I really enjoyed playing this game, the whole art style is what sells it to me, it´s also very addicting, getting the good ending was hard but with the OP combo of Barns and rats/summoners anything is possible.
I learned that to use the books more effectively it´s better to pause in the middle of the battle and not use them all at the start, unless there´s archers, then it´s better to cancel their bows with the curse, overall the strategy part of the game is really fun.
Now I have the urge to make a tierlist of which units are the best :)
That's really addictive game!
The gameplay is great
By playing dozens of times and achieving 5 or 6 victories with positive HP, and more of that with 0 HP, I could say that the major challenge of the game is not about getting power and ruining enemies, but is about the simultaneous growth of potential and keeping it in check at the same time. The most painful losses occur when you encounter the King too early because of too too-powerful build for beginning levels (especially high-level Bard-Summonner/Ratfolk setups). The power of the King grew over time too, but not so fast as the power of the Witch, so, the strategy is about losing the minimum number of both red and blue hearts at each level to maximize the number of rounds before the boss battle. Nevertheless, there is another reason to keep growth in check. Level3 items are very powerful, but if you are creating L3 item when there are already 3 or 4 bones in the tub, your are getting one cool Tier 4 item (like jumbo milk or succubus or big boned) in the shop for it. But if you are crafting L3 item with 1 or 2 bones in the tub, you are getting some useless shit for it, like excalibur. So, that's another example, of when you should constrain your potential until the third bone is in the tub and not create L3 items, but just prepare for it. I'm interested if this encouragement for slow growth was intended or that's for coincidence, because seen something similar in roguelike card (dice) games, when you have good attack cards (dices) and can finish the round instantly, but the game encourages you to prolong the round as long as you can to heal it up until the end of the round (in that games that's a little bit annoying).
Here is a screen for my best run in the attachment. Managed to prolong the game for 12 rounds, and did the boss fight flawlessly (all the 3 lanes were mopped up with serious advantage). 3 HP were lost in the midgame. Maybe even when waited for three bones in a tub to craft my first L3 and make sure that I would not get lousy gift for it
PS: regarding the perf problems: I'm using Macbook m1 with 8GB RAM and after playing 3-4 games in a row without reloading page (pressing in-game restart button instead) the game becomes unplayable, - animation becomes slow, sound starts to freeze for fractions of a second. Page reloading tackles the problem.
Beat it on run 6 or 7, in 11 turns, mostly by the combined power of a bard, rats, and the demon spawner. I like that you don't have to defeat the sons, both slipped through but this was my second king encounter so I knew to put all the big guns in the middle lane.
Well balanced game, very nice look, tight and fun game loop. I think this could have success on steam / mobile, maybe you'd earn something. You could make this a rogue lite and expand it in that case. At any rate, thank you for the fun I had.
Minor bug where I defeated the game but was not crowned glorious overlord of the township. Could be considered a feature to teach us not all heroics go acknowledged. Back to the cauldron!
There's a really minor bug I came across, I'm having difficulty figuring out the exact conditions, but here's my best guess: If I defeat all enemies extremely quickly while in fast-forward mode (eg: first two rounds, using a Bowie or Stoner) my units will take a couple more steps forward after 'winning', before they jump all the way to the end. It doesn't actually have any effect whatsoever on gameplay and it's not even all that irritating, but I thought I may as well call it to your attention. (and yes, being able to fast-forward is awesome!)
Thanks for reporting!!! I introduced a behaviour so that, when there is an active archer or a cursed unit, the "jumping to the end" was deactivated. I can simply make it ask if there are any enemies and if not, to ignore that, and that should be it! Next patch!!
Wow thanks! Also, I'm impressed you were able to make the menu soundtrack distinct without out making another track. Seems like the boss music track is used in another game, I'll check it out. :)
Love this game. Spent too much time playing it. Thanks for making it and updating it.
Some gameplay/balance suggestions:
Nurse - Text says 'heals hurt allies' however only heals 1 unit each time. The upgraded nurses feels redundant as not many enemies deal more than 3 damage anyway. Consider upgrades being able to heal from lethal damage or heal multiple units in lane (to protect from range damage)
Excalibur - really weak and requires a lot of set up to make work.
Wizard - clunky to play. it would be much smoother if you could "load up" spells. Also on upgrade maybe attack multiple units instead of more damage. He feels like kobold/archer with extra steps at the moment.
Pigman - Even with upgrades he is weak relative to his tier 3 peers. Every 3rd step is just too slow
Succubus - Giving an upgraded succubus a shield removes the blessing. This doesn't really matter because succubus is so strong anyway haha.
items - It might be nice to have 1 or 2 other items to increase variety. E.g add the bow as an attacking item or a heal scroll (heal when taking fatal damage) or blessing cross as utility items.
