I have a great time with this game!  Very deep and lovely art style!  Some general comments:

1. I absolutely LOVE how the tooltips are done! Great job!
2. On the final island I encountered, I wasn't able to explore and make visible the cell across the bridge.  

The VOD for the review is linked below and will be available for 60 days from the date of broadcast:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2863008889?t=0h6m37s

Also, linked below was my initial look at the game (the above revisit was due to time constraints):
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2861952488?t=1h59m25s

I had fun playing. I completed the first 2 islands and saved at the start of the third. The music was good. The SFX fit well. The wolf howl was a good warning they were spawning. The art style worked well and was easy to understand. The UI was reasonably intuitive and easy to navigate. The only real issue was sometimes needing to remember where something was, though it did not take too long to find things with a bit of looking.

The tutorial is nice. It goes at a good pace. The instructions are clear, and the tooltips draw attention where they are needed. The only issue I ran into was at one point, after the exploration of the ruins, it felt like the tutorial ended. Eventually I did the right things to bring up the next step, but it took longer than expected. I may have missed something that would have guided me to the next step.

The nested tooltips are interesting. It is a neat feature for allowing additional details, though the progress bar on every tooltip does feel a bit odd when first seeing it. I will probably get used to it over time, and the benefit of the nested tooltips will likely be worth it.

After completing the first island it looks like I had 3 routes to choose from. 2 of them had 2 stops, while the last was only 1. That last had a Ruins, while one of the others had a Small Ruin. I figured the Small Ruin would only give 1 blueprint, while the regular one would offer 2, as the Ruin I had explored did. I like research paths, so took that one. It only gave 1 blueprint, making me regret not choosing the Small Ruin with second stop at an Atoll.

Reaching the next island I have what look like the same 3 units, but they are now unequipped, and I have very few resources. It feels odd to lose your equipment when the same team is traveling to the next island trying to solve a greater threat. I can understand the gameplay mechanics of starting fresh on each and building up with new challenges, but with the story, it feels odd.

The curses add an interesting challenge. I like to explore and build up as much as I can. The curses being added over time puts a bit of a limit on it. You can keep building up, but the challenge will increase. They never felt unmanageable. The game overall is fairly easy. The combat threats were quite manageable, allowing freedom to explore and build up. The Androids/Automations were an unexpected surprise on the second island. It is a nice way to allow expanding the team. The various more modern tech elements fit well in the story of much was lost and trying to recover. You get to start with the basics, but also have that elements of more options and quickly advancing to more modern techs.

• Youtube Link / Twitch Link
• Graphics : Really not my cuppa, the current graphical style I find makes it very difficult to kinda parse , readability can be kinda bad.
• GUI : It's a unique issue in the fact that there's a significant amount of information at the hands of the player and yet be lacking or be unclear to cause confusion.
• Performance : Flawless
• Music / Sfx : 
  • Music : I think there's only one song for BGM? 
    • The victory fanfare is more of a suggestion.
  • SFX : A fair bit could be improved here, e.g. pawns chopping down trees
• Gameplay :  Somewhere between a puzzle game, builder and management game.
• Misc Issues :  Might've encountered some bugs but unknown.
• Notes : 
  • The tutorial really kinda leaves a lot to be desired, it's not quite clear on certain things and leaves other things completely unexplained.
  • Do we ever get more than 3 pawns?
    • Can we ever choose different types of pawns or is it always the Artificer, Hunter and Pioneer?
    • Under the impression that the current way the game is, there's no choice or variation here.
  • So many things need material transported and yet if the map (random map gen?) doesn't have water where you might need it, you're potentially soft-locked. [Landlocked]
  •  It can be very unclear on what materials you might need to go forward, or where/how to obtain them.  [Like mana crystals , ruins?]
  • All pawns getting KOed doesn't result in a loss, unsure if intentional or if it's supposed to be a punishment , with the punishment being lost time.
  • "starvation" seems pretty inconsequential and can be largely ignored seemingly.
  • Seems to want to have roguelike mechanics , or even roguelite but if the latter, there's no meta upgrades, different characters to unlock, or buildings to keep permanently?
  • I might've been able to succeed in the last mission if I had taken the truck depot , but if the intent is to have the player take it on that last mission to get materials to the tower , then it's an avoidable soft-lock that should be fixed.
  • AFAIK there's no "priority" system, having your pawns do X and Y before Z when Z is immediately important can be a bit annoying.
  • It seems like you can kinda accidentally softlock yourself if you build over/destroy certain tiles.
  • Consumption/production graphs would be nice (how much are my dudes eating, how much wood is being used vs forest regrowth/harvesting?)
  • Forests being able to regrow should be mentioned, same if that's the case for other things, I built over the top of a few forests that I would've otherwise have kept.
• Final Thoughts : There are many disparate game elements here and I'm not sure if they work together in it's current form. I spent much of the time I played the game rather confused on numerous things in and about the game. I went in expecting a hex based (not too dissimilar to something like combolands) city builder, but instead what I got was something that was more reminiscent of a game I played back in the late 00s where it was a puzzle game with a veneer of city building. Minding I was completely exhausted when I played this game and I forgot to get around to writing this until a couple days later.

