Made from scratch in 48h by one guy for Ludum Dare 39.
help
Here a few tips that will hopefully help you win the game:
map
in this overview you see a few cities, each starts with a random name, population, food, water, followers and enemies. so each game will be completly different and you need to adjust your strategy to win. at first focus on the cities that are likely to run out of food or water soon, based on their population and stock.
city details
if you click on a city you see more details about it and have a list of possible tasks you can assign your followers to (read below).
followers
assign your followers to conduct tasks for you in cities. you have your own amount of followers in each city. they will perform the task until you reassign them - or until they die. they are pretty obedient. or stupid.
enemies
some tasks might produce enemies - they really hate you and tell other people how bad you are! the more enemies you have in a city, the more the happiness will decrease over time.
tasks
each task produces different types of output - not all of them are good. if you recruit more followers you might make more enemies as well, for example. the speed of production depends on the amount of followers assigned to the task.
win
to win the game you must have followers in at least 5 cities and an average happiness rating of 75. yes, that is not easy. make sure to assign your followers very wisely.
lose
if the happiness of a city turns to 0, lose. also, if everyone dies, you lose as well. there is nothing to live for, if there is no one to share life with, right?
This was a fantastic game, I played for at least 30 minutes or more, I think I lost 3 or 4 times before I got the hang of it. A little bit of instruction here would go a long way in helping people get started and give you a good rating, even if it's just in the game text here. This game has a tough starting game but an easy end game, well at least until you find another city. I don't understand why you would get another city though it's just a huge risk :P
Tips for other people trying it: * don't forget to get more followers * don't go overboard with the followers * deal with those who oppose you * golden statues bro
As I realized from other reviews it is a bit to hard at the moment so I just updated it with slightly adjusted settings, I hope that is ok with the rules (I did not change one line of code, just a few numbers in the Unity Editor inspector). If someone wants to play the original binary that I submitted first, there is still the 1.0 version as a win download on the itch.io page.
Here are the changed settings: - slightly more food, water and followers start - food and water tasks bring +5 happiness - research task is faster - more reward for pigs task - help text adjusted
Also for new players, I recommend checking the help section but I will add some more info in the game description here as well.
Very interesting concept, and a game very fun to play. I played it for some time, was about to reach the fifth city, had an overall happiness of more than 80, and zero enemies. But somehow I lost, suddenly. I don't know what happened. So maybe it would be nice to include on the losing screen exactly what was the cause of losing, so a player can adjust his strategy on the next runs.
The sound is interesting at first, but after a while that tick for each day passing became very irritating. I would only remove that, because the other sounds are ok.
Yeah sorry folks, didn't have time to include a "you lost because..." part - you die usually if a city reaches zero happiness or everyone died (population is 0).
Your UI is very nice to look at and to use (which is good, since it's most of the game). I didn't get too far in the 15 minutes I had, but I'm adding this to my list for later. I think the Research New Tasks option might have been too fast - I researched them all out in the first few minutes (at least, it stopped giving me more).
This is very cool, and definitely the best execution of a management style game this jam. It's a lot to take in for someone just picking it up, and the lack of tutorial hurts, but once you get over that hump, I had fun with it.
One of the strange things for me was that I developed a strategy that seemed to work quite well, and then just proceeded to execute that one by one for each new city I got in contact with. In a large game, that would have bothered me, but for a shorter jam game, it actually felt quite satisfying. 'Haha, I've got it figured out, and it led me to victory!' Just something to think on if you ever plan to expand on this project. Thanks for building it!
On a sidenote, you asked if my game, Automated Explorer, was going to get a web version. At first, I did not think so, but I was able to solve my HTML5 performance issues, so if you are still interested, feel free to come back and check it out! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/automated-explorer
This was one of the best game I played here on LD39. Really good. The strategies to win are not easy find (although it seems like everyone really like pork :)). The game is well balanced, I keep you entertained to not let people die or lose a city. I played for at least 30 minutes. Great work!
Tips for other people trying it:
* don't forget to get more followers
* don't go overboard with the followers
* deal with those who oppose you
* golden statues bro