Not forcing the use of gold to start a round might be interesting. Allowing strategies of saving up gold at the cost of life to get better units
Add text explaining the spying costs 2 gold. Maybe it's just me but I played 20+ rounds always saving 1 spy for the final round before realising you could spy at the cost of gold after using up the 3 free spys
I really need to rewrite the text for the nurse, probably next patch!
And i might consider a rebalance for the pigman. He is QUITE strong in later levels, but maybe too weak starting out?
And i'll see about the spying! Editing UI always sucks but i'll keep it noted as something that should be touched up!
As for the other things, they are mostly intended behaviour and/or unchangeable.
Excalibur is intended to work that way, he does require a lot of setup, but i quite like that! It's a whole event with a huge payoff.
Wizards are divisive, but they are working as intended! I really really like how they work.
They do need setup to work, too, as you are supposed to be going for a mostly magic build (and therefore have weaker/fewer units). The fact that they make you use your magic in turns, and strategize, goes perfectly with them, imo: you kind of feel smart in a way. A "brains triumph over strenght" vibe. I could maybe make them stronger in early levels to make up for that, but they do tons of damage already!
Extra items would throw off the balance of the randomness, but there will be new items when new decks of units come around! Some day! But it's in development <<
The forcing of gold is intended! I want people to roll instead of saving, and see different choices and freeze some units to buy. That would be discouraged otherwise, which in turn would also make the game truly random, as you would only use the three units the market gives you and that's it!
Thanks a lot for the feedback!! I'll get those other things checked for next patch!
I played Excalibur again and tried to go all in on his damage just for fun (it was).
With that in mind you should increase the damage cap from 99. Its completely unnessecary but I feel let down I couldn't get 300+ damage when I levelled up my beefy 75dmg lv 1 excalibur haha
I love the game Stopsignal, ive been playing it for a while, and this is the best ive managed so far, ill comment again if i can win.
Also, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR UPDATING THE FAST FORWARD, it feels so much nicer now. I just happened to check the dev log, so, here is your thank you. :)
Conceptually straightforward, and considerably fun! Kudos to the dev - it's a very solid gameplay loop and I definitely enjoyed the few hours I spent on it trying different builds!
this game is awesome, but I think It could have more chalenges, quests and why not, more enemies on the late game, maybe a tier 5 and 6. There is so mutch potencial about this game! By the way, I finaly got the last self-imposed quests: finish in less than 9 turns and finis in more than 13 turns
Wanted to add that the recent changes to the Royalist class feel MUCH fairer! They're way less actively frustrating to deal with and makes ranged gameplay way more viable early on.
okay now i don’t know if this is the worlds biggest skill issue or an actual glitch but for the past 3 rounds, i’ve used multiple bowies/archers on my team in the same lane
and they ALWAYS hit the same target with their arrows.
This remains one of my favorite games on this website. Whenever I have time to kill, i always return to this game. Thanks for making such a fun and engaging thing!
Hah, thank you so much! I hope one day i get the willpower to add more to it, i have so much stuff thought up but damn, the effort needed is quite a lot too!
love this game find myself playing it a lot. update wise i would ove to see a lot of things, but to keep you from needing new UI maybe some odd recipies of combining two different level 3 things. pig and kobold give us manbearpig or something.
I have suspected for a while now that the "random" targeting for the archer NPCs (both the enemy and ally variants) isn't actually random and just makes things harder for you, and this was confirmed in a recent game that I had.
Enemy had 15 units, two of which were the Royalist type (which is immune to the first hit they receive from ranged attacks and counterattacks on that first hit). I had a single level two archer unit in my bottom row. IF the formula for calculating the archer's target is actually random, the first time that my archer fired there was a 2/15 chance that it would hit a Royalist that still had its counterattack perk active. It hit a Royalist. Now the second time that the archer fired, there was a 1/15 chance that the archer hit a Royalist that still had its counterattack perk active. It hit the other Royalist. The chance of this happening randomly, given the assumption that each unit has an equal chance to be targeted, is 2/225 or a 0.89% chance.
I don't know if this is intentional but I completely avoid archer units for this reason because these results are typical of my experience playing with them. They're a huge hindrance to your own team, and they're extremely frustrating to deal with on the enemy team because they seem to always attack targets together.
Hah, but it kinda was! Instead of making a list and choosing a random unit from there, I just looped through every unit and gave them an small chance to be the victim. This loop didn't end when choosing someone, so last units to appear had more chance to be chosen!
