Iron Ruler

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Awesome! You got a gold star for remaking one of my favorite oldskool games of all time; LORDS OF CONQUEST!! THIS IS EVEN BETTER THAN THE OLDER VERSION FOR c64 DOS AND ATARI 8-bit!! WAY BETTER!!

3/10 A TBS where you conquer regions. Good: - free - the basic concept is interesting and reminds games like Risk and Diplomacy. You attack neighbor "countries" (regions), and there is a total attacker strength coming from units in regions, militia, influence capital city etc. And the defender's strength in a similar way - music is good - lots of maps including those resembling continents - a map editor - many options when starting a match: can pick regions belonging to each player, distribute resources on the map etc So-so: - bg images in the UI are passable. Not great but okay - there is a tutorial that's pretty lengthy and tries hard to explain the various game systems. There is even a tutorial for the map editor! (never seen that in any game yet). Though the tutorial could be shortened (just the wording). The bg of the tutorial panel should be more opaque because the text is a bit hard to read. Also, it's a bit annoying that the tutorial messages block the actual clicks in the game. Often the tutorial explains many things in a row and there is no chance to try that out. Still, overall the tutorial does an okay-ish job at explaining Bad: - the gfx of the tiles and units are rather bad. The resulting overall palette and look of the maps is low budget and ugly. I guess this is the main reason why this game has had just 5 reviews since July 2022 (that's 9 months). That's just about 1 review per 2 months.. The screenshots are terrible, and no one bothers to download even for free - the UI is awfully designed. E.g. there is a huge panel at the bottom that occupies the full width of the screen but the buttons to select units to produce, or showing available resources are tiny. I guess that's because the game was designed for tiny phone screens? In many cases clickable things don't even look like buttons, but just as text lines that change color when you mouse over them (not even over them exactly but over the general area). In battle setup screen there are tiny checkboxes spread across the screen - no tooltips. E.g. it's unclear what the "turn around" button is. Is it end turn? End action? A tooltip could help - general controls in the game are pretty awful as well. E.g. first you need to select the destination region, then the source region of a move. Instead you should have been able to just to drag a unit from one region to another - when attacking, you can't see what the attacker and defender strength is composed of. E.g. how much the nearby capital is providing. I'd expect to see that in a tooltip when mousing over the number, for example. - battle dialogs shouldn't be shown for AI vs AI battles - can't zoom in/out or drag the map (or I just haven't found how) - I didn't even understand at first that my kingdom has several regions in it. I thought "country" mean as many starting players (AI or human) I dunno. It's just all very confusing. So, overall, there seems to be a ton of dev's work gone into the project. However, he probably never playtested the game on anyone. So, there are excessive features developed here (like a tutorial for the map editor) but the core of the game and the basic controls are almost unusable. Since the game idea overall is interesting, the way forward I'd see here is to take a few friends who haven't seen the game and just let them play it while looking at them. It would become instantly obvious that the game controls and UI raise lots of problems. After a complete UI re-design and improved controls the dev would need to get a proper artist to redraw basically everything (exc maybe the bgs in the menu screens). Right now the game looks like a prototype. [table][tr][th][i]I'm a Steam curator, you can [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43946907-Friendly-Nerd/]follow me[/url][/i][/th][/tr][/table]