This game was officially renamed "Rise to Ruins" a few patches back. I think it fits better, or at least, has a little more soul.
I found myself in a gaming slump and decided to fire this up again.
Made it to Day 12 this time, no shenanigans.
What's new...well, for one he added another layer of advancement into the game, namely, building quality. Now you can upgrade buildings multiple times to increase their efficiency and allow them more workers. On the downside...the settlement building itself now has quality, and controls how many buildings you can have. So you build 4 buildings, upgrade the settlement building, build 4 buildings, upgrade the settlement center....It's kind of cool in that it changes its appearance as you upgrade it, going from a wooden enclosure to a castle eventually. The materials aren't hard to come by but in a game where time is against you always, it's a super annoying delay that gets introduced when you're really trying to drop down as much stuff as you possibly can early on.
Nomads show up with greater regularity now, based on your available housing. I know they were in earlier editions but I almost never saw them. Now around Day 5 or so, Nomads have to run the gauntlet of the level to reach you and while 10 or so may show up on the map, maybe only a couple will actually reach you.
I had greater success this time primarily because I built arrow towers early on. Before I'd tried to skip them and go straight to Fire Bolt Towers, but they tend to not hold back an entire wave by themselves after Day 7ish or so due to the energy requirements. A few Arrow Towers on the other hand can deal with entire waves for the first few real days.
Growing food is super obnoxious in this build too now. You can't hardly grow anything in summer and nothing in winter. So if you don't throw down a lot of farms right at the outset your dudes will starve by summer's end. You can supplement it with casting Invigorate Land on food spawns on the map, but that becomes increasingly difficult if it's not literally right outside your base. You do have kitchens though which can make food last longer, I suppose, or feed more people per unit and they seem essential to feeding even the default starting # of villagers.
Here's a pic of my village shortly before it was overrun.
My building steps in order. Sprinkled through here are the required village center upgrades you have to do:
-Clear a ton of land as the very first thing
-Build 4 large farms
-Build the Mining Facility
-Build the Woodcutter's Shack
-Build a couple tents
-Build the Stone Cutter's Building
-Build the Lumber Mill
-Build a couple more tents
-Build the Kitchen
-Build the Bowyer's building
-Build the Crystal Harvesting facility
-Build a couple Arrow Towers
-Build a couple Stone Golem spawns
-Build the Crystal Refining Facility
-Build some Fire Bolt Thrower Towers
That seemed to give me a couple days of breathing space, where I could build the Forge, Armorsmith, Toolmaker's Shack and Waymaker's Shack, and any other needs like additional housing or storage or farms. Done this way I had about 200 units of food as I came up on winter.
There is still the part of the game where it seems expected of you to nuke monster spawning grounds that show up on the map, which I find an annoying distraction. After Day 9 or so they start showing up so fast you can't really keep up with them anyways. I also learned this build that "Ancient Radiance Pools" are essentially bad and should be destroyed as soon as they're found, because they attract monsters to them, level them up and gather essence to them (essentially stealing it from you.) A good couple fireballs takes them out.
And unfortunately on Day 11 the monsters hit my west side and smashed up the towers pretty bad, destroying one and damaging the rest. And due to job and build priorities, I couldn't seem to make my guys repair the towers very quickly, or get replacements build. So by Day 12 I had them mostly repaired and a new tower almost finished....then a huge swarm hit my stone golems like a freight rain, ran them over, hit my towers, flattened them all within 20 seconds and then started rampaging through the village. If I had gotten my towers repaired faster and gotten more built before that attack, if I hadn't built so many defenses to cover areas the monsters weren't really attacking that often, I might have lasted a day or two into winter. But I was feeling pretty good about myself until, once again, the game just completely overpowered me and there was nothing left to try or do.
It's an engrossing game for a few hours and I love the music and dem pixels to death. But every time I get done playing this game I feel discouraged instead of eager to play it again. I've hit the end of the game's production chain (ie there are no more buildings to build and you're just scaling up your defenses and/or exporting to Limbo) so I guess I'll wait a few more versions, to see if the fun in this game can actually last. It's a charming little village sim right up until the point where it turns the screws on you. And it turns them fast.
I will say the game feels more playable now than in previous builds. I actually thought I knew what I was doing for a while. So you can enjoy it longer before getting overrun. But it still amounts of the same feeling like you're just not getting it when it's all said and done. I put several hours into this game and that doesn't really jive with the "die and do it all over again" meta it's going for, to me. I still imagine at release, all these buildings that are available by default now are going to have to be unlocked....which sounds like ass to me.
Author
Topic: Retro-Pixel Castles (Read 8957 times)