really nice to see you dive in this genre, Fizzer!
It's a somewhat controversial one but a very legit market with room for growth, as an old school incremental fan I'll be sure to play that out!
EDIT: Just watched the video, that looks promising. In these games, balance between depth and UX is all, and from what i've seen it seems to have just that
I'm enjoying it but have a couple questions (or suggestions).
Is there a set of instructions somewhere that I missed? Most of it is self explanatory, but...
- Knowing what an upgrade does before you commit to it would be nice. - When you click on a neutral territory and don't have enough armies you get to see the info about that territory. If you do have enough armies it just captures the territory. I'd like to be able to see the info before capturing. - A more specific description of the Powers would be good. For example is "Multi Level" a one time use? Or once you unlock 1 can you always do 2 levels simultaneously?
Anyway, great start! I think this is something that people will enjoy.
It's a nice start to a game. I have played a bunch of other idle games and really think this could fit well in the genre. My favorite moment so far was when I got a bonus territory which asked me to play a 1-v-1 warlight multiplayer game and gave a huge reward when I won. Very cool product placement.
In general, I'm noticing that the game is quite slow. I finished the first map fairly quickly but the second is taking quite some time. My troop and gold incomes are about 50/sec and 150/sec, but the enemy zones have hundreds of thousands of soldiers and the available upgrades cost hundreds of thousands of gold. The technology upgrades are affordable, but their powers are weak. I seem to still be far from redeeming advancement points, but those rewards are also fairly weak at first (+5% or +10% adds up, but not a huge jump at first). It's totally fine to have slow idle games - I've played plenty that are slow and quite fun. But I think you'll find players expect some good progress at the start to get them engaged and then slow things down as time goes on. I think a big part of this is that the territory bonuses are quite small and could use some balancing.
Similar to the point above, the special bonuses can be enormous and give hours worth of progress compared to territory bonuses. It seems to me that the current best strategy is to scout for resource caches and almost entirely ignore the territory bonuses.
I agree with one of the prior comments that the UI is currently pretty clunky. This really looks like a beta, although obviously the warlight maps themselves are beautiful. A few random ideas to improve it: (i) In general, the menus on the bottom of the page are not very pleasing to the eye. It is blocky, covers up the map and just doesn't feel finished. There should be a way to show key info in a locked field that is always visible, with an ability to at least make common interactions without opening a new tab. If it has to be pop-ups then it might be nicer to have it as a thinner tab up the side instead of eating half the screen. A lot of the info being shown could take a fraction of the space currently being used. (ii) On the ore and bar tabs instead of having to select an ore from the list and then selling it at the bottom of the page, there should just be separate sell options for each ore. One less click and it would be more intuitive. (iii) We probably don't need separate tabs for ore vs bars. (iv) When you click a bonus, we don't need the whole bottom half of the screen to pop up with the bonus info. Just make it work like the real warlight game where the territories are highlighted and we can use an examine option to get more detail.
Anyway, hopefully some of this helps. I'll keep at it and weigh in with any other thoughts.
Edit: two other random thoughts: (i) Smilar to the ore tab, there is no reason to have to click the mercenary camp for it to pop up the purchase option. The only thing it does is sell me troops, so just put that up front. (ii) Territory bonuses would feel more useful if they gave troops directly, instead of gold. Gold has a bunch of uses, but what you really need are troops and they feel hard to come by.
Edit #2: I just noticed the game info pop-up in the top right. Some context from my current game: 2 hours played, about half territories claimed, more total money and more total armies earned from caches than from all other sources combined. Also I'm noticing my troops per second keep bouncing between 41.0 and 40.99999. :)