This made bowies shoot knights and made archers snipe succubuses, oops
Bone Book Lv 3 + Bard (or any units that needs walking, like Kobolt, cause Lv. 3 change from normal skeleton to Summoner) Armor + Succubus (or any high dmg unit works)
Blessing Book Lv. 3 — Also gives 2x DMG on next hit. Spells on Flying Skull carries over to its summons. (Flying Skull + Funny Bones)
I think that the difficulty is not a problem in and of itself, but some skeletons are useless or appear too late to be useful, which can be a personal issue. Nevertheless, I have completed 13 runs so far and I still want to play more. Amazing art, incredibly creative, but a little too unbalanced
The only things I find useless are the bless (spell not punk rock skeleton) archers are trash after first few levels as even if there is only one royalist it seems they shoot them most every time, get nulified, and damage your front line.
the bless spell is the one thing that actually made me beat the game, when combined with succubus just 1-2 bless spells with succubus can literally win an entire flank
Me and the brother once did it in 5. (This was BEFORE the recent update, so probably impossible now).
I got reasonablly reliable at doing it in 7. You probably want to focus on rats, and loading up flying skulls with Funny bones (creates a chain of skulls and bones)
i died to archers because the archers killed my charm unit so it failed to charm the mega knight and i died bruh and it also killed me healr and buff unit for my summons
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I really enjoyed playing this game, the whole art style is what sells it to me, it´s also very addicting, getting the good ending was hard but with the OP combo of Barns and rats/summoners anything is possible.
I learned that to use the books more effectively it´s better to pause in the middle of the battle and not use them all at the start, unless there´s archers, then it´s better to cancel their bows with the curse, overall the strategy part of the game is really fun.
Now I have the urge to make a tierlist of which units are the best :)
That's really addictive game! The gameplay is great By playing dozens of times and achieving 5 or 6 victories with positive HP, and more of that with 0 HP, I could say that the major challenge of the game is not about getting power and ruining enemies, but is about the simultaneous growth of potential and keeping it in check at the same time. The most painful losses occur when you encounter the King too early because of too too-powerful build for beginning levels (especially high-level Bard-Summonner/Ratfolk setups). The power of the King grew over time too, but not so fast as the power of the Witch, so, the strategy is about losing the minimum number of both red and blue hearts at each level to maximize the number of rounds before the boss battle. Nevertheless, there is another reason to keep growth in check. Level3 items are very powerful, but if you are creating L3 item when there are already 3 or 4 bones in the tub, your are getting one cool Tier 4 item (like jumbo milk or succubus or big boned) in the shop for it. But if you are crafting L3 item with 1 or 2 bones in the tub, you are getting some useless shit for it, like excalibur. So, that's another example, of when you should constrain your potential until the third bone is in the tub and not create L3 items, but just prepare for it. I'm interested if this encouragement for slow growth was intended or that's for coincidence, because seen something similar in roguelike card (dice) games, when you have good attack cards (dices) and can finish the round instantly, but the game encourages you to prolong the round as long as you can to heal it up until the end of the round (in that games that's a little bit annoying).
Here is a screen for my best run in the attachment. Managed to prolong the game for 12 rounds, and did the boss fight flawlessly (all the 3 lanes were mopped up with serious advantage). 3 HP were lost in the midgame. Maybe even when waited for three bones in a tub to craft my first L3 and make sure that I would not get lousy gift for it
PS: regarding the perf problems: I'm using Macbook m1 with 8GB RAM and after playing 3-4 games in a row without reloading page (pressing in-game restart button instead) the game becomes unplayable, - animation becomes slow, sound starts to freeze for fractions of a second. Page reloading tackles the problem.
Really love this game. It's the first game I purchased on Itch.io. I've sunk about 5 hours into the browser version already.
Keep up the good work. I love your art style. I'd also love to connect and chat about how you make games. Ping me on discord: briandouglas_71953
Good in every aspect : Visually appealing, music is pretty good, great replayability and a tough challenge for sure !
Esta god.
cool
Took a while but I finally got the good endings.
No sé inglés pero está guapísimo
2 hard 4 me
One of the best auto-battlers I have ever played
Suuch a well-thought and enjoyable game, thank you! I donated and can’t wait for updates!
what a wonderful game!Wish to support it on kickstarter
Auto Necrochess Gameplay
Beat it on run 6 or 7, in 11 turns, mostly by the combined power of a bard, rats, and the demon spawner. I like that you don't have to defeat the sons, both slipped through but this was my second king encounter so I knew to put all the big guns in the middle lane.
