I wrote a review for this game and found out steam reviews had a character limit. So I ended up making a video. Let me know if this is something you guys would be interested in, or an appropriate place to post, as I don’t want to post a youtube link without permission.
Short, important feedback : Flattening tool is unintuitive, particularly concerning nodes on the sides of mountains. Quarries/deep mines need to be built on top of them so I end up layering several times and its hard to predict exactly what the result will be.
Entertainment % is somehow perfectly worded, but unintuitive to me lol. Only matters if going for 100% achievement. The games suggestion [in the happiness summary] is to build more entertainment venues but I don’t think its exactly that straightforward as it seems possible to get less value from more venues.
I played 120 hours so far and enjoyed it enough to write down my thoughts, or ~3000 words. Thanks for the fun! Looking forward to more.
I have found the flattening tool needs to be used like this. Rotate the picture so that the highest point is along a line in line with the squares on the screen. Flatten one line. Come back after and flatten two lines. Keep doing this until the area you want is all flattened. For deep mines, especially quarries, use the maximum amount possible, always with the intent of the mining area being kept in the centre. It may take 6 or 7 attempts but always keep flattening in the same line/s from the same position. Use a CTRL+ ALT+number camera save.
Interesting, thank you for the precise reply. I ended up doing several variations of this and that’s kind of the question I was trying to solve.
I think it could be useful to have some in-game text that says “start flattening from highest / lowest position”, “this process needs to be repeated”, etc… or perhaps just show an outline of the expected result? It makes sense that flattening the side of a mountain should take a fair amount of time, so repeating the process seems fine, but I think somehow just making it more intuitive or informing the player more could go a long way.
These two things [flattening tool + entertainment] were the only functions of the game that I found to be confusing and might lead to frustration particularly with folks who don’t want to go online to look for solutions. I did this and found discussions from much earlier versions of the game, so it’s hard to tell exactly what is viable… and meta data just lead me to frustrated posts on the topic lol.