To be honest guys, I'm starting to lose interest in the game. My empire may become a ghost town soon. I was number one on the board for a while, so I always have that going for me.
Yeah that's why I have just started side projects, such as a large forest around my city. I've been regulating prices in my city so that wood and stone are always around 2-10 gold and iron is 30-40gold. Collecting the resources is kind of getting boring, but I can pretty much build whatever I want now.
Hopefully you'll still drop in from time to time? I never expected people to want to play for hours every day anyway, so I'm impressed at the hours some of you lot have put in! In the longer term I more expected people to check in once a week to harvest and build some houses. See you when the first major content expansion hits!
My new goal is to fill as much of the world as I can with trees. Almost 100% of my income will go to tree planting.
Pioneer Gormster, I am also surprised by how much I like your app and how much time I put into it. Here is the essence of what intrigues and motivates me about it: 1) The app is a "Pioneer", it is different from other kingdom-building games due to the economic and environmental gameplay and ramifications (and other aspects also). 2) I get to be a "Pioneer" within the game. I like discovering new lands, expanding, bumping into others, etc. 3) I am a "Pioneer" of the game. As one of the first players I am not only learning gameplay but trying to figure out strategies and consequences. And I am excited to see how others play (different ways are quite clear already), and also interested in what happens to this virtual world long term.
It's not the first time I've seen a developer underestimate their playerbase's... enthusiasm. I mean this not as an insult, just as an interesting observation. Everyone from Blizzard down to 1 man development companies has done this in at one point or another. I personally have enjoyed the game quite a bit so far. I foresee myself playing for quite a bit more time to come. I like the concept of permanently influencing the world to as much of a degree as you are willing to work towards (or have time to). I like the concept of building your economy from nothing. I like the concept of charity being encouraged but far from necessary. I like the metaphors this game generates. I look forward to future updates and how you plan to expand this little world you've created. I think you're even entitled to add in a couple of cosmetic "upgrades" as restitution for your efforts thusfar as well to help cover the costs hosting the server (but I understand and even appreciate why you did not from the beginning base on your "mission statement"). In short, thank you gormster for allowing us to be a part of your experiment. We've enjoyed it so far and hope to continue enjoying it as time goes on
gormster, let me say again that your game is great and has been a very enjoyable experience! I have another question for you. I tried to download and play the game on my iPad, but unfortunately I was spawned at a new random location without any of my money or resources. I assume that if I walked over to my buildings, I would be able to interact with them based on my Game Center id. However, how would this affect the leaderboards? Would wealth be reset to the total of the character on the second device? Does this mean that some information about the character is stored locally on the device? If so, could you possibly implement iCloud? Thanks for your participation in this thread!
I heard that there is a village to the Northeast that has incredibly cheap resources. So if you need any resources head Northeast.
Correct on all fronts. Currently held gold and resources are stored local to the device, and whichever one you last used to play on will register as your highscore, but you won't lose what's on one device by playing on another. iCloud would be cool. It's another nice-to-have that fell by the wayside due to underestimating how much people would get into the game, and want to play it across multiple devices! Maybe something to think about down the line.
Just a quick, important note on the first bugfixing update, which should be released momentarily: Property ownership will now tied in to Game Center id, as opposed to just Game Center username. This is how it should have been done in the first place really. In the event of changing your Game Center username, you should first revisit any tiles owned before this update to re-register them with your id, as opposed to just you username. Sorry for any incovenience!
I just checked the leaderboards and someone has 800,000 gold! Is that possible or is it some sort of glitch? They passed me pretty instantaneous without passing me over time so it may be a glitch.
Looking into it now. There's a chance its the same bug that Yerti found, which would be really annoying as the fix for it just went live! Update: yeah it was that glitch. Worst timing ever. I'm a little unsure what to do as it wasn't their fault. If they don't come forward I could maybe patch out their mega-wealth in a future update. Just gotta decide whether to remove their high scores in the meantime...
You deserved it for doing the right thing. Since its been patched now, do you mind telling us the cause gormster?
Not just yet. Although the fix has gone live, I've seen another player rush to the top of the highscore this morning because of the glitch, because they haven't updated. I've hopefully disabled Game Center now at least, for player's using the old version, although I'm not 100% sure as it wasn't very clearly labelled in iTunes Connect.