[WIP] Increstellar - conquer the galaxies

[LoSboccacc]

I've been working on a 4x game for mobile and desktop using phaser - Increstellar

It's a little strategy game that's built on the basis of approachability, borrowing heavily from the incremental genre to maintain a sense of progression and direction while trying to avoid the problems related to being unable to play a whole match in a single sitting and getting lost on resuming play midgame - it plays nicely on mobile and tablets and it's a nice coffee breaker if you're into that sort of things.

There's everything you'd expect from a 4x: build facilities to improve your economy, tend to your colonies, research and build better ships and conquer different aliens to gain sectors and find artifacts.

There are also some aspects that are proper of incrementals: there are multiple galaxies to conquer, each providing more resources and artifacts than the previous one, but having stronger enemies as well. The artifacts can be used to improve your empire, and those improvements become effective only trough a reset, so finding the right balance between expansion and contraction is the key to rapid advancement trough the systems.

In the future I'm planning to expand the strategic aspect of it: introduce the ability to customize ship loadouts, add stations defending special sectors, more weapons type and, if I can find a way to generate interesting events, more political bickering between colonies.

Devlog and other info: https://losboccacc.itch.io/increstellar/devlog

What you guys think? I'm interested in hearing opinions on the basic game loop and even on balance or other improvements you might think of while playing.

[Odk]

Hi,

I'm playing for almost 1h and I can say that it's quite nice. One thing for now is that there is no visual relation between ship level and fleet strength/performace. I don't get what ship upgrades give.

[Entian]

Hello,

I've played the game for a while (lost track of time, which is good :)), and I love it! Really nice work, keep it up! Here are the things I noticed:

- only some resources are visible at the top bar, while the game has more. Workforce and maintenance would be nice to see as well, for example in a "free/all" format. For example if you have 50 workforce available and 47 allocated, it could say: "Workforce: 3/50 ?" (I didn't find if the still available workforce (or even the total allocated one) is displayed anywhere at all, so I always added up the allocated ones every time to see how much I have left, which is quite tedious, and also the total maintenance is not visible on the research screen, while in some cases it would be useful. Also when I first saw the icon for the maintenance resource, I was confused what it was, because I couldn't find it in the top bar like the other resources)

- I agree with Odk, I didn't find anywhere what benefits do ship upgrades give me. Is it firepower, accuracy, speed? The only stats that are visible are hull, cost, and number of weapons, which all seem to remain the same regardless of upgrades (up to level 26), and the fleet strength also remains the same after upgrades. So it's difficult to decide whether to save research points for the terraforming (which gives a clear benefit) or use them for upgrades.

- small/medium/large weapon shots look almost the same, I couldn't really distinguish them. Would be nice if they had different colors, so I can see which of my weapons hit/do damage (right away, without the need to check the detailed statistics afterwards - which are nevertheless really nice). Would be even better if the colors would be different by empire, so I could see which are from the enemy and which are from my ships.

- basic game loop and balance: I really liked the game loop (planning the next move, allocating the resources properly, executing the action and reaping the rewards). I think the balance of the actions could use a little work, after a short while I just settled for expand and explore, and ignored exploit and exterminate completely, because they seem to grant significantly less benefit. Expand helps me become more powerful right away, while explore gives me the long term advantage with the civics. At the same time, exploit gives me things that I get anyway even if I don't do anything just go grab a coffee while the game runs, while for exterminate the threat reduction is really minuscule and disappears quickly. With those I just don't feel like I'm progressing at all. Also, for expanding it would be nice if I could select the specific sector, not just the empire I want to attack (at least I couldn't figure out how to do that)

I hope some of this feedback is useful. Good luck with the game, I will keep an eye on it!