Battledom

Lots of potential but unnecessary friction

Looking at your responses to other critical reviews, I understand micro is an essential part to this game, but I feel there is a kernel of truth. The controls feel vastly insufficient to make that micro feel anything but tedious and unfulfilling. Now do not get me wrong in the slightest, I do not think your game concept is bad. I as a game dev myself (albeit an amateur), find this super impressive, but as a game dev to another my understanding is giving the most direct feedback tends to be more helpful vague praise. To summarize, I believe players have with the “micro” are due to the ui and controls and I will list all of that below. Unit controls : Units tendency to run out of formation tends to ruin any strategy you have in mind, unless you constantly switch between them. Despite clearly breaking the box formation you tell them to stay in, our lightly armored archers will not stay in the back like you tell them to, but charge ahead of your heavily armored spearmen. Ui controls : Rather than having cosmetics separated from equipment, they’re located in the same paging menu that you must spam tap to get through rather than opening a menu and tapping what we want directly. There is no option for presets. So if you want your guys to be anything other than buck naked archer and to look like anything other than bald black women (this is the default option when you want to create a new unit type), you must interact with the entire cosmetics/equipment page. In addition, than using the whole screen so we can see our units fit more clearly up close and a far, there is unused space left on the edges. Not to mention, rather than telling you what the outfit you gave the soldier will require of you, the game lets you guess until you are later in another map trying to queue them up in another level and no there is no pop up to automatically meet the equipment needs. Also there are no army presets. Despite clearly putting effort into the art, the scale of the game forces you to work at max zoom because many management sites are twice that of the max size you can zoom to and have options you must engage with for maximum efficiency on various sides of the map. In order to collect resources or access options, rather the opening up a menu and directly collecting resources, you have to scroll around the map that is too big for your screen locate each resource site that while spread realistically, drags out the act of trying to simply trying to play the game optimally. In order to simply order max food output, you must tap 64 to 96 times at minimum. I’m not kidding. There are 32 farms throughout the farmlands map. Each farm has two options (one selected by default) and a confirm button. There’s likely more cause you have to pan around the map and sometimes you don’t have enough resources for max food output. While the map is cool and it’s awesome to be able to select on each of people walking around, the game adds extra steps to everything that you have to do to play the game optimally. For example, you tap on the blacksmith, rather than a menu opening up of what you can order from the blacksmith, you see into his house and then have to tap on his forge. When you could have just had the order menu and the blacksmith’s house share if you wanted to show off the interior. This is the same with the wizard place, the castle, the bar, and probably other places. Potential Minor Bugs : I’m honestly surprised there is no ambience in the farmlands or the village, while there is ambience in the woodlands. I was going to comment on how cool it is for your units to appear in the castle but it seems that mid animation they switch skins to a default one. Hope you had a nice thanksgiving and a merry Christmas if you celebrate such

Good concept but unnecessarily overwhelming micro management

The title says it. It’s cool that you can customize your units but the game makes things so much harder than it needs to to obtain resources. SO many screens, clicking so far apart with tiny icons to click (which are hard to see on phone). Every battle you need to replenish everything lost (units, equipment, etc). Even for equipping units, the same toggle that allows you to switch between equipment also switches through unit art customization (eg hair, head, etc) which makes things more confusing. These features should be better streamlined or simplified for the user.