Well balanced game, very nice look, tight and fun game loop. I think this could have success on steam / mobile, maybe you'd earn something. You could make this a rogue lite and expand it in that case. At any rate, thank you for the fun I had.
Minor bug where I defeated the game but was not crowned glorious overlord of the township. Could be considered a feature to teach us not all heroics go acknowledged. Back to the cauldron!
There's a really minor bug I came across, I'm having difficulty figuring out the exact conditions, but here's my best guess: If I defeat all enemies extremely quickly while in fast-forward mode (eg: first two rounds, using a Bowie or Stoner) my units will take a couple more steps forward after 'winning', before they jump all the way to the end. It doesn't actually have any effect whatsoever on gameplay and it's not even all that irritating, but I thought I may as well call it to your attention. (and yes, being able to fast-forward is awesome!)
Thanks for reporting!!! I introduced a behaviour so that, when there is an active archer or a cursed unit, the "jumping to the end" was deactivated. I can simply make it ask if there are any enemies and if not, to ignore that, and that should be it! Next patch!!
again, thanks for reporting!!!
Wow, that was a prompt reply. Makes sense! Writing code logic is difficult :)
Can you post all 3 tracks from the OST. If you already did can you give me some pointers.
https://soundcloud.com/bauti777/auto-necrochess-battle-theme
https://soundcloud.com/bauti777/unnamed
here you go! except the menu loop, which is just a part of the firt one repeating over and over!
Wow thanks! Also, I'm impressed you were able to make the menu soundtrack distinct without out making another track. Seems like the boss music track is used in another game, I'll check it out. :)
nice game, i jsut suck at it :-/
Love this game. Spent too much time playing it. Thanks for making it and updating it.
Some gameplay/balance suggestions:
thanks for the feedback!!!
I really need to rewrite the text for the nurse, probably next patch!
And i might consider a rebalance for the pigman. He is QUITE strong in later levels, but maybe too weak starting out?
And i'll see about the spying! Editing UI always sucks but i'll keep it noted as something that should be touched up!
As for the other things, they are mostly intended behaviour and/or unchangeable.
Excalibur is intended to work that way, he does require a lot of setup, but i quite like that! It's a whole event with a huge payoff.
Wizards are divisive, but they are working as intended! I really really like how they work.
They do need setup to work, too, as you are supposed to be going for a mostly magic build (and therefore have weaker/fewer units). The fact that they make you use your magic in turns, and strategize, goes perfectly with them, imo: you kind of feel smart in a way. A "brains triumph over strenght" vibe. I could maybe make them stronger in early levels to make up for that, but they do tons of damage already!
Extra items would throw off the balance of the randomness, but there will be new items when new decks of units come around! Some day! But it's in development <<
The forcing of gold is intended! I want people to roll instead of saving, and see different choices and freeze some units to buy. That would be discouraged otherwise, which in turn would also make the game truly random, as you would only use the three units the market gives you and that's it!
Thanks a lot for the feedback!! I'll get those other things checked for next patch!
Thanks for the reply.
I played Excalibur again and tried to go all in on his damage just for fun (it was).
With that in mind you should increase the damage cap from 99. Its completely unnessecary but I feel let down I couldn't get 300+ damage when I levelled up my beefy 75dmg lv 1 excalibur haha
weird to comment in my own game, but just to show the new fullscreen features (and a really good run)! (;
This game is so fun!
After 20+ runs, I finally figured out the secret ending...
Finally a turn 7
this game is so fluid now! even on normal speed is way better! that's awesome, congrats!
theres a bug on the browser version were the speed of the entire game and all the animations/tweens are very slow
Can't seem to replicate it! What's your browser?
google
I used to have this issue when I only had 8GB of ram.
Important: there is a bug with the lvl 3 succubus that makes her instakill the king or princes with the lil projectile she has (hi this is me the dev)
new mission: try to kill king with lil projectile.
awesome update with the fast forward
I love the game Stopsignal, ive been playing it for a while, and this is the best ive managed so far, ill comment again if i can win.
Also, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR UPDATING THE FAST FORWARD, it feels so much nicer now. I just happened to check the dev log, so, here is your thank you. :)
Conceptually straightforward, and considerably fun! Kudos to the dev - it's a very solid gameplay loop and I definitely enjoyed the few hours I spent on it trying different builds!
thank you so much!!! <3
i don’t think you can get a luckier turn 1 than this holy
oh damn that is actually perfect o:
Or a second boss (for example after winning against the king you have to fight others country or even god)
Hah, one day! First let's get the game on phones <<
S2
Wanted to add that the recent changes to the Royalist class feel MUCH fairer! They're way less actively frustrating to deal with and makes ranged gameplay way more viable early on.
