took me a bit to get what was happening. when I finally did though it was very cool! ambitious and creative

Made it through the hump and figured out how everything worked together. I'm not too good at these kinds of games so even then I had some trouble getting far. But I think the bones are there to make something that could suck a player in, especially with the upgrade tree.

I think there's a lot of systems and content built into this in a short time, and I think the area you could use the most polish in is just making the UI and controls a little more intuitive. I think I didn't immediately grok certain controls like "lock"ing the individual ship attacks/modes, and it was often hard to select an individual ship if it was right on top of a city. I'm also not a big RTS player so I'm maybe not the best playtester but I think once you get a hang of the interface it feels pretty balanced and fun, and has that enjoyable "make the number bigger" feeling. Overall I really like it!

Not a genre I'm normally drawn to, but still a lot to admire and enjoy. With games like these, I often wonder how much it might help players get used to things when on a smaller scale- starting on a single continent, with limited retaliation from cities, just so players can warm up to the strategies necessary to win. When you have a greater sense of the value of given upgrades, it's a lot easier to make a confident, informed choice with your gameplay, and I think that feeling drives a lot of player investment and enjoyment.

This was a lot of fun once I understood what was going on, but it definitely took a while to understand what was going on! And to be honest, even after beating the game I'm still not clear on a few things, like how or when the mothership takes damage. The tutorial video can help explain things, but 7 minutes is a *long* time to listen to an explanation for a game that might only take 5-7 minutes to play through. I think at that point most people (myself included) are more liable to just stumble their way through the game themselves.

There's a lot of information that would be really useful to have on the UI that's missing. It's unclear, for example, why and how many times a city will rebuild. I know it's 3 from the video, but that doesn't actually help all that much in the middle of the game when I'm attacking multiple cities at once - I'm probably not counting every time a particular city has been destroyed. It would also be useful to have some more information always onscreen. I always want to know how many resources I have, so it would nice for that to be on screen at all times, instead of just when I click the mothership, which I don't often have a reason to do otherwise. There's already an icon attached to each city for if they're hostile to my ships, but for the vast majority of the game, it's just a given that they're hostile, and it's clear when they become hostile visually because they're shooting back. I'd much rather see a lives counter for them, or have a visual indicator for whether they're marked for mining vs attacking for my own ships instead of needing to click into them for that information. There's other UI stuff that might be useful too, like health bars for my ships, ammo indicators for ships, etc

Without all that info it can make it harder to figure out how the game works - it's not overly-complicated at the end of the day, but there's often not enough information put in front of the player to make things clear from the outset. That said, all of that is not really difficult to fix, either - it's just a matter of putting the right information in front of the player for that clarity, and I think reducing that friction is all it needs

Super fun! Took me a bit to figure out the controls (someone had to tell me how to do the mining and attacking) but aside from that, really fun little game! reminds me of Pandemic!