Thanks for the feedback
It is still a work in progress but the feedback is still helpful.
Now first of all, there are definitely some balance issues.... food and scrap amounts seem still balanced for the previous system, which assumed that there would be the passive benefits and such.
I'd actually massively increased the amount of food produced by working farms for this reason, and while I didn't change scrap production much the lack of needing to rebuild stuff also significantly reduces your need for scrap (now it's just for building up those multi-purpose tiles).
In my current game, I have about 6 survivors. And quite often, on many turns, I *dont* move them.
While I'd prefer if you were motivated to move at least one survivor per turn, we definitely don't want people having to make a ton of moves per turn, as otherwise the time it takes to do a turn gets longer and longer as you get more and more survivors, and that kind of mid/late-game "bog down" is one of the things we most especially want to avoid. This is why we stuck to the limited number of dispatches per turn for so long, but then you basically only have one piece on the board since you move your entire group as a... well, group.
Now, some of this is because of the balance issues, sure.... for example, there *needs* to be multiple survivors sitting on a farm, or it wont do enough.
Right, we're actually in the process of making it so that only one resistance member may be on a tile at once, and will be rebalancing the amount of farmland and/or amount of food you get from farming accordingly. So if you need more food income you'll need to find or build more farms.
One of the biggest reasons is the tiles. There are now only a few tile types that survivors can directly interact with. These seem to be farms, factories, tiles that farms/factories can be built on, and enemy towers/walls.
There's:
1) ice-age, abandoned-town, desert, and ocean shallows multi-purpose tiles that can be converted to clinics/farms/factories.
2) grassland, ocean shallows, and ice age farms for food production
3) ice-age, desert, and abandoned-town factories for scrap production
4) pyramids and focal towers for mana production
5) the impasse tiles
6) rescuable-survivor tiles
7) the various special buildings, though I'm not sure they really do much nowadays
8 ) the evil outposts, though as you say their impact on the game is currently dubious
I might be forgetting something but I think that's it.
On the evil outposts, they used to make skill rolls harder in their proximity but skills are gone now, so perhaps they just need to make all missions except rally and knock-down-evil-outpost impossible within a few tiles range, so they have a localized impact. And maybe cause a slight reduction in the monster aggression that goes up with each turn, though I suspect Chris wouldn't be wild about that.
On tiles not affecting strategic decisions once they're purified/built... well, I'm not sure what the alternative is, without making it really easy to kite the overlord around by constantly rebuilding stuff. The overlord could be given some different behaviors to pursue sub-optimal paths (not going after the nearest target) but there's only a marginal benefit to be gained there, additional challenge would require multiple overlord pieces on the board (which we had at once point in pre-alpha but it gets really confusing and hard to handle). Also on the tiles becoming less-relevant/irrelevant after a time: just as it's not a good thing if your average number of moves per turn goes up linearly with the number of resistance members, it's not a good thing if the average number of tiles you need to pay attention to each turn goes up linearly with the number of purified tiles. It's ok that the last 1/4 of the game (in terms of turns) take a little longer than the first 1/4, but it needs to not take 4x as long.
Anyway, part of what's going on is that we've shifted the strategic game to one where the player can't really build up a sustainable situation:
1) You've got to stay on the move.
2) You can't hold a permanent base of operations.
3) Eventually the overlord's slash-and-burn tactics will leave you without the ability to get the resources you need (unless scavenging is better than I thought it is, there's a couple ways we could go with that).
So while "not dying to the overlord" isn't all that hard, you have to do more than that, you have to get in a position to win before you've got nowhere left to "hide" (or, in this case, farm). Morale can also be hard to maintain.
This seems much more fitting to the context than the previous system, I think.
On the amp towers, they were so strong before that we were considering majorly nerfing them or just replacing the mechanic altogether (since there's not much granularity there for nerfing), so the fact that they're "smashed and gone" now is basically that nerf. Keeping at least one online most of the time from the mid-game onward shouldn't be too hard, but I may be wrong about that.
On kiting the overlord by just revealing sections of targetable land on opposite sides of the map, well, that is basically how to manage him, yea. We jokingly refer to it as "The Traveling Overlord Problem". If it's working that well I imagine you don't have many other buildings working in the game, or he'd hit them on the way from one side of the map to the other.
