I’ve been reviewing Liberated Pixel Cup Games. This is one of the 48 Games.
Disclaimer: I’m competing in the cup too! I am not a judge!
Villages [Download me] [Github Repository]
This is a Single Player, Turn-Based Strategy game. It’s built in C++, and compiling it was pretty easy despite having no building instructions. It just required typing cmake .. && make on the build directory, then moving the Villages binary to the folder below.
Once you start the game, there’s no tutorial on what to do or how to play. The Readme was pretty useless too.
You have a Castle, and nearby is some sort of a cave and some trees. You’ve got on top your resource bar, and on the bottom your buildings bar. To get gold, you need citizens (Population), and tax those citizens. To get wood, you need to build Mills near the trees, and assign citizens to work on those mills. To get Ore, you need Mines around the caves, and assign citizens to the mines. To get Food, you need to build farms and set citizens to work’em. There’s also other resources, like Water (you need wells) and Population Limit (You need houses).
Once you start building, you need to place roads that connect everything to the castle. Do remember that since this is a turn-based game, you need to click “End” to finalize your turn. At the end of each turn, citizens might come and go, you collect your resources and get to build more things.
I wish there was a way to see what my current population limit was, and maybe a way to see how much wood/food/ore I’m gathering per turn. You see… to win, you need to build a Wonder, and that requires 50,000 gold, 5,000 Ore, 10,000 Wood and a whole bunch of citizens working at it. There’s currently no way to move an assigned citizen from one work to another, so the only way to do it is to ask’em to leave town…. by raising the taxes!
The other way to get people to leave is if your crime rate is too high. To lower it, you need to build towers. They’ll protect a certain area around them, but only if a blacksmith provides enough swords to man those towers. Blacksmiths in turn require Ore to make those swords… And so on.
Overall, the game is fun, though it definitely could use a manual of sorts. Sadly, there’s only one level (I would’ve loved if it was randomly generated), but you can move your starting position to wherever you want and take it from there. Building a Wonder does take time, but on the other hand, turns can last as little as a couple of seconds, so finishing the Wonder can be done rather quickly.
