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(+1)

Game is very fun, but also very grindy.  Would like to automate events (maybe after 5-10 second timer or toggle defaults from a menu, maybe unlock this after first prestige?  Even just a simple skip event toggle would work too).  Automating runs would be great too (I love overnighting idle/incremental games).  

Damage upgrade does not scale well, especially noticeable on higher waves (+10% more damage multiplier instead of +1 damage would be nice).   Knockback on cannons is overpowered, especially on bosses.  Pushing to more than 6 prestige points on the first run is very hard with the wrong setup.  Might be an end-game balance issue.  I soft locked on wave 41 and ended up in a stale-mate because of the wrong setup (pretty much all crowd control and not enough damage).  Sell hero button would be great for a partial refund incase I want to change my setup during a long run.

Priority targeting would be great (i.e. close, high hp, low hp, etc.).  Better automated upgrades would be nice (it seems to dump all my gold into the top hero and mostly ignore the other ones.  It also seems to spend most gold on damage even though speed is a top priority).

Hey rofltastic, thanks for the really detailed writeup. Honestly this list hit almost every sharp edge I'd been circling. Just pushed a patch that directly addresses every point.

Automation for overnighters

  • Auto-Dismiss Events (Settings, 5 / 15 / 30 / 60s). Dismisses the popup with no pick, no reward, no penalty. Click any option to cancel and resolve normally.
  • AFK Auto-Restart. If a wave stays active longer than 1 / 2 / 5 / 10 min, the run auto-ends, banks your RP, and starts fresh with your commander setup. No cap on frequency.
  • Offline progress. Closed-browser time now grants RP based on your last run's RP-per-minute pace. Welcome-back toast on return.
  • Wall Breached auto-retry. When AFK Auto-Restart is on, the gameover screen shows a 10s countdown and auto-restarts, so a breach doesn't stop the overnight loop either.

The wave-41 soft-lock story

  • Damage upgrades are +2% of base per level now (was flat +1). Late waves finally scale properly.
  • Bosses are fully immune to knockback. Cannon "concussive" and crossbow "heavy" builds can't shove bosses back faster than they advance. That was your stalemate path.
  • Sell Hero button. Every filled slot gets a 50% refund button with a confirm dialog. Mid-run pivots are real.
  • Priority targeting. Per-hero chip row: Closest / To Wall / Low HP / High HP / Tanks. CC-heavy builds can now explicitly focus bosses.

Commander auto-upgrade (the real fix)

  • You weren't imagining the damage-dumping. There was a literal typo on the progress-reset path that silently fell commanders back to dmg-first even when you'd set speed priority. Fixed.
  • Also rewrote the distribution: commanders now round-robin one upgrade each per cycle instead of slot 0 draining the treasury before anyone else gets a turn. Matched presets end with identical level counts.

Thanks again. Detailed feedback like this is the most useful thing a player can give a dev. Let me know if anything still feels off after the patch, especially how AFK Auto-Restart plays overnight for you.

(+1)

The archers' damage got way worse.  Instead of 4 => 5 => 6 damage now they do 4 => 4.1 => 4.2.

(1 edit)

Good catch, that was a bug. My last patch switched damage upgrades from flat +1 to "+2% of the hero's base damage" per level, meant to scale better at late waves. For the archer (base 4) that's only +0.08 per level. Effectively a nerf at every level for every hero in the game. Definitely not what I wanted.

Just pushed a fix. New formula is +1 OR +10% of base, whichever is larger:

  • Archer (base 4) gets +1 per level, same as the old chunky 4 → 5 → 6.
  • Cannoneer / Crossbow (base 10) also land on +1 per level at current stats.
  • Once prestige multipliers inflate the base (Sharpened Edge, Promotion stacks, class bonuses), the 10% kicks in and upgrades keep scaling. A 3x-dmgMul cannoneer gets +3 per level.

So the floor is the chunky feel you remember, the ceiling actually scales into late waves. Thanks for flagging it quickly, sorry for the break.

