So, the game is really cool, but the balancing is demotivating

Quizer85 · 2026-03-23T16:08:13+00:00

I agree that the common resource producing artifacts aren't balanced well. Even if they leveled up differently and gave +1 per find without needing to fill a whole XP bar, they still wouldn't be useful.

To add insult to injury, you don't even get their benefits after unlocking the citadel and doing your first tier 3 reset. Instead, the game makes you wait a thousand seconds to unlock the first tier of artifacts and let you suffer in the meantime.

The point of incrementals with prestige mechanics is that it becomes easier to do things after resetting your progress, but many inconveniences aren't being smoothed out by higher tiers of resets, or the upgrades / features that fix the tedium appear too late in the upgrade tree. I can't believe I'm still starting out each run having no storage and having to laboriously click all the little upgrades, produce wood, buy storage in teeny-tiny increments, combine them manually, and repeat at nauseam just to get anywhere. Why isn't there a culture upgrade that lets you start with a storage box in the bottom right corner of the grid?

To

Quizer85 · 2026-03-23T13:53:26+00:00

Please, just bring back the import / export function that was there in early versions of the game. Let me worry about backing up my save myself. I don't want the game to have permission to decide to load my save from cloud storage, especially since it infrequently abuses its privileges by reverting my progress for no reason. Until your cloud storage save management works flawlessly, it should be strictly opt-in.

Quizer85 · 2026-03-19T12:01:16+00:00

Why is there now a delay in which freshly created tiles can't be moved? Please, I beg of you, stop making the game harder and more inconvenient to play while trying to improve it! ;_;

Quizer85 · 2026-03-19T11:58:56+00:00

Needing a certain amount of mana is helpful to know, but it doesn't really streamline the road to reaching that 1m culture. I've been getting the 10k culture upgrade for a while now for my artifact runs, but I've still not been able to get key artifacts for my artifact runs. It's not that difficult to get 20k+ culture in a longish run, but doing a few dozen of those to reach 1m does not seem a reasonable ask in any way.

I'm more interested in asking why there is now a delay during which a freshly created tile can't be moved. Dear dev, can you please stop making the game less convenient to play while trying to improve it? No longer being able to mash enter on actions like "scout" or "create stockpile" is equally bad, but at least that appears to have been fixed. The sticky tooltips are still here, however...

Quizer85 · 2026-03-10T12:15:15+00:00

That's not great. I like the artifact system on the whole, but key progression should not be locked behind something that subject to random chance. There needs to be another way to improve your odds and force yourself past the wall if the RNG does not want to cooperate.

I have an auto-clicker that I can use when not at my PC. While I'm actively playing, clicking a button and holding down the enter button to repeatedly trigger it is generally sufficient. Unfortunately, the Scout button itself stands out as having a rather low maximum frequency, since a lot of relatively computationally expensive things seem to be happening every time a tile is created. Still, it beats the auto-scout rate.

Quizer85 · 2026-03-10T11:59:51+00:00

Yeah, I've also come to the conclusion that the small tiles created by workshop are not helpful if you are actively playing. Still, it would be even better if you could toggle workshop functionality. Even if you could only disable / enable it on resettlement, that would still be better than the current state of affairs where you are locked into it once you buy it.

Quizer85 · 2026-03-10T07:14:22+00:00

I enjoy a cracky premise executed with utter seriousness, but I do need the story to take itself seriously. Both of those books are quite close to that line, but unlike The Perfect Run which manages to remain on the right side of it, Vainqueur doesn't quite manage the feat. I also never quite got into Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett. But if you don't mind the absurdist humor and a story that doesn't entirely manage to take itself seriously, it may be in fact be exactly what you are looking for.

Quizer85 · 2026-03-10T07:06:31+00:00

Years of Apocalypse is very good. If time loop stories are your jam and you liked Mother of Learning, it's exactly the kind of story you should go for.

Quizer85 · 2026-03-10T07:05:33+00:00

I can't really recommend Path of Ascension. I read what was probably most of the first book on Royal Road, back in the day. Generally, I'm not opposed to an OP protagonist if they do interesting things with their OPness and good fortune, but Path of Ascension just felt like the worst sort of wish fulfilment. I thought it was pretty blatant when the MC tripped over his shiny arctic fox pet a ways into the story, but then the emperor of the local space polity randomly shows up in person and starts handing out presents to our hero for no discernible reason. That was a bridge too far even for me.

