Dark Forest Village

Fun game but it scales poorly. Endgame is so tedious that I gave up, despite being so powerful (hundred hammers per face from union, dozen prestige points per face from abusing advisor with priest), but telling each person what job to do each turn is just too much.

theres a bug that i cant obtain any oil

three body?????

I love how early game you can just evade notice pretty much indefinitely

eyerhymes: you can get prestige bonuses that mean you can breed out the attention modifier from the 6 face, also with bonuses you can go for a long time without worrying about the threat. i had the same issues as you on my first play session, but have returned for a few shorter sessions while watching stuff and now feel the micromanagement isnt too bad.

I love everything about this game except for actually playing it. The mechanics are all super interesting, the progression looks deep and fun to explore. Every round it felt like i was learning and discovering new tactics and heuristics towards a long-term strategy. There was real tension between going for science, or population growth(or presumably government and military and other mechanics that I started to see hints of). Whether to carefully sculpt dice or just cycle through them quickly and exile them when they run out of jobs.

But ultimately, to play at a level that the game seems to demand for reasonable progression, you need to individually inspect every die to see what's on every face--there's no way to read or intuit this at-a-glance--decide what ratios you need for the portion of the game you're in, flip to the research tab to see what's available(hopefully the next step in your build), and manually assign every die, every single turn for hundreds of turns. Skipping through a few turns to just accumulate resources is almost always going to end your run, or worse, foreclose the possibility of passing a challenge that won't come for many turns. This level of micromanagement stopped me, despite wanting badly to keep exploring.

There are possibly some exploitable mechanics, like using a single die in the growth job (or in the academy) to dodge attention without needing to exile. It did seem like avoiding being noticed at all costs was a centralizing strategy in the early game--a little anti-fun, since you should want to be happy when you roll high on your resources--getting some resources up front will rarely be more valuable than the full turn of production you lose when being attacked one turn sooner.

I wonder if there could be periods without a threat on the horizon, where we weren't punished for rolling certain faces. That way the tension could rise and fall and we could go in and out of intense focus.

the game seems really cool but it just really seems too hard for me, i did 5 runs up until now and have not gotten a single prestige point or any meaningful progress in the game.

that tooltip placement is very frustrating

three body?????

eyerhymes: you can get prestige bonuses that mean you can breed out the attention modifier from the 6 face, also with bonuses you can go for a long time without worrying about the threat. i had the same issues as you on my first play session, but have returned for a few shorter sessions while watching stuff and now feel the micromanagement isnt too bad.