The Board Is Yours

It was good! I see no AI, although the art for the knight and pawn still kinda look off but it is a fun game nonetheless!

I cannot give you the solution, but since you have the letters, you can now try to rearrange them and find something that reminds you of a legendary code in the world of gaming…

That was implemented at some point, but I had to remove it. I see the solver as a guide, pushing the player to understand that he needs to (at least try to) optimize, even if he does not find the optimal configuration.

Also, having a “decent” configuration is often largely enough to unlock new upgrades / new cells to buy / new prestige perks pretty fast (less than a minute usually), which would make the “exact best” configuration obsolete already…

The hints could be efficient for very early stages, but at some point, there is no difference between providing the player nothing at all, and providing 1 or 2 exact piece positions, because the complexity is still enormous (the solver literally does billions of iterations for each solving round before it breaks). I would have to almost provide the solution itself. Also this solver breaking is a reminder that brute force is not the appropriate way to solve it, because after that, you’re on your own to solve it.. This should indicate that there should be enough information on the board to exploit the pieces capabilities in various ways to obtain a “good enough” configuration to continue progressing at a good pace in the game.

Thanks for the feedback! I can say the record is above 600K for the 5x5 board here.. I considered adding a leaderboard but it might only be in a dedicated mode in the final version instead. I have considered creating a discord, but imo the amount of people actually interested in my games is not high enough to make it worth it yet… maybe in a few months, but thank you for the proposition!

That’s… Impressive! I literally never managed to beat the solver… Might be a rounding error somewhere.. Good job, though there is definitely room for improvement in your position! Plenty of square not unlocked yet that can only increase your production (as long as you control them by at least 1 piece)!

Hey! The prestige progress only is saved, so it should help you restart more easily if needed, but do you have more details about which popup/ at what point in the game and the freeze itself (generation is frozen, but buttons still seem active)? I’ve tried replicating this bug for hours now, but was not able to yet…

Thank you for the feedback!

• Yes, that’s implemented in the whole game in fact, but with only 6 prestige points, I removed it in the demo to streamline the gameplay and be sure to not have people second-guessing themselves when going to prestige, since these are expected to be short prestige/reset (5 minutes or so). Stacking prestige points would mean you will have way too many new rules to understand & exploit at once afterwards…
• For the tooltips cut off, I suppose you talk about the prestige graph, but you can move the prestige scene with mouse/drag. I will make this more obvious
• This is a big one, it seems I didn’t explain the generation correctly; You produce & harvest on all the squares you control, but each cycle is a 2-steps process where multiple pieces will produce on all the square they control, but then they will all harvest on these same squares they control. Each piece harvests everything that is available on the square after the production step.. Ok, still not clear. I need to find a way to make it clearer, or even maybe to separate steps visually in game.