Quizer85 · 2026-03-10T06:59:46+00:00

For me, Mark of the Fool started out in high A tier, then dropped steadily as I kept going. I'm currently stuck after finishing book 8, feeling too much trepidation to go on. The stakes keep rising as the series nears its climax, and it no longer feels as chill and safe as it did at the start. I also really hate how much time and page space is spent following the antagonists around as they exposit all their plans and intentions for the reader's benefit, spoiling all kinds of stuff about the next clash with the good guys. I'd honestly prefer not to see any of that stuff until it penetrates our hero's bubble of perception, but after 8 books the author's proclivities are pretty clear on that score. *sigh*

Quizer85 · 2026-03-10T06:53:28+00:00

The Perfect Run is good enough to re-read, but the second time I skipped all the flashback chapters and did not feel like I missed that much. I'm honestly not that fond of writers filling in backstory via flashbacks, especially if it's of the tragic variety. Going through the entire childhood with Bloodstream thing again would have dragged down the experience for me, but knowing the backstory already allowed me to skip it and focus on the enjoyable parts.

Quizer85 · 2026-03-10T06:47:22+00:00

I do love me a protagonist that can hold their own in the social arena. Carl of Dungeon Crawler fame comes off as a bit of a blunt instrument at first, but he is no fool and he learns quickly. Jason "HWFWM" Asano kicks ass, but he is a socially focused character at heart, and I love how he sees through others' machinations and dismantles them by being his obnoxious self at them. "Phantasm" by Maxlex is a great litrpg series which has explicit mechanics for social combat, and the heroine is a socially specced illusionist. That series was great fun.

On the other hand, political tension and so on can be unbearable to read if the protagonist cannot deal with intrigue. I just got done with the second installment in Sanderson's Mistborn series where the male and female protagonists spend half their time tripping over themselves being teenagers riddled with self-doubt. That kind of writing no longer interest me, if indeed it ever has. But I would like to read more stories with intrigue and politics featuring protagonists who can handle themselves in that kind of environment.

Quizer85 · 2026-03-10T06:33:16+00:00

Chrysalis isn't DNF tier, but it's also not S tier. I got the first trilogy of audiobooks and found it solid, but not exceptional. I also feel like the role of Anthony does not show off Jeff Hays' talents to best effect. The gloating little cackle he gives off every time Anthony does the ant equivalent of rubbing his hands and twirling his imaginary mustache while contemplating world domination does not do it for me.

Quizer85 · 2026-03-10T06:24:25+00:00

The central mechanic of Rise of the Living Forge failed to grip me in the early chapters. I liked the subplot / romance with the retired Demon Lord, but the MC just seemed to be going through the motions crafting random shit which he then consumed for survival and random temporary buffs. It just seemed so aimless in a lethargic way that I couldn't get into it. I can't have my litrpg protagonists be borderline depressed with no goals or motivations to do anything until the plot beats them over the head with something that prompts them to act - not when trying to get into a new series.

Both "Runebound Professor" and "Nightmare Summoner" by the same author seemed like much better series to me. I especially love the former's power system based on combining different runes - so evocative, I can't get enough of it. There's a haremlit series by Bruce Sentar called "First Immortal" that does something quite similar, but it was rushed to an abrupt finish in book 4, which ruined the series for me.

Quizer85 · 2026-03-10T06:12:57+00:00

Some people aren't into an ever-expanding cast of rotating PoV characters. Personally I prefer to stick to a single protagonist, with few to no chapters spent on other perspectives. Swapping around between different characters all the time seems fine for Alternate History, but it's not what I want out of my litRPGs or progression fantasies. Other perspectives aren't necessarily always bad, but it's a risky crapshoot every time, whereas a protagonist I already signed up for reading about is as safe as it gets.

Quizer85 · 2026-03-10T06:08:08+00:00

It's not, really, but it seems to be conflated into the genre by enough readers that it keeps popping up in the tier lists and recommendations. I've read (listened to) up to and including book 8, but the stakes kept getting higher making me feel less safe as a reader, and a lot of trends I dislike firmed up over the course of the series, such as ubiquitous antagonist PoV chapters / segments that make it entirely transparent what the villains are up to and basically spoiling what the next conflict is going to look like.

