Kingdoms and Castles Review (Kiburi様)
Love this game, cant recommend it enough.
The building is great and the city management is really fleshed out and fun to mess with. Lots of customability and you can really balance building your city in different ways.
That being said i do have some thoughts that would make it a little more enjoyable imo, but im not a game dev so i might just not know what i want :P:
it feels like theres not enough variance in the threats and diplomacy. As the game is every new game feels exactly the same as the other games due to how simple most of it is. Like theres 3 or 4 different preset personalities for the AI and only one is even close to difficult to remain friendly with at all because they just demand money from you repeatedly. I love the idea of the vikings attacking but after a small while it just becomes a horde simulator and its not very fulfilling and is instead extremely tedious. I guess id sum it up as the early game is great, but the late game is just the same thing on repeat forever.
Also the enemy ai is really wonky? Like even in Survival mode they usually just go for some buildings and then leave instead of trying to destroy your keep. Theyre also really hard to predict where theyll attack which would be great if there wasnt 300 ships attacking one spot of your castle for years where you have to focus all defense on that one side, just for them to attack a random spot on the complete other side of your city thats comparatively naked and gets overwhelmed due to it being an absurd amount of enemies. Like i really get what its going for but its mostly just frustrating instead of challenging. Im not really sure how to fix this without changing the gameplay entirely which isnt what i want
I also think the map builder could use some expansion. Things like having bigger maps and allowing AI kingdoms on the land type maps where you can compete for land and wouldgive more reason to interact with them or impede them. Having a way to influence the size of islands and having variance in the land height (hills/mountains) sounds interesting but im not sure if it would work without making the maps massive which i could see being too much of a departure from the original intention.
Back to the AI kingdoms, i think a lot of expansion could be done with them in diplomacy, simple things like adding archetypes (religious nations, militaristic nations, friendly, merchant, defensive, etc. which could include the vikings as a fast growing nation that steals supplies from other nations as part of the wave mechanic), or expanding trading to allow for repeat trading of specific items (i.e. repeatedly selling wood to the king one island over etc).
I'll admit i might just be looking at this game and wanting it to be different than its supposed to be but its just some thoughts i had while playing.
Once again i love this game, and im def recommending it to my friends and anyone who asks. Most of these arent big deals but i thought it might be something to think about at most. <3