(1 edit) (+1)

Played for a few more hours and prestiged. Some more thoughts:

Monsters spawn offscreen at top and bottom it's kind of annoying. Sometimes you can get unlucky and a boss  will spawn almost directly next to your wall.

Events are boring also merchants should probably be free. Every time I get a merchant event I have no gold because of my commander.  Or maybe some kind of upgrade to automate them?

The screen flash on taking damage happens way too often. The later waves you will have a hundred monsters attacking your wall at one time and the flashes are crazy annoying to look at.

The prestige for Scholar's mind is absolutely broken and unfun. You kill one monster and reset for 4 rp. Honestly prestiging in general should be more powerful. It's a grind to get to the later waves for little to no power. 

Also maybe skills shouldn't cost gold I don't know.

Overall it's a fun game though. I think the prestige is just too grindy and redoing everything is not very fun a second time.

(+1)

Another round of changes just went live, driven almost entirely by this comment. Thank you — genuinely.

Monster spawn locations — fixed. Bosses now always spawn from the far right edge (no more materializing inches from the wall via an unlucky top/bottom roll). Minion top/bottom spawns also pushed deeper into the field with a minimum 90px distance from the wall. Even surprise-angle spawns give you a beat to react.

Merchants too expensive — prices cut ~40%: Healing Tonic 40g→25g, Sharpening Stone 75g→45g, Lucky Charm 60g→40g. Affordable even on a commander-drained purse. "Automate events" is a good idea I'm still sitting on — might ship as a prestige bonus down the line.

Screen flash spam during swarms — was a real bug. 100+ enemies whaling on the wall every frame kept re-triggering the flash before the previous one faded, locking it into a solid red strobe. Now rate-limited: only re-fires when the previous is nearly gone. Still impactful on first hits, no longer strobing.

Scholar's Mind exploit — 100% broken, you nailed it. Kill one goblin, reset, claim +5 RP, repeat. Fixed: the flat prestige RP bonus now requires at least 1 cleared wave OR 20 kills before it unlocks. Legit runs still get it; kill-and-reset returns zero.

Skills costing gold — agreed. Pulled the one-time equip fee entirely. Skills are now free to equip and free to cast, cooldown-gated only. Research unlocks them once, then swap between slots as your build needs.

Prestige grindy / redoing not fun — Ancestry (new prestige bonus) exists specifically for this: preserve 1/2/3 of your favorite research nodes across the wipe so you don't re-climb the same ladder every time. Still tuning baseline shard yields.

Bonus rounds of polish you'll also notice:

  • The war wolf now walks with a proper leg animation (was ghost-gliding before), has double HP (60 → 120), and bards heal it from anywhere on the wall for 2 HP/sec each.
  • Range indicators are color-coded per hero class now — archer rings are reddish-brown, crossbow purple, mage green, cleric gold, bard pink. Overlapping rings are finally distinguishable. Bards also show their aura ring (was invisible before).
  • Bard chapter got four new research nodes (Double Time, War March, Extended Refrain, Healing Chorus) — strength, range, and wall regen. Fully-researched bard grants +70% fire rate, +55% damage, +90 aura range, plus wall HP regen.

New patch is live on itch. Keep the feedback coming — this is how the game gets sharper.

(+1)

Commenting here instead of replying to my thread below. 

MASSIVE shoutout to Westicles for incorporating our feedback so quickly, and so well on top of it. 

This feels like a completely different game right now (for the better):

  1. The units finally do their job
  2. The scaling works great
  3. The autoclicker definitely helps although when you reach lvl 30+, it's no longer necessary
  4. Everything seems to work together great now

I can only say great work here! 

What I can still offer as a constructive criticism: 

  • The bard has a tooltip over him saying you need to research Bard Academy and there is no bard academy as far as I can see
  • On lvl 40-> lvl 50, the damage output of the units is simply insufficient to progress. I tried with only mages, I tried with crossbows (as they do %health dmg) but still seems I can't push through lvl 50. Not sure what's the solution there.
  • The targeting, although infinitely better than before, still lacks when you upgrade the speed sufficiently. I found some units have certain angles where they constantly miss (not a huge issue but still, worth mentioning)

Will continue trying to beat the game to see if I can but at this point I'm not sure it's possible (is there a final round to beat?) 