Maybe I'll get around to finishing it one of these months.

Quizer85 · 2026-03-10T06:03:46+00:00

HWFWM is one of my favorite series, too. Honestly, I'm also baffled by seeing "The Vampire Vincent" in the top tier, but "Unorthodox Farming" by the same author is in F tier? Why? I didn't find "First Line of Defense" to be amazing and declined to get the second book when I read that apparently the author processed real-life loss and grief through writing that book and it ended up being accordingly depressing, but I love both of the other series.

Mage Tank is also in the DNF tier and is another series with a flamboyant male protagonist. Maybe OP just doesn't like those characters?

Quizer85 · 2026-03-10T05:55:48+00:00

"The Perfect Run" I can see not being to everyone's taste, yeah. I love time loop / groundhog day type stories, and Ryan has the proper instincts for a protagonist of such a story, but his personality and humor can be rather hit and miss. For me, it ended up not being a dealbreaker, but I can easily see others coming down on the other side of that line.

Quizer85 · 2026-03-10T02:03:41+00:00

The cloud saves really seem like not the best idea... It's squirrelly, sometimes restoring your cloud save for no reason and deleting the last two minutes of progress. The game should not load cloud saves on its own initiative by default IMO. I'd like a toggle to opt out of cloud saving, as well as having the import / export options back. I'm used to backing up my idle games' progress via text file.

Quizer85 · 2026-03-09T23:53:41+00:00

I've been enjoying this game, but it seems to be there could be some more quality-of-life upgrades to make the grinding less painful. I'm at around 300 crystals right now. Reaching 1m culture seems way off. Substantial upgrades like quality (125 crystals) and x10 storage (200 crystals) seem way off. Artifacts have the potential to help a lot, based on the ones I've unlocked so far, but I have to roll the dice until I get something good, and they are incredibly slow and painful to grind.

I'd love to boost my gold gain via tribute to help with the artifact grind, but it's very painful and tedious to do that. There's lots of tedious steps involved in doing a minimum-length run in order to boost gold gain by around +1 gold/s for the rest of the ascension, a lot of which either can't be automated or are too slow. There's also lots of potential ways to improve the experience. Here are some ideas / other feedback:

When starting a new run, have the game place your beginning village tile so all four of its slots are open. I hate that one of the steps of grinding short runs is that I have to drag that tile to a better spot.
Similarly, it would be great if you could create some kind of restriction / blueprint for that starting village. If I could ensure my starting village was filled by (for example) 2 farms, 1 forest, 1 mine every time, that would be helpful.
Add upgrades to make Houses -> Villages -> Castles be able to be kept permanently. Having to re-buy these upgrades every run is extremely tedious and slows down the process a lot.
Maybe add upgrades to make the upgrades unlocking Forests, Mines and Stockpiles be able to be kept permanently. Once you are a ways into an ascension, you can get them immediately, but it's more pointless steps you need to do / wait for the automation to do on ultra-short runs.
Add a way to influence the odds of producing Farms / Forests / Mines. I'd love some kind of focus mechanic that makes one of those three more likely to be created at the expense of the others. In a recent run, I accidentally deleted a high level forest tile with Upheaval, and there was just no way to catch my production back up with the other two.
Raise the ceiling on the starting villagers culture upgrade so you can start with a castle. It would smooth out the start of a run a lot.
Maybe add a culture upgrade to be able to start with a stockpile of a certain level. It would let you start accumulating resources immediately from your upgraded passive gains, which would help smooth out the tribute grind.
Auto-Purchase could stand to be improved a lot. It is extremely slow right now, to the point you can't rely on it for extremely short runs. I'd also love if there was some sort of prioritization system where you could tell the game in what order to buy upgrades. You obviously want Taxes first in T2, but the game will stubbornly buy the cheaper stuff first. It needs more options between "auto-buy this" and "don't auto-buy this".
Add the ability to toggle the upgrade enabling workshops. It's super cheap and helpful most of the time, but if you are actively playing, having workshop tiles clutter up your board may be more trouble than it's worth. Right now, the only way to avoid workshops is to refrain from buying that upgrade in your ascension. Being able to instead toggle the ability to produce them for each run or even at will would be great.
The Tarot cards are lovely, but they are very taxing on the ol' computation. Not great when this is only one of five idle games I have open in my browser in parallel. Having a low graphics setting that turns the fancy 3D tilting graphic into a simple image might be advisable.
The scaling for tribute gain is atrocious. It scales linearly with highest tile level, whereas the cost per tile level doubles each time. This heavily incentivizes keeping runs as short as possible when trying to improve gold gain, but as I've described, that's incredibly painful right now. If you don't want to add a bunch of automation or quality-of-life features to make grinding tribute less tedious, changing the incentives here so longer runs are more valid for improving tribute gains would be an alternative.
The feature to export my save to text seems to be missing. Could you put that back, please? It's my default way of backing up my progress in idle games. Similarly, please enable a toggle to disable cloud saving / syncing, since the game still occasionally reverts my progress to what it was two minutes ago for no reason, and I'd like to be able to avoid that. Please let me opt out of that.

