Steam says that I played about ten hours of Clockwork Empires yesterday (it was probably less than that as I paused occasionally to come back here to find answers to questions like "what am I supposed to do with cults?" and "what is up with the stockpiles being mostly empty and people leaving stuff all over the ground?"). Even if it wasn't total play time, I still spent ten hours on Clockwork Empires, so you can call that my vote for it being a great game. Even in its unfinished state, it has leapfrogged hundreds of games to take a place in my "favourite games" list (which isn't numbered, sorry). The last game I played yesterday - #8 - went for about four and a half hours and got up to around day 30. I quit for three reasons: I was tired and needed to go to bed. It was running incredibly slowly - the day/night cycle took much longer than at the start of the game, and I couldn't do anything new. The refinery would not refine any metal. I made sure that I had a refinery, that the refinery had all the equipment it needed, the refinery had a crew, the crew were alive and properly functioning, and that I had a supply of hematite. To try and resolve this issue, I a) mined more hematite, b) built more stockpliles, c) built and outfitted another refinery, d) waited for another crew to claim it...with the same result. If I ordered charcoal and iron, the items kept swapping in the list, as if it thought I had zero materials. I could see logs and hematite in the commodities tab, but no go. I haven't reported this as a but because I'm not 100% sure that I didn't just miss something. I encountered a number of bugs, most of which have already been reported, but I might have a new one. Because of the refinery problem, I thought that maybe the crew wouldn't go get the hematite unless it was in a stockpile. So I built more stockpiles. I built lots of little ones (which may have been what slowed my game to a crawl), but then ran into the problem of people treating the stockpile as "barleys" - I don't know if other countries have that in their kid's games, but essentially immune or invisible - the problem was that fishpeople do not recognise the sanctity of the stockpile, and just slaughtered the colonists who stood there. I lost a lot of colonists that way, but one of the dead bodies had a question mark, and showed up in the work crews tab as an unassigned worker named "The Late Prunella Scales" (or whatever her name was). She showed up in the colonists tab as if she were still alive, but she was rather definitely dead. The problem went away after half an hour or so, but it was rather distracting. (This has been logged as a bug, because I haven't seen it elsewhere.) I have attached the replay in case it is useful. Next, a wishlist of changes in order of preference: Please enable the option to disable music. I need to be able to hear people sobbing or screaming - those are important cues, but I can't listen to the music for so long. (Not that it is bad music - I disable it in most of the games I play and normally supply my own, more varied soundtrack. An aside - the Dredmor soundtrack gets regular rotation in my playlist. Thanks!) I would be happier if the "give me three colonists of any type" option did not include Overseers. I had a population of around 65, and about half of my work crews were overseers with no one to oversee. Often I would see an overseerer staring at a rock, and no mining happening. That they didn't stand there forever is good, but there was a lot of work not happening. I couldn't find a way to demote them, and when the option for more colonists came up, the choices boiled down to: a) No colonists, b) Definitely an Overseer, c) Probably Overseers with maybe a labourer. So the third option was the only way to minimise the damage (although I could have waged war on the middle class and marked surplus overseers for frontier justice), but picking the third option got me more prestige, which (I think) meant more freeloaders (upper class capitalists and such) and even fewer labourers. Please allow drag-to-select resources, and auto-queuing manufacturing. My wrist is aching from having to click so much. The tabs (work crews, colonists, commodities, etc) need to work better together. For example, I would go to make something, then quit out to go back to the commodities to see how many resources I have on hand, then go back to queue up the appropriate number. In a similar vein, I should be able to see if I have a metalworker in a crew assigned to the ceramics kiln. I should be able to see all the farmers who are inappropriately assigned, promote one of them to Overseer, and put the others in her work crew. At the moment, trying to do that is way too much work, and I'm just happy if a work crew has workers. Saves would be nice, but I would rather have the things above. Personally, I'm happy to play it as a roguelike. Lastly, some feels. Thank you so much for making Clockwork Empires, for sharing it with us early and for being so receptive to everyone's feedback. CE is an amazing game. I have really enjoyed the time I have spent with it so far, and I'm really excited about how much better it is going become. Some anticipated games are a disappointment, but Clockwork Empires is turning out to be even better than I imagined.