Great!! <3
okay now i don’t know if this is the worlds biggest skill issue or an actual glitch but for the past 3 rounds, i’ve used multiple bowies/archers on my team in the same lane
and they ALWAYS hit the same target with their arrows.
Interesting! How many enemies were there? That is quite strange D:
I edited the randomness the other day, it should work! dang, hahahaha
don’t think the enemy count influences it, it seemed to happen no matter what
the images below are 5 different instances of it happening
This is invaluable, thank you so much! I'll check it out!
I made a prior comment about the archers being not at all random, and the author acknowledged that this is the case and will be fixed soon.
I got 1 hp point.
I killed the king.
There left a prince on the side.
I have one succubus against prince.
but charm takes no effects on prince.
the prince passed the end and I heared the failure bells.
but the final screen shows I've taking the kingdom.
I'm I lose or am I win?
You have on and lost! Maybe next time you can win without dying? Hahahahah, still, good job! it's a hard game!
This remains one of my favorite games on this website. Whenever I have time to kill, i always return to this game. Thanks for making such a fun and engaging thing!
Hah, thank you so much! I hope one day i get the willpower to add more to it, i have so much stuff thought up but damn, the effort needed is quite a lot too!
love this game find myself playing it a lot. update wise i would ove to see a lot of things, but to keep you from needing new UI maybe some odd recipies of combining two different level 3 things. pig and kobold give us manbearpig or something.
Hah! That's a cool idea, but it's a toooon of work hahahah
One day? ( I don't think so, but I love to dream)
I have suspected for a while now that the "random" targeting for the archer NPCs (both the enemy and ally variants) isn't actually random and just makes things harder for you, and this was confirmed in a recent game that I had.
Enemy had 15 units, two of which were the Royalist type (which is immune to the first hit they receive from ranged attacks and counterattacks on that first hit). I had a single level two archer unit in my bottom row. IF the formula for calculating the archer's target is actually random, the first time that my archer fired there was a 2/15 chance that it would hit a Royalist that still had its counterattack perk active. It hit a Royalist. Now the second time that the archer fired, there was a 1/15 chance that the archer hit a Royalist that still had its counterattack perk active. It hit the other Royalist. The chance of this happening randomly, given the assumption that each unit has an equal chance to be targeted, is 2/225 or a 0.89% chance.
I don't know if this is intentional but I completely avoid archer units for this reason because these results are typical of my experience playing with them. They're a huge hindrance to your own team, and they're extremely frustrating to deal with on the enemy team because they seem to always attack targets together.
okkkkkkk alright you got me :(
in my defense it was out of lazyness, not out of malice (?
I'll update it soon!
I don't think you can call anything you do in a game that is completely free "malicious" but I appreciate the effort either way! <3
Hah, but it kinda was! Instead of making a list and choosing a random unit from there, I just looped through every unit and gave them an small chance to be the victim. This loop didn't end when choosing someone, so last units to appear had more chance to be chosen!
This made bowies shoot knights and made archers snipe succubuses, oops
Bone Book Lv 3 + Bard (or any units that needs walking, like Kobolt, cause Lv. 3 change from normal skeleton to Summoner)
Armor + Succubus (or any high dmg unit works)
Blessing Book Lv. 3 — Also gives 2x DMG on next hit.
Spells on Flying Skull carries over to its summons.
(Flying Skull + Funny Bones)
Both +1 Hp/ATK per turn are Super Strong
succubus's charm takes no effects on king and prince
I think that the difficulty is not a problem in and of itself, but some skeletons are useless or appear too late to be useful, which can be a personal issue. Nevertheless, I have completed 13 runs so far and I still want to play more. Amazing art, incredibly creative, but a little too unbalanced
The only things I find useless are the bless (spell not punk rock skeleton) archers are trash after first few levels as even if there is only one royalist it seems they shoot them most every time, get nulified, and damage your front line.
the bless spell is the one thing that actually made me beat the game, when combined with succubus just 1-2 bless spells with succubus can literally win an entire flank
Has anyone been able to clear sooner than 8 turns, I keep getting close but always end up 1 or 2 hearts short
Me and the brother once did it in 5. (This was BEFORE the recent update, so probably impossible now).
I got reasonablly reliable at doing it in 7. You probably want to focus on rats, and loading up flying skulls with Funny bones (creates a chain of skulls and bones)
i died to archers because the archers killed my charm unit so it failed to charm the mega knight and i died bruh and it also killed me healr and buff unit for my summons