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I was stuck on either 4 or 5 i think, the long vertical one with multiple bishops.  I definitely want to give it another shot, it makes me feel dumb in a good way and I'm itching to beat it.  Really fun game.

For us dumdums who get stuck, it would be good to be able to replay the tips that it gives you when you fail repeatedly

Great feedback, plenty I can take away and use to improve the game going forward.  The early game issues are new, its funny how you miss things when playtesting your own game...  I'll have to think through how best to address that. 

This is my first time creating a true functional UI like this rather than just a status HUD for an action game, so that feedback is very well received.   Definitely agreed about readability issues.

Love to hear the feedback that the game has potential, I had fun making it and want to keep working on it.

Agreed that those are the weakest parts of the game.  I did not get the chance to iterate on the late game difficulty ramp the way I wanted, and the audio needs to be reworked.

On the difficulty thing, I definitely need to playtest and tune the numbers more, but I also have some ideas and features that I didn't have time to implement during the jam that might help out with that.  Thanks for helping me confirm that thats an important thing to focus on!

Fun game, would be nice to have some more decisions to make in year 1.  Fees like there is no tradeoff and you just need to expand in year one.  Maybe add in a choice to sack that gives you money to spend in year one but has a long term tradeoff?

UX in and out of battles is a bit noisy and hard to read.  The models are also very similar and there are enough colors and squares and glow effects that its hard to tell which are yours and which are the enemies.   Battle HUD is also a little excessive and overloads you with info.  You end up managing the battle entirely in the menu on the left while ignoring the map completely.

- Maybe start with your squad and just one enemy to declutter some while you learn?
- differentiate models some more
- make UI more minimal and contextual

Once you work out the combat though, its decently fun and is probably a good starting point for a solid game.

I do find it a little hard to track the resources you and your opponent are gathering.  i'm frantically clicking around and i feel like i don't have enough time to glance over to the small numbers on the left.  some kind of UX change to make that easier would be helpful.

Overall though, this is a really cool game and has lots of potential.  

super fun, works overall.  surprisingly interesting strategic decision making.

Feedback:

• not totally sold on everything sharing the same cd, it forces you to fully commit to an attack if you initiate one instead of balance resources and attack and seems to favor rush strategies and disincentivizes resource gathering.  take that with a pinch of salt since i've only tested on easy and medium so far. 
• nodes are a little too small from a ux perspective, can be hard to click on.  given that there is a radius you can't select in side of anyways, it might be better to make the nodes the full size of those radii
• make esc deselect the current node.  re-clicking on it is too fiddly

Some very minor criticisms:

1. I would love a reset level button instead of just a reset game button.  When I know I've messed up, it would be nice to not have to die on purpose and wait for the turn to resolve.
2. movement selection could use some tweaks:  Its a little weird that the rook always defaults to the square above it but the pawn defaults to the one below it.  It would probably also be better if the cursor snapped to the possible moves instead of giving you full free movement
3. Subjective:  It's a little weird to me that you are forced to move your pieces into threat, but the AI will skip its turn rather than do the same when at the start they will happily march off of a cliff.  The early levels trained me to think that I could rely on pawns always moving forward no matter what, so when I came up with a plan to trap a pawn and it didn't move, it felt a little unfair.   I'd probably rework the early levels to remove the bottomless pits, or maybe get rid of them altogether and introduce the rook earlier.  Personal preference, so disregard if that's part of your intended difficulty ramp.

Clever use of the limited moveset in chess to help you contain scope and make something really polished and nice.  I don't play a lot of chess, so some of the levels are surprisingly tricky for me... I'll give it another shot before I rate it, but pretty impressive!

Thanks!  Just don't look at the mountain tiles... I ran out of time and didn't get to iterate on the initial placeholder art I threw in there.

Good feedback, I honestly didn't get as much time to playtest late game/farm heavy strategies like this as I would have liked so I bet you're right that its not balanced well enough against people who would explore the whole map and bank resources...  

I did try to address this by giving you things to  spend food on, making wood and stone limited resources, and forcing you to expand and spend favor, but It might not have been enough.  I want to keep improving this game so I'll be sure to test those scenarios more.  Thanks!

The previous month's rules seem to have allowed it if that helps

/jam/metroidvania-month-33