Mineral Cities by Gareth Jenkins 2012-04-28T09:34:00
Excellent game!
I've played it to the "end" and reached 100 minerals.
Too bad it didn't say anything when I reached that final goal, the game simplty kept running as usual.
Is there an end when you run out of space?
Maybe I'll have to try, I've still got the game running.
Graphics are excellent, while they are simple, they are perfect for the game - i.e. it doesn't seem they could be better.
Some feedback on gameplay:
- Pace:
the game seems very slow at first because you have to wait it finishes to gather resources before placing a new tile or you might lose valuable cycles. However, there is a simple trick: while you wait, you can simply build something else far from there which doesn't interfere with the tile you have just placed!
So I found myself constantly rotating the planet and placing tiles in different zones instead of focusing in a small area and building slowly tile after tile in there.
By using this strategy, the pace is ok as you are constantly busy. The game is still long, I think it took me about 2 hours from my first restart to the 100th city.
- You can lose!
On my first attempt I lost because...I had 92 cities and no mineral patches left!! At first I was placing cities directly on top of minerals, so 1 mineral = 1 cities. After 10-20 cities I realized that there were not 100 mineral on the planet, so I had to place cities so that they covered only a part of the mineral patch (e.g. getting 4 cities per mineral patch). It was too late and the even after careful placement, I was left with 92 cities and no mineral patch available -> so I had to restart.
- My city strategy:
On the second attempt, my strategy was then focused to avoid that mistake. I only built cities when I had to (that is: when I was closing to mineral patches) and placed 4 cities one after the other on the mineral patch I was approching. This isn't the most efficient approach as 1) lost some cycles 2) some of the cities where often +0 when I placed them.
However, this was the safest approach as I could exactly place the cities in a square format by little movements of the keyboard. I do not reccomend to place 1 city first and cover the rest of the patch later: I noticed infact that when you return again on that patch you might find that the planet has rotated and you can't align yourself to the first city anymore, potentially losing minerals.
- Overall goal of the game
The apparent overall goal of the game (even if the game doesn't end there) is to place 100 cities.
Provided that you are careful in using mineral patches, getting 100 cities is just a matter of having the money to build them. You need about 53k minerals to build all cities!
Tiles gives you a finite number of resources when you place them, but if you build near them, they give you resources again. Eventually however you'll have to build too far from a certain tile and then it will just lay there, without giving you anything and occupying planet space.
The more closely spaced you build, the more resources you get and the less likely you are to run out of space before getting 53k to spend on cities (remember to use well your mineral patches when you place them!).
- My Best strategy - Grass and Water rocks, Hills are useless, Cities have to be built
As I said the more packed you build, the more profits you get.
My strategy is build water and grass only if possible.
Hills are useless, as they never give resources on their own. They can rise your water to +1 (or more) but you'd need a lot of hills to get high value water (e.g. +10). This would mean 10 near hills which occupy a LOT of space without giving resources. So no hills.
If you don't build hills, water has 0 value in itself. HOWEVER, water can be VERY DENSELY packed: you can build a LOT of water tiles almost on top of each, so you can have an area with like 16 water tiles all near the same grass!
This means that you can get a +16 grass.
Imagine what happens if you put a single water, then a single grass (+1) and then again 14 waters: everytime you put a water the grass "grows" and you profit from a grass which is +2,+3,+4,+5,+6,+7...up to +16!
Imagine the same thing with multiple grass near..!
So "DENSE" WATER + GRASS = LOT of money...they money you need to build those cities and win!
I do not reccomend to build more cities than you need (the ones on mineral patches): cities occupy quite some space as you can't densely pack water/grass on them. While they can reach nice numbers (e.g. +12), I don't think they are effective in boosting your economy.
Like other people, I too found the controls "wrong" at first but got used to it.
One thing about controls that often lead me to make mistake:
Grass = 1, Water = 2
At first I was building with the idea that you need to have an hill first, then water (which needs hills), then grass (which needs water), then cities.
I think this idea lead me often to press 1 for water and 2 for grass as this is their "natural order".
Of course, following the natural order would mean that 1 is actually Hills, 2 is water, 3 is grass, 4 is cities.
Or maybe I just had to pay more attention as this game is very unforgiving on tile placement.
A note on this "unforgiveness": I think it's the correct choice for the game (I would not advocate undo or destroy).
Final thing on gameplay: current re-playability is probably low since once you have reached 100 cities playing again doesn't make much sense: even if the patches are random each time, the game would probably look the same as the first time.
But again I want to say: EXCELLENT GAME!
I can't vote for it as I didn't partecipate in the Ludum Dare, but I hope you get high ratings, you deserve them!
PS:I'll try to upload a video of the 100th city placement later.