Hello and welcome to Feedback Quest 9! My name is Hythrain, and I'm one of the hosts for this lovely event! I'm also one of the streamers, so both the game and this feedback are being done live! If you want to see the see the VOD, let me know and I'll link you to it when it's uploaded to YouTube!

So I'll start by admitting that I couldn't give this game enough time (I have to limit the time I play due to how many there are to cover), so there's a lot I can't cover for this. However, I still have a lot of things I can bring up as per my notes.

First, I want to cover some bugs I encountered that I think should be addressed. These will be in the order I encountered them.

1. When I did the first tutorial level, one of my workers began just building the tower despite the fact that I had never specified them to do so. it did this after I had mined some the resources. I assume this action was because once resources are in range, workers will just do this. While this can be nice... I kinda want to tell them directly when to build. That way, if I'm a completionist about hitting all the nodes then I can do so.

2. When building a dock, it will stick out on all sides that have water... even if that water is just a river. The problem then is that these river docks are then built far in land and can visually collide with stone bridges. Just not a good look. I'd say rivers should be treated different than ocean, for reasons that will make more sense later on in this write-up.

3. I encountered a bug where, if you specify to repair a stone bridge before you build the bricks, the workers will ignore the bricks and never actually do the repair. Or at least, they'll try and do the repair but it won't actually work. I had to actively cancel the repair, wait a moment and then start it up again to get the repair done.

Alright, onto the real feedback. There were a few issues I felt should be addressed because they otherwise make it... well, not fun. For example, I found moving resources was so incredibly slow because of how long it takes to move the cart around. I also felt like moving around in general at the normal speed was too slow in general. Yes, I know there are higher speeds but they also increase the speed of the day. In games like this, I don't like to feel rushed because otherwise I know I'll make mistakes, get frustrated and then give up on the game. This isn't to say you can't have challenges, and the Curse system does a great job of this. I just feel the overall speed should be tweaked.

Next, I feel like there should be a means to move resources without a cart or docks.  For example, if a worker doesn't have a task going on then they should move resources that aren't near another task (or aren't needed in any nearby tasks) to places where they'll be used. Even if this is just one resource at a time and their movement is slowed when moving certain items (basically anything but food, grain and water), it would be a lot better. This could then work hand-in-hand with upgrading the cart speed, making it that the cart allows you to move a lot of resources quickly as opposed to the slower one at a time method.

This brings me to what I felt was the biggest issue I was experiencing: how overpowered docks are. Docks have a two block range and automatically connect and move items without the use of workers. So if you're smart with your building, you can effectively connect the entire outline of an island to a dock network and essentially never need to transport things manually. This is also why the river docks are a problem, as you can utilize rivers to do this in-land as well. In the last level I played, I was building docks all across the exterior to connect as many resources together so that I wouldn't need to move anything manually. This can then trivialize the gameplay, as you only need to gather the resources and not think about moving things around. Instead, what I think would be better is if docks were made to make transportation easier. For example, let's say workers could move items manually. You could then specify a dock to collect items, where a worker can move them to. Then once the dock is full, you can specify to transport those items to another dock. A worker then sails a boat between docks (with the boat being much faster than a cart AND able to carry more at once), bringing those items to the dock. In this way, you create a nice balance between these three methods of moving cargo around.

Lastly, I have some points about the controls. First, I feel like the game should always default to a cart when clicking on a tile, even if you don't click specifically on the cart. I can't say how many times I wanted to click the cart but being just a couple pixels off led me to not click it. Second, I'd love if there were more keybinds to make ordering things better. For example, have a button that just turns on harvest or attack mode, or a sequence of buttons that first chooses a category of building types and then a specific building instead of requiring me to do this all with a mouse. There could even be a button that you choose to bind to a specific cart, and then whenever you hit that button and click on a tile it'll cause a worker to move the cart to that tile.

Other than this, I like the game a lot and will likely play it some more on my own! I can't wait to see how it progresses!