Again, outstanding work including all of our feedback! 

(+1)

I JUST REALIZED YOU HAVE A PRESTIGE SYSTEM IN PLACE. 
Jesus Christ, great work!

I completely missed the menu it seems.

Ha! You're not alone — that discovery happening hours in was exactly the feedback we needed. Your comment was actually the push for a full discoverability pass that just shipped:

  • First time you cross 500 lifetime RP, a big gold toast fires telling you prestige is available and pointing you at the Pause menu.
  • A pulsing crown badge sits on the Pause button until you open the prestige screen for the first time.
  • Clearing wave 50 now pops an "ENDLESS ZONE REACHED" notice and everything banks 1.5× RP from there on, so pushing deep actually pays.

Also doubled down on prestige instead of nerfing enemies (per your wall-at-50 feedback) — the tree went from 10 → 20 bonuses, including things like:

  • Empire's Reach (+0.5% damage per wave past 20, scales with run depth)
  • A roaming pixel-art war wolf that bites and slows enemies on the field
  • Dual Imbue (stack two elements on one hero)
  • Phoenix Down (first wall-breach = 50% HP revive)
  • Ancestry (preserve research nodes across the prestige wipe)

Plus the Bard phantom "Alchemy" tooltip is squashed and the projectile hitbox scales with enemy size now — those were both direct from your comment thread.

Genuinely appreciate you sticking with it long enough to find the prestige system. Enjoy the new tree! 🐺

(2 edits) (+1)

I don't understand the commander. It just wastes all of my gold on one hero. 

Edit: it seems fine after you get mages/cannoneers and only need one carry.

Also I think the projectiles are being deleted too fast. Even if my mage has high enough range it will shoot a projectile towards monster and it will be deleted before hitting the target.

Hey, thanks for sticking with it long enough to flag both of these — they were real and they're both fixed now.

The commander problem was the design itself. Every setting used to be on by default, including auto-upgrade, which is exactly what was vacuuming up your gold into one hero. Total rebuild this update:

  • Every setting (Auto-Hire / Auto-Upgrade / Auto-Imbue / Auto-Skin) now defaults to Off — the commander does nothing until you explicitly turn something on.
  • Auto-hire is now free of gold but each hero type can only be auto-hired once across your wall, so a fleet of commanders can't all spawn archers.
  • Default 50g reserve so even when auto-upgrade is on, it never drains the treasury below your spending money.
  • New BROKEN flag — if you manually drop a hero into a slot whose commander expected something else, the commander pauses its automation (with a pulsing red "Commander ⚠ BROKEN" warning on the hero panel) instead of dumping gold into the wrong hero. Resets when the run resets.

Projectile lifespan was a hardcoded 1.8s, which was way too short once you upgraded mage range. Now it scales with range / projSpeed with a 50% margin (capped 2s–5s). Long-range mage bolts make it to the target.

Both shipped in the latest build. Give it another shot if you've got the time — appreciate the feedback either way.

(+1)

Awesome. This game is fun and it definitely has potential :)

(+1)

I played for a few hours while ignoring the less optimized gameplay, as others mentioned here, but I have another big big issue: I had to restart my computer and the save was lost completely. 

With the amount of grind there is right now, I'm not touching the game until a future update addresses some of the points. 

The artwork is very nice (for me), the gameplay is good too, but definitely needs a lot more work on rebalancing. 

I only reached the progress that I reached through auto-clicking, otherwise my units are simply useless (tried the mage, tried the crossbowmen, tried the archers... all equally bad even with upgrades).

Looking forward to the future :D

(1 edit)

Thanks for the detailed write-up — you flagged four real problems and they all got addressed in subsequent updates.

Save loss on restart. Added visibilitychange / pagehide / beforeunload flush handlers so progress writes to localStorage on tab close, page hide, or browser shutdown — not just at run end. Also added a one-time Save Backup nudge that fires after 3 runs pointing you at Settings → Export Save, which copies your full save to a paste-anywhere code. That's the real safety net — browser storage can still get evicted under disk pressure or by clearing site data, and only an export survives that.

Grind. RP yield up +25% per wave, you now start with 3 hero slots open (was 1) so you build a real team from run 1, first skill is way cheaper (5 RP + 15g to equip Smite, was 12 RP + 25g), and the skill bar is visible from your very first wave so you know skills exist. Plus a 1× / 2× / 3× game speed toggle in the top-left to chew through the slower stretches.

Units useless even with upgrades. Root cause: heroes were firing at where enemies were, not where they'd be. Arrows landed behind moving chargers basically every time. Fixed with full intercept-quadratic target leading on every projectile-firing class (archer, mage, crossbow, cleric). On top of that:

  • Cannons now always splash — shells detonate on a timer at the predicted impact point, so even if the target dodges the splash still lands.
  • Projectile lifespan now scales with range so upgraded mage / cleric / crossbow bolts don't vanish mid-flight.
  • Mage / Crossbow / Cannoneer / Cleric base damage all nudged up.
  • New: Hero leveling + crits — every hero earns XP from kills, levels up, and gains crit chance scaling 0% → 30%. Crits hit 2× and inherit through splash/chains.

Auto-clicking. This is now a first-class feature, no external tools needed:

  • Hold-to-damage — press and hold your finger / mouse on an enemy to chain-tap them.
  • New Restless Hand research node (Command chapter, 4 stacks) scales the hold-tap rate up to ~5.5 hits per second.
  • Sentry Marksmen research auto-taps the closest enemy automatically while you focus on upgrades.

Bestiary, hero panel DPS / KILLS / LVL / Crit% display, range indicators, and a real commander rebuild also shipped. If the artwork pulled you in originally it might be worth another shot — appreciate either way.

(+2)

So this totally looks like it could be a good game but unfortunately the dev took great length to make it not be one. There are obvious bugs like you can not finish the tutorial because the UI elements overlap each other and the things that you need to click. Or enemies that can be outside the screen damaging your wall without you being able to do anything about it. 

The slow progression is extremely annoying. As is the bad aim of the "heroes". If you save up to get another hero like the cannoneer, thinking that the splash damage might at least offset the bad aim, you will get even more disappointed because their aim is even worse, rendering them almost worthless. 

The game forces you to constantly click on the enemies and there seems to be no way to automate around that. That clicking gets tiresome soon. Then you do not really have time to manage the updates of your heroes taking all the fun out of a potential micro-management. 

Too bad, this looked like it might be fun.

(1 edit)

Honest feedback like this is what actually moves a game forward — every single thing you flagged was real, and they're all fixed in the current build.

Tutorial UI overlap. The coachmark placement code used to fall back to "below the anchor" and clamp into viewport, which sometimes pulled the explanation box ON TOP of the very button you needed to click. Rewrote it: now it tries 8 candidate spots (4 sides + 4 corners), each clamped to viewport AND rejected if it would overlap the anchor rect. Worst case it lands in an opposite corner — it can never sit on the target.

Enemies attacking from off-screen. Archer enemies used to park at their stop distance which on narrow phone screens (and for boss archers) could be past the visible edge. arriveX is now capped at W - 18 so any ranged enemy that's shooting at the wall is guaranteed to be on-screen and tappable.

Bad aim — the big one. Heroes were firing where enemies were, not where they'd be. Arrows landed behind moving chargers basically every shot. Fixed with full intercept-quadratic target leading on every projectile-firing class (archer, mage, crossbow, cleric). On top of that:

  • Long-range bolts no longer vanish mid-flight — projectile lifespan now scales with range / projSpeed.
  • New hero leveling system — kills grant XP, levels grant crit chance scaling 0% → 30% (crits hit for 2× and inherit through splash + chains).

Cannoneer "even worse." You called this exactly right — slow shells + moving targets = the splash never fired. Now cannon shells detonate on a timer at the predicted impact point. Even if the target dodges or dies before the shell arrives, the splash still lands and damages whatever's nearby.

Constant clicking with no automation. Three new features, all built-in, no external tools:

  • Hold-to-damage — keep your finger / mouse pressed on an enemy to chain-tap them.
  • Restless Hand research (Command chapter, 4 stacks) scales the hold-tap rate up to ~5.5 hits per second.
  • Sentry Marksmen research unlocks wall auto-tap so the guards chip at the closest enemy automatically while you focus on upgrades.

No time to manage upgrades. Same root cause — once auto-tap and hold-tap exist, your hands are free for actual decisions. Plus a 1× / 2× / 3× game speed toggle in the top-left to chew through the slow stretches.

Slow progression. RP yield is up +25% per wave, you start with 3 hero slots open (was 1), first skill is way cheaper (5 RP + 15g vs the old 12 RP + 25g), and the skill bar is visible from your very first wave so you actually know skills exist.

The artwork still pulled you in. If you've got it in you to give it another shot, the rough edges you hit are gone. Either way — appreciate the receipts.

(+1)

Suuuuper grindy. Some bosses are immune to clicks with no explanation.  Archer aiming and arrow speed makes no sense with the enemy speed. Enemies spawn off screen. Archer enemies can stay entirely off screen while damaging you.

The skill menu covers part of the screen, hiding enemies.

Huge oversight is zooming in and out the page, allowing you to move enemies around.

Spent an hour. Can't even afford to buy the first skill. Trainwreck of a game. Needs time in the oven, its so raw its pink on the outside.

The overall polish is fine, but with the balance its unplayable. I love that theres a hundred of upgrades but if the archers keep missing whats the point.

(1 edit)

Brutal but every single point was real and they're all fixed in the current build. Receipts:

"Bosses are immune to clicks with no explanation." They weren't immune — your taps were just landing invisibly against a huge HP pool with a hitbox sized for goblins. Boss tap radius now scales with sizeMul (a 2.55× ram had the same 9-pixel hitbox as a normal goblin), and every tap spawns a floating damage number so you can SEE it landing.

"Archer aiming and arrow speed makes no sense." This was the worst bug in the game. Heroes were firing at where enemies were, not where they'd be — arrows landed behind moving chargers basically every shot. Fixed with full intercept-quadratic target leading on every projectile-firing class. On top of that, projectile lifespan now scales with range / projSpeed so long-range bolts don't vanish mid-flight, and there's a new hero leveling system with crit chance scaling 0% → 30% per level.

"Enemies spawn off screen / Archer enemies stay entirely off screen damaging you." Ranged enemies' stop position is now capped at W - 18 so any archer goblin that's actively shooting the wall is guaranteed to be on-screen and tappable.

"The skill menu covers part of the screen." Shrunk #skill-panel (narrower min/max width, tighter padding, smaller font) plus a mobile-landscape override that goes smaller still. The battlefield stays visible.

"Browser zoom moves enemies around." This was a real bug — resize() re-derived canvas W/H from innerWidth on every zoom tick, which visibly shifted the simulation. The handler now short-circuits when visualViewport.scale !== 1, so Ctrl-+/− is a no-op for game state.

"Super grindy / spent an hour, can't afford the first skill." RP yield is up +25% per wave, you now start with 3 hero slots open (was 1) so you can field a real team from run 1, the first skill is way cheaper (5 RP + 15g for Smite, was 12 RP + 25g), and the skill bar is visible from your very first wave so it doesn't take 2-3 runs to even discover skills exist. Plus a 1× / 2× / 3× game speed toggle in the top-left.

"100 upgrades but the archers keep missing what's the point." This was the heart of it. Lead-targeting fix means archers actually hit moving things now. Affordable research nodes pulse gold so you know what you can buy at a glance. And there's a new Bestiary in the Pause menu that explains every enemy + boss including the Goblin King, Bull Champion, Iron Vanguard, Master Archer, High Priest, Coven Matron, and Siege Lord boss variants.

Polish was the part you said was already fine. The balance and bugs you called out are the ones we burned through this update. If you've got the time to take another run at it, the rough edges you hit are gone. Either way — your write-up was concrete enough to actually act on, so thank you.