also agree that this game was created with different intentions than how we play it. But this is one of few companies I've run across that do try to listen to feedback from those who play it in a different manner and try to accomodate that way of playing without messing up the intended way of playing. Please be patient with them. :3

[Aristotle]

Unfortunately, it looks like this game isn't really viable for speedrunning, unlike DoE which you can beat rather quickly once you know what equipment works best for you and you memorize the recipes for them.

Agreed. Unlike DoE, this game was not designed with speed running in mind.

The competitive challenge part of this game is going to be how long can you survive the Infinity Tower. That is going to take a lot of skill, strategy, and preparation. I am looking forward to people's feedback on how to make the Infinity Tower something to seriously brag about. And then I can't wait to see how far people can get.

But this is one of few companies I've run across that do try to listen to feedback from those who play it in a different manner and try to accomodate that way of playing without messing up the intended way of playing. Please be patient with them. :3

Thanks Sonikku. That is much appreciated.

We don't "fire and forget" with our games. We release them to a small group - like our backers - first and start gathering feedback. We are very thoughtful about how we analyze that feedback, after which we take steps to try and make the game as awesome as possible.

We also try very hard to give people different ways to play our games and still have a lot of fun. I think we've shown a pretty solid track record in that area, going all the way back to our first game: Threshold.

I am confident we will be able to make this game fun for both the asynchronous and the grinder type players.

[Rosuav]

Caveat: I have yet to actually download and play Reignmaker, due to a thing called PEP 463 that's been taking up most of my time lately (there've been, I kid you not, five hundred emails in the space of a week). But I will get to it at some point, probably soon.

Even if you only get a few extra "cycles" at various times, it makes a pretty big difference.

We are trying to support two very different styles of play. My names for them:

1) Asynchronous: People who like to "check in" with their game numerous times throughout the day, do a few things, and then come back later. They play the game in shorter amounts of time: 15-30 minutes at a time or less.

2) Grinders: People who sit down to play for a few hours and want to blast their way through the game.

Play style #1 is having absolutely no problems. The pacing of the game and resource gathering are fine for them.

Play style #2 is experiencing a massive exceess of money (triads) and to a lesser extent food. We need to do something here. The current plan is the Market.

Thoughts?

Let's say I play by the asynchronous style. If I fire up the game at, say, 7AM, and play for 15 minutes, then shut it down (because memory's costly stuff), and then come back again at 7PM and play for 45 minutes, am I better off than just firing it up once per day and playing for an hour? I do hope this won't be one of those "win by permanently allocating RAM to the game" things, because those get tiresome really REALLY fast.

[Jyn]

I think level 37 and 38 are much too hard. The two narrow columns that are only 2 spots wide combined with freezing runes is too nasty of a combination. We are going to rework that board shape.

Every play through I have done I get massively stuck on those levels as well.

When you have some spare time to try for yourself, would you mind giving level 25 on Hard mode a second look? I feel like it might be a bit too hard. It might just be my skills, but I can barely scratch him, let alone beat him, let alone gold flag him.

[Frobozz]

Agreed. Unlike DoE, this game was not designed with speed running in mind.

The competitive challenge part of this game is going to be how long can you survive the Infinity Tower. That is going to take a lot of skill, strategy, and preparation. I am looking forward to people's feedback on how to make the Infinity Tower something to seriously brag about. And then I can't wait to see how far people can get.

You are a horrible and evil person. It took me hours to beat the first real boss, the giant porcupine!

So far I am enjoying the game and without restating some of the issues brought up about people who like to grind (me) I did have a few more thoughts:

1) Interaction with townspeople:

Is there a way to make it easier to interact with your population? Or to know who you have in your city? Right now it appears that you have to hit the thought bubble precisely and quickly or you miss the interaction.

I was distracted at work and forgot what my other two feedback items were.

But I am enjoying the game!

[Aristotle]

When you have some spare time to try for yourself, would you mind giving level 25 on Hard mode a second look? I feel like it might be a bit too hard. It might just be my skills, but I can barely scratch him, let alone beat him, let alone gold flag him.

Hard should be extremely hard. You should have to be an absolute match-3 pro to beat hard.

Hard should be excruciatingly challenging such that you claw and scratch your way through each level and boss.

Otherwise there's nothing for people who are really, really good at match-3.

[Rosuav]

Caveat: I have yet to actually download and play Reignmaker, due to a thing called PEP 463 that's been taking up most of my time lately (there've been, I kid you not, five hundred emails in the space of a week). But I will get to it at some point, probably soon.

Let's say I play by the asynchronous style. If I fire up the game at, say, 7AM, and play for 15 minutes, then shut it down (because memory's costly stuff), and then come back again at 7PM and play for 45 minutes, am I better off than just firing it up once per day and playing for an hour? I do hope this won't be one of those "win by permanently allocating RAM to the game" things, because those get tiresome really REALLY fast.

Well, I've started playing now. Turns out it is a "win by permanently allocating RAM to the game". That's sad. Any chance it can be set up so that timers get cut down if you leave the program shut down for a while? Even if it's like a quarter the amount of time, it'd be something (that is, leaving the program running would have the timer expire in 1 minute, so terminating and starting it up 2 minutes later will show the timer halved). It'd mean there's value in repeatedly coming back, as opposed to trying to allocate a huge block of time to running a RAM and CPU hungry program.

[ScrObot]

I'm compiling a separate email on suggestions/typos etc, but wanted to weigh in on the resources thing.

I 100% do not like the timer method. This is not a mobile game, and that design reeks of F2P mobile designs. This is a PC game -- leaving it running in the background while you "do other things" is not really a valid scenario for PC gamers. Mobile? Sure. PC? No. What other PC games do you play where you have to do this? Most people have jobs and can't access their gaming PC easily throughout the day to re-up the timers. This isn't a hugely extensive sim game where things are happening when you're not actively doing anything -- there's just timers that you wait to tick down and start over again. That's not enjoyable -- that's busywork.

I understand the Market is a potential solution to this. I'm currently on level 15 or so and have more triads than I know what to do with, but the lack of resources and the speed that they get gathered is dragging me down. I'm also not upgrading my blacksmith or buying anything because it takes away from my small amount precious resources.

Similar to a previous post, I was thinking that making the resource gathering be based on battles makes much more sense. The level of the building could be the "base" value, which goes up as you level up the building. Each "tier" of levels would have a multiplier to that base value, to prevent blasting through level 1 over and over again for easy resources. First tier would be 1x, second tier 1.3x (or whatever), etc. Keep the resource "spoils of war" that you get when you first beat a level, and I think that gives people good incentive to keep playing the game. The villagers could add to the multiplier (0.2x for each one or something). I think people are going to grind even in the current setup, but it's almost pointless because you aren't getting resources, you're just basically wasting time waiting for timers. This would at least give you incentive to play the harder levels rather than just snoozing through easy ones over and over, or walking away from the game waiting for timers.

I realize this is late in the game and probably won't change, but I wanted to get my 2 cents in regardless. I'm enjoying it quite a lot otherwise. (=