After much struggle (okay, really, I spent a lot of time gathering resources to try out random spells), I completed Continent 1 and moved on to Continent 2! Woo.
I've inspected the situation, and my progression is pretty thoroughly blocked at the moment. I can progress through the tiers, I guess, though my selection of resources is really very meager. I have wind-free access to a bunch of thawing woods and plains, a single square of skelebot junkyard, a single square of ocean, a bunch of The Deep, and three squares of evergreen forest, so when I say 'meager'.. The problem is, all the places I want to get to are blocked off by wind.. and the highest profession any of my NPCs has is level 1. I need a Residential Tower to fix that, of course.
And here we hit the real crux of the problem: I have absolutely no control over whether the game gives me a Residential Tower. When I first looked, I had no missions that offered one; I opted to stall for a while, and at this moment one mission exists that offers one to me, but it's well out in the wind and is impossible without lowering the difficulty level. And by 'impossible' I mean I'm down an elusion scroll from having tried anyway. When it goes away, perhaps the game will generate another one. Perhaps not. I'm at the mercy of the RNG, and my only recourse is to wait. Oh, right, or I can go find secret missions and hope against hope that I happen to get the exact scroll I need out of one.
Having scrolls be gained with so little control is fun when they confer minor bonuses, and on Continent 1 wind shelters were common enough that they weren't a major issue. Once they become a core gameplay element, though.. this isn't really a lot of fun.
I'm not putting this in Mantis because this is a complaint rather than a suggestion, but I am not one to offer a complaint without at least trying to explain what I'd like to see.
One option might be some means of 'purchasing' scrolls. The 'currency' for this might be the answer to a thread I saw about making monsters drop something interesting, or it might be the result of a process where you feed other items to your Ilari and the amount of 'currency' you get varies with how rare the inputs are. This might create some interesting decisions, since otherwise desirable items (upgrade stones and elusion scrolls leap to mind) could be made very valuable in this system, leaving players who badly want a certain guardian power torn between giving up something useful and getting their power RIGHT NOW.
Another might be a means of "rerolling" missions, or ordering up missions with the ability to specify a desired reward. Any number of things could make this an interesting system, including putting the ability on a cooldown or only allowing one custom mission to exist at a time - well, you've got your mission. Oh, it turns out to be something really difficult? Good luck!
And since I'm posting here, I'll take the trouble to say that AVWW is otherwise a captivating game that has held my attention for quite a few hours now. Thanks for producing it.
