Also, I’m looking into ways to make getting control easier for the early game, since you usually are so busy trying to get the economy rolling, staffing guard posts is difficult.
working on the court system and policy making systems. Tax policy is one of the policies that can be set, described in the post above. Also added a Court Policy, where you can set it to: restrictive, open, or closed. Restricted is default (you hear 3 petitions per month if you hold court), closed means you only can hear 1 per month (also increases control by 2, and decreases happiness by 4), and open where you can hear 5 petitions per month (also does the opposite to happiness and control that “closed” does).
Petitions are events where you are presented with a problem by one of your subjects, and you get to make a choice as to how it should be resolved. These are random, and can have a mix of positive and negative effects based on luck, and your decisions. If you hold court you gain +2 control that month. Some events can be strictly negative, some can be strictly positive, but most will be a trade off.
so for balancing purposes, I’m going to put a poll. I don’t know if I just got really bad at the game or if this is a problem for everyone. This was the biggest problem for me when I played it.
How many times did you have coup attempts, and how often were you spending resources just to avoid them?
I never had to worry about coups
Coups were an issue occasionally
I have to spend a lot of time fighting coups off
----------Don’t pick this, this is just the poll devider------------
I never have any coups happen
I have 1-2 coups happen
I have 3-4 coups happen/I already lost before this point due to coups
I have 5+ coups happen/I already lost before this point due to coups
Reila in the early game and malin in the endgame since i had -70/-80 happiness in the early game and i was gaining 6/7 happiness in the mid-end game the harder to avoid was malin because i didn’t have enought food to give her
I really enjoyed this simulator!! The sprites are very cute, and the balancing act of city maintenance, while hard to get a grasp on at first (my first attempt was a disaster), is actually quite engaging. Not so hard as to be frustrating, but not so easy as to be boring or obvious. Getting happiness and control to 100 each took until about month 75 for me, and keeping Malin and Reila from revolting required regular feasts. They both blobbed out just after mid-game.
A few comments on gameplay: first, I found town weight to be wildly unpredictable relative to food supply. It would hold steady for several months, then suddenly plummet from 11 to the negative thirties if I stole food and let them go a little hungry for one month. There seems to be no reliable way to lower town weight in a non-dramatic fashion…
Secondly, for a game featuring weight gain, there seems to be little to no in-game benefit to fattening the main dragon. It increases opulence, but that can be accomplished by fattening the other dragons, or building statues or the mansion. Fattening yourself eventually causes the sprite slow-down in addition to lower defense. The slow-down is definitely cute and realistic, but once it occurred, I just ate everything in sight to get the blob ending, then reloaded an obese save, exercised down to fat, and finished the game at that weight.
Finally, I took notes on any bugs or typos I found while playing, and there weren’t very many, but in case they can be helpful, here’s the list. I was playing as Serrin.
At the obese weight level, Serrin did not slow down at all on my first playthrough. After she had become morbidly obese AND Reila blobbed out (which happened the same night) she slowed down, and when she slimmed back down to merely obese, the obese speed was present. On a subsequent playthrough, Reila blobbed out while Serrin was obese, and the obese speed penalty kicked in after the blob cutscene.
When holding a banquet for the townspeople, even after two dragons have blobbed out, the text mentions dragons in the plural as being present.
When Serrin (MC) is at blob size and at weight 100 – that is, when going to sleep will cause her to blob out – there is no image of her on the menu screen. Not sure if there is one for dialog.
Pathing in the mansion bedroom is bad. Clicking on the bed from the entrance or the magic ball causes the sprite to get stuck.
There were a few instances of a word missing in the text. They were usually easy to supply, and I only made note of one. In the 100-month ending, the ambassador says “I was by the king” instead of “I was told by the king.”
When using Reila’s power, she says she will “form a comity.” I think that’s not the right use of the word comity, and you may mean committee? Otherwise, “form comity” (without the ‘a’) might be right.
Thanks again for the engaging game! Good luck on Heroes on a Budget.
New update should be coming soon, hopefully before the gamejam. Update will finally implement the court system (basically random events), add policy making decisions (taxes, how many petitions you hear, health/weight management, and religious policies), adds more fetish flavor, some minor rebalancing, a ledger item to look at your stats anywhere and if there’s time, maybe a start on the magic system.
Assuming you’re not using any codes, first thing I would recommend is to pick either Reila or Malin. Pick based on whether you struggle with happiness (Reila) or control (Malin). Serrin’s a bit harder for beginners since in the early game money isn’t as important as making sure the other dragons don’t want to kill you. Just make sure you produce enough food to make Serrin fat fairly early, and don’t let the town build up a lot of wealth (shake them down often).
Second, I would be a bit conservative with building things in the beginning, being hamstrung on resources like stone or wood can be a killer. The first things you should build are a stone mine, and a house. Then on the second month I’d recommend building another house and a farm, then just sit for a couple months. after you built up some more money, wood and stone, I’d build another house and stone mine. By the following month, you should be starting to run out of cash, so I would start having the guy working at the market start selling iron (keep an eye on this, since you will need iron eventually). then just coast until you build the wall.
Once the wall is built, I’d start focusing on raising control and happiness (in that order, at least in the current public version, the new version will add more ways to get control in the early game). Once you’ve got that all set, it’s really your call on which direction you want to go. Guard posts that are staffed produce control every month (if they still have access to iron), and building a few entertainment districts or restaurants for happiness.
If you have a high opulence (hoarding money, getting fat, or building statues), build the inn, since it will allow you to receive gifts once per month every now and then.
I’ll try redeploying the game and posting and reposting the update.
Looking into the files, for some reason the new assets that got used weren’t included with the deployment last time? It looks like it worked this time, let me know if it’s still busted, because it seemed to work for me.
