Cavern is a fun roguelike with some unique features like secret rooms and NPC allies. If you're not into tirn based strategy but found Kingturn interesting enough then Cavern is a more action oriented safe bet. Currently Cavern has some issues with crashes (but great auto-save recovery and an active developer) yet is still well worth checking out. Although you really ought to give Kingturn more of a chance; in terms of gameplay depth and exhaustive content Kingturn is a superior, no contest.
@turakm: Should you ever feel like giving Kingturn a second try, I would actually recommend turning down the difficulty (maybe to 'Normal'). Kingtun is indeed a rather challenging game, even for those who have played a few other TBS titles before. Decreasing the difficulty (even slightly) makes a huge difference, though, and will turn Kingturn into a much more casual and maybe more enjoyable experience in your case. The sole purpose of the difficulty settings in Kingturn is to enable players to adapt the game play to their personal taste. So there's nothing embarrassing about turning down the difficulty .
@turakm: Turning down the difficulty (and especially the spamrate) surely helps. But then you will face less enemies, which results in your characters leveling slower, and getting less equipment and money. I recommend to stay on the standard difficulty settings and just take your time. If you are stuck, replay the scenario. Note that you will keep all XP, items and gold when you retreat before your last unit is defeated. Some scenarios are great for improving your army. In the beginning, focus on upgrading a few core units with good equipment. Just use what you find, buying equipment in the beginning does not make much of a difference, buying levelups I found much more rewarding until the expensive stuff shows up (e.g. with prices >250/300 gold). Get comfortable with using those units, see what they are good (and not so good) at, etc. Don't forget to use the "Level Up" in the camp menu. Good rule of thumb is to levelup any unit that costs less than 20 in the beginning, then <30, and in the endgame you can just go on a spending spree for whatever you like... Somewhere in this thread I posted on which scenarios I improved my army quite good, but cannot remember which those were. The "Treasure Maps" were pretty nice for that, I think. @everyone: We need something like a tactics manual, it seems
This is key. Once you realize you cannot win, retreat and try again. The gain in levels, a different set of tactics, or a new item may turn the tide the next time. And if, again, you're in a guaranteed losing position, retreat, try again. So long as you are smart, you can and will be able to beat the previously unbeatable.
Keep focus on the battle line, the further out you can control the field the better even if your troops dwindle you can replenish them. Early on when the enemy has just one barrack try to surround them and attack from different sides. Anything you can do to divide the enemy forces will help, sometimes sending an early "red herring" attack from the side will diver enemies so you can push from the other direction. Later on when multiple barracks are at play send forces to one barrack to keep enemies engaged while a few stronger units circle around to a less populated barrack to conquer and gain a stronger foothold on the level. I am also awful at SRPGs and TBS games; which is what makes those devilish buggers so appealing... it's a real love hate relationship. I think it took me so long to best Kingturn because the bleeping enemies were so vile and underhanded. ...but it's a methodical struggle like chess and you can eventually work your way up. If you've only played 2 scenarios of the prologue there's a good chance you might not be catching all the nuiances of each unit's power abilities, etc that might help deepen your appreciation.
Totally agree with the recommendations to adjust the difficulty level to suit you. I was starting to struggle with the game and tuned it down to where I was enjoying it again.
When the ETA of the patch? I have since stopped playing.. But this game is awesome will continue once I patch
I just finished the main storyline and the last battle was a bit of a nail biter and extremely fun! I also started the game on Normal difficulty and about midway switched over to the default (Strategist?) difficulty. I never hired mercenaries - just used the characters that joined up along the way. Which was bad and good, I guess. It wasn't too hard to keep troops well trained and geared, but there were some battles where I was grasping for straws and needed a second or third type of troop and didn't have them. Either way I loved the flexibility in troop composition and strategies. Great game and great storyline!
Interesting idea. I'll see whether we can integrate a few statistics. Would only work properly after a new play through, though. The patch will be hopefully released around April, 26. You can continue playing before the patch comes out, though. Just kill the Kingturn task once (via double tap on the home button and removing the Kingturn icon from the small task list at the bottom). Afterwards never use 'Exit to the main menu' from the battle field, and you will be fine.
We have started evaluating our options for iCloud support already. Right now our main problem is, that game-progress is constantly saved in Kingturn, so real time synchronization is a little tricky. There are also still quite a few issues with iCloud synchronization in general. The last thing we want to do is messing up a player's save games, so we have to tread carefully here. But we'll try our best to find a reliable solution to exchange Kingturn's game saves between devices.
Would it be easier to have a single button on the main menu that you'd have to push in order to upload/download from iCloud? And then all the constant local saves wouldn't have to touch iCloud.
This is pretty much the solution we have in mind right now (a Backup and a Restore button for manually transferring game progress / saves to and from the cloud). Afaik, this is not really the way the iCloud is supposed to be used, though. So I'm not entirely sure, yet, whether this kind of data dumping without any system (synchronization) interference is a feasible solution.
Your solution was posted in the comments section of the link you provided, "It's worth repeating that iCloud Document Sync works perfectly fine. This is the same type of service as Dropbox. It's CoreData and syncing relational databases that is having issues. Dropbox, BTW, can't be used for this purpose either. EDIT: Pages, Keynote, Numbers - these Apple iOS apps use iCloud Document Sync. They're flagship apps that have to "just work"."
I have disabled the automatic transfer of saves between devices in games that have them as an option. The automatic transfer is messy sometimes and not really reliable! I would agree that a good solution would be a backup/restore button for manual transfer of the game progress! A good example of a manual button for iCloud saves is the Heroes & Castles game by Fours4ken media.
Another good example is W.E.L.D.E.R., where I never had any issues pushing my save to the cloud and retrieving it later.
Kudos to Mangobile for looking into iCloud saves; my impression is few cross platform developers take platform specific features (like iCloud) seriously but it looks like they're really diving back in to iOS.
Just to make sure I'm not misunderstood ... My previous post was not meant as 'bashing' on Apple's iCloud. Synchronization issues seem to be very common among all cloud systems. Anyway, achieving a flawless document synchronization for an app is certainly not as simple as your cited comment makes it sound. There is no magical switch that makes synchronization happen automatically for an app (have a brief look at this developer tutorial). The fact that there are plenty of apps out there that support iCloud synchronization, doesn't tell us how many problems users might have with it, though. Anyway, my main point was this: Right now I can't tell, yet, whether we are able to achieve a flawless iCloud support in Kingturn.
Thanks a lot for the examples. It's reassuring to read that other games have successfully implemented a manual backup / restore mechanism already. We'll have a look into it!
