My thoughts so far

[lazybum]

A couple of different points

1) I can't figure out what upgrading the blacksmith does. I upgraded the blacksmith to level 2 and checked costs before and after. I couldn't see any differences. I don't have many items researched, but it appears as if I should be able to make all of the items once they are unlocked via research. I know that something is wrong with costs displaying correctly, so perhaps that explains my confusion.

2) I think I understand why the asynchronous gameplay doesn't sit so well with me. It's an oatmeal raisin cookie. Oatmeal raisin cookies can be tasty, and I like Oatmeal raisin cookies. However, most people would be unpleasantly surprised if you bit into one after buying a chocolate chip cookie. I went back to the kickstarter web page and it does not mention an idle game style of play. It describes the game as match 3 with tower defense and real time strategy. My suggestions haven't exactly been accepted with open arms, so consider this a theory you can feel free to believe in or not. When you open this game up to the public at large, if you change your game description to include the idle style game play you will have less people upset when they discover it. You have mentioned that you are in contact with many players that have been enjoying that part of the game, so perhaps you would find a whole new untapped market.

[sonikku2008]

@lazybum's #2 point: Or Kongregate's idle game market. *shot*

Anyway, some news. I beat levels 37 and 38 -- which I've dubbed my own personal hell, since I portray myself as half fox, half ice dragon -- after getting Archie. Problem: It wasn't just Archie that won it for me. I had to make use of something I don't think was ever intended: Pause Buffer.

What do I mean by this? Well... next time you go into a battle, deploy a stoner or an arch druid. Pause the game next time you hear one of those stones drop or spot a sheep walk by and watch as the attacks keep moving, damaging enemies as normal and, if they died, triggering their death animations which play out.

Below is a list of what I believe is paused and what isn't.

Paused:

Freeze/Block timers
All enemies
Access to the board.
Your attacks from clearing runes.
Your troops.

Not paused:

Cascades. (Your chain continues while paused, which "buffers" your attack, sending everything off when you unpause.)
Stones dropped by (Mega) Stoners. (Must have hit the battlefield.)
Exploding sheep spawned by Archie.
Arrows fired by any archer.
Gold/Chest/Scroll timers (can be clicked on as well).

The items above that are not paused can be used greatly to your advantage, making the impossible slightly easier. Plus you don't have to pay a single resource to use it. *shot*

I'm fairly certain the above is not intended whatsoever, but this was the only way I could beat those levels to see the rest of the game in its current state. I also believe it was not intended, based on what you yourself have said earlier in this thread, Aristotle, that you would have even one level 5 building at this point in the game. So I'm glad these two levels are being reworked to be a little less difficult. I'll see about giving you feedback on the rest of the game while I'm past that, at least.

Edit: Holy heck in a handbasket. If you guys thought Elemental Lord was hard, just watch how much damage the Cubicle is capable of pounding you with in ONE attack. Also, apparently he won't die if you pause buffer him a lot. Don't know if it's because I'm pause buffering or if it's because of a glitch not related to it because I can't beat it legit.

Edit 2: Beat it legit, no pausing once. Still not dying despite having 0 health, despite hearing the death sound.

[Rosuav]

I've given the game a bit of a play now, and have a few comments.

1) Can we get hover help reminding us what the resources are, please? I know it seems obvious, but I like to confirm sometimes that I'm not going off trying to get more X when I have heaps of X, and it's Y that I need. (If it bugs people, it could be configurable in the options. But it's nice to get the official names for resources.)

2) First casualty of the "gotta keep the program running" problem is the BGM. It's not terrible but there's no way I'm leaving that playing all day.

3) Most of the time, I'd rather get the maximum from a resource building. Defaulting to that would be more useful than defaulting to 1, plus it'd make it obvious what you've gained by upgrading ("this one goes to eleven!").

Fortunately I can, currently, afford to allocate this an entire CPU core and a few gobs of memory, but this isn't going to become one of my permanent games at this rate.

[sonikku2008]

New build available, when you tab off, the BGM appears to cease. That solves your second point, Rosuav.

Speaking of, the new build fixed half of my Cubicle problem. The enemy dies appropriately now, but... I have a clear screen and yet the game still thinks there are mobs available, the blue bar is not 100% full. I can idle all day on this tower, nothing else will attack me. So unless we got birdies flying offscreen trying to attack me in a lane I cannot reach (and yes, I do see the cubicle hitting me out of bounds of my tower's reach), then I dunno what the problem here is, but until this is 100% fixed, I cannot continue the game beyond 40.

[Aristotle]

I have a lot of detailed answers to all the great feedback. But it is already 2:30am and I've been working since 9am. I am beat.

Short version:

Where did I ever say you have to play asynchronously? You don't. That is *ONE* way to play and make progress.

You can also play the grindy way - especially if you are really good at match3. And the grindy way will get better once we add the market.

We want to support both styles of play, and support a hybrid of both as well.

[Rosuav]

New build available, when you tab off, the BGM appears to cease. That solves your second point, Rosuav.

Oh, that'd be an improvement. Game BGM generally falls into one of a few categories with me:

1) So annoying that I turn it off straight away
2) Mildly annoying, but kept on because I like the SFX and the game doesn't have separate Mute buttons for the two types of sound (thanks Frogdice for separating it all out in Reign!)
3) Reasonably alright, but gets turned off once I've played the game for an hour or two and it's getting repetitive
4) Really awesome and stays on whenever I play the game.

Currently, ReignMaker is in category 3. There aren't actually all that many category 4 games... and there have been just four in my entire gaming history where the music is so awesome that I play it when I'm not even playing the game (Starwish, Streets of SimCity, American McGee's Alice, and Alice: Madness Returns). Maybe I'm a bit harsh on video game music.

[Rosuav]

By the way, it took me quite a while to figure out the quest mechanic - I nearly submitted a bug report saying that achievements weren't working properly, hadn't noticed that achievements are in the top middle of the screen and these were on the top left. Possibly means I clicked through something too fast. I'm still not sure what the reward is, though - I hear Dal's (??) voice saying "Awesome!" and I think maybe there are more triads waiting for me? Went looking for docs but didn't find any.

[Aristotle]

By the way, it took me quite a while to figure out the quest mechanic

The second battlefield tutorial screen explains what quests are and how they work. This is displayed the second time you enter battle:

[ScrObot]

I think a lot of the confusion/lack of information on quests could be solved if the quest description included the triad reward. e.g. "Make five Void rune matches in a row. (50 triads)"

Even though that screen explains the quest mechanic, the reward is never shown anywhere. Am I getting 1 triad for wasting a dummy, or 500? Is it the same reward for the "use 5 dummies" quest? Do the quests scale with the battle level? etc.

[Rosuav]

The second battlefield tutorial screen explains what quests are and how they work. This is displayed the second time you enter battle:

(chomped for brevity)

Huh, weird. I'm sure I would remember having seen that. Either I clicked through it real fast, or I broke something somehow. Unfortunately I have no idea how I went about breaking it, so I'll have to create another profile some time and see if I can duplicate the phenomenon.