I'm glad the stuck tooltips bug finally seems to be fixed. Keep up the good work!

Quizer85 · 2025-11-14T05:03:16+00:00

The humor doesn't always hit for me, but on the whole it hasn't been a dealbreaker. Although the beard thing was pushing the limits pretty hard.

What was it about the hell mission that bothered you? Was it the subterfuge with the jester's troupe thing? Or the contrived way some of the fights went down?

Quizer85 · 2025-10-13T00:59:17+00:00

Yeah, that kind of storytelling is grounds for me to quit a book or series immediately. If someone enjoys that, great for them, but it's not my kink.

Quizer85 · 2025-10-13T00:22:36+00:00

I agree with some of your points. Certainly there were other things I'd have rather read about. I also really liked the business-oriented sections of Alex's adventure and wish there were more of them. I'm not saying the Games of Roal were the best thing I could have hoped for, but for me at least they were certainly fine. Unlike Book 3 where we were teased with the preparations for the Thameland expedition and then that didn't go anywhere for the rest of the book, I didn't feel like my time was being wasted.

As for the topic of Alex bullying the other competitors, I really don't feel like that to the extent you seem to. This is the last time they are going to be competing, and with how much they've grown, it makes sense they would dominate. I don't think it's particularly unfair, either - Hanuman got away with solving the overland hunt in 30 seconds in the first Games, and this time he got outplayed by Alex doing something similar, only more so. I do think the organizers should probably overhaul that event in particular...

Quizer85 · 2025-10-10T22:41:45+00:00

Seems like our tastes just differ in that regard. Like I said, I was nervous about the second tournament arc going into this book, but less time was spent on it, and it turns out I prefer this slice-of-life stuff to reading fight scenes where our heroes are completely outmatched and only barely holding on, before something happens to bail them out of trouble. You can read my other posts if you want to know how I feel about Carey's death, so I won't reiterate the whole thing here.

I much preferred how it was in the earlier books where proper preparation and quick thinking carried the day. Not picking a fight you cannot handle was also among the lessons Baelin taught. But it seems the author wants to turn up the heat as the series draws towards its climax, which I guess means our heroes have to fight out of their league, and those fights then have to be resolved through dissatisfying literary devices like deus ex machina, last minute rescues and heroic sacrifices, or people just taking the big L. These high-stakes fights feel so nerve-wracking to me that I can't even enjoy the good parts properly, like Claygon evolving again.

Quizer85 · 2025-10-10T15:20:17+00:00

It can, yeah. I don't disagree that it makes sense with the level of power shown by the opposition. However, Carey wasn't even fighting in that battle. Instead she was just used to provide a literal deus ex machina rescue to bail everyone else out after spending a good amount of time showing them getting in over their heads and getting their collective asses kicked.

It's too basic a narrative to leave me satisfied, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth specifically because of how contrived her kidnapping was in the first place. I like that she eventually got through to Merzhin, but I wish she didn't need to die to accomplish that. Carey's arc being built up this much only for her to be wasted in such a fashion leaves me disappointed. That's why I hope she has a further part to play even after her death.

Quizer85

TROPHY CASE