Something different isnt usually my cup of tea but im intrigued at the least. Wishlisted as well

That I didn't know and it actually sounds like an awful game mechanic. Somebody actively had to do work to disable it. :(

The game looks dicey to me.

Thanks for sharing this information. RT isn't a knockout criteria for me though if there was a way to have it turn-based and maybe roguelike elements in RT would eventually make it more appealing. What I would like to ask you is how is this game hard? Would you be willing to elaborate? :-)

Your day job is definitely safe. ;)

On topic: Being a Settlers (and general builder and resource management) fan, this has definitely piqued my interest.

tl;dr: You have to manage different types of dice that make different faces that various work spots need, while reserving some for combat, and constantly expanding and utilizing resources to refresh the dice so they don't decay and die. In real-time.

Let me explain the mechanisms:
* Dice have colors (classes) that determine what faces are on them. Peasants have gather and no research, soldiers have raid, and no gather or research, citizens can research, but not gather or defend... Some faces have numbers on them meaning they count as 2x of that face.
* Spots on the map (buildings, etc) require specific faces to use them (harvest icon to harvest, explore icon to get herbs, build icon to build). Sometimes you need multiple (a big building might need 3 hammers to build!)
* You roll the dice. If it doesn't have a face you can or want to use, you reroll. (Mandatory reroll when a die returns to your hand when its time to complete action is finished.)
* Each die has durability. Each reroll reduces it by one.
* Durability of 0 = dead die, discard it.
* Put a die in the cookhouse with food to replenish its durability. Hope you keep enough food around...
* Harvest spots run out, so you HAVE to keep expanding.
* Come winter, your dice freeze if you use them outside of heater areas (which consume wood, the most-used resource for which you need to keep expanding). Frozen dice can't be used again until spring, unless you've had enough extra food production to make beer to serve in a tavern that works like the cookhouse, but for frozen rather than durability.
* Eventually random raids on your base start coming in, so you have to keep some dice around ready to counter-fight. Injuries can happen. (Which get healed with herbs in the apothecary.) A die getting a 2nd injury destroys it.
* If you don't have sword-faces, the raiders will burn down a building (which will cost you resources and hammer-dice to put back).
* You can change dice between classes in certain buildings + resources. You can breed new dice by occupying two for a while at a location. But there's a maximum number of possible dice. (This is probably the hardest part of the management side: You're only allowed 12 total dice of any assortment.)

In real time. It's quite a frantic resource management/optimization game. I *like* it so far, but it's really challenging so far. I did only play it about 90 minutes yesterday, so there is a lot more to it I haven't touched yet, but this should give you the idea of why it's hard. Especially since you can't allocate things. I think I'd like it more at 50-75% of normal speed, or if you could allocate while paused.

There's a tech tree. I have not yet explored that yet, since I only just started knowledge production. I immediately took the first upgrade of +1 wood when harvesting wood. There's a similar for wheat that will be my next from what I've seen.

ALSO, please, developer, add control mapping. Let right click do SOMETHING other than "deselect'. Right click should at least be autoplace (rather than Lshift+click) or lock die (rather than Lalt+click; yes, left only).

Example production chain that I've seen so far from the wheat farm:
* Two "gear faces" (2 peasants or citizens that rolled that, or citizen has a chance of one of its faces being two gears at once) required to produce wheat. Wheat farm can only be used in summer, not winter.
* 1 gear + 2 wheat to make food at the mill. (Food + time with any die, any face at the cookery replenishes durability. Food + a peasant at the school morphs the die into a citizen.)
* 1 gear + 2 wheat at the brewery makes beer.
* Some wood + some beer allows you to build the tavern using them.
* Frozen die + beer + time at tavern unfreezes the die so it can be used again.

Wow, thank you so much for your detailed explanation! I can now appreciate why you've been describing your experience as hard. The way you describe the system is intriguing, seems like it's mainly based on an Rock Paper Scissor plus RNG. It's also easy to understand how for little old me it would be beneficial to have an active pause function allowing to make some moves. With their system in place it should still be a challenge on any higher difficulty mode where in the meantime I read there doesn't exist a pause at all. Let's hope developers will consider this as I am really interested in the game and your description only added to the wish to give it a whirl soon. :)

This one is really tempting. It sits on my wishlist since the "coming soon" - announcement.
Oh, that sucks.

I finished my first play of this (won it, once I got through the tough point on the curve previously discussed). The "roguelite" element didn't catch me at all. A single play was too long for a "roguelite" that you want to play again right as it finishes, but too short to be fulfilling as a strategy game. (For me, it was about 4-5 hours.) I don't have a strong urge to play repetitively at all (though I will play it more; I'm just not sure how much).

I "unlocked" new leaders to select, which revealed to me that apparently the starting one had a power too. Tutorials never mentioned it and I have no idea at all how to activate it. I guess if that had been covered anywhere, I'd be more encouraged to try them.

I "unlocked" new play modes/scenarios. They're all the default scenario with extra difficulty added: 'always winter' or 'reduce your dice limit from 12 to 6', 'buildings spontaneously catch fire in summer', and a few others. They're not compelling to me at all.

There already are the other difficulties. Unless changed, I'll never play them. Disabling pause (even a "you can't do anything but scroll map and look at game state" pause as it is) is completely unreasonable. I guess I could go down one, but I already completed a 'run' on this one, so I won't do that.

I didn't quite explore everything the game has in one go. There were buildings I didn't unlock [via research in that play] or build. It looks like there could be a "peaceful" option, though I'm not sure how that would interact with the ever-harder-over-time raids, unless monk dice pray them away. Which, if that is the case, it seems OP, since monk dice can bless dice [preventing them from gaining wounds/freezing/etc the next time they would], and can cheaply (1 herb instead of 2) heal any condition too.

The game start menus mention there's something called "ascended dice" that you can pick at game start to replace your starting 6 peasants. I've no idea where they come from and haven't seen anything. Maybe there's more tutorial in play #2 or something.

So, as a recap/review/whatever... I like the game. The core conceit is great. It feels good to play and I like the strategy and decisions. The UX has some weaknesses (mostly the pause and some of the inputs being less-than-optimal). It's a solid, mostly bug-free experience*1 and felt good to make progress in. The biggest strike against it, not surprisingly, is the "roguelite" experience they went with. I feel like the game would benefit from larger/longer maps*2, and ABSOLUTELY from a campaign mode [with or without a story] rather than just the "play a loop and done". EDIT: And lastly, there needs to be something to do, even if minor, to use/dump certain die faces that are used a lot less than others.*3

On the game play loop/curve... I simultaneously feel like, at a certain point, my victory was a given and I was just going through the motions (4x players know what late-game Civ games can go like...), but also felt like my engine was just getting started at the same time (since I still had buildings not built. It was a a weird feeling to have both at the same time. Like, I had food coming out of my ears so durability was no longer an issue, but I was all-but-entirely out of stone [due to map RNG] to build advanced buildings.

I'm happy to have this game out there. I hope it improves in updates. I don't think it's quite worth $20 (though it's very polished for what they did include; I'm very happy for that), but certainly $12 or more. I am definitely interested in where it goes, or where its designers go in the future after this. I'd say about a 4 out of 5 at this point, but that could certainly go down if another match gets boring quickly. I don't see it going much higher without a considerable update of the caliber of things I mentioned here would be nice.

*1 (I encountered one bug once -- I was stuck in "lock dice mode" where I couldn't place dice but only toggle their lock state, no matter how many times I clicked to toggle that -- that a save/exit/reload fixed easily).

*2 (Including wider in this "ringworld" experience; it's an aesthetic choice, but the mechanics YEARN for a full map that goes in multiple directions. Once you get one particular research, a single 'expand my realm' building covers the entire width of the map. Start at the one point and fan out in a "curved dome" even instead of just a ring?)

*3 (Hammers are only useful while you're building. What if buildings needed repair after invasions instead of just binary destroyed or not, or you could hammer up a building itself to increase its efficiency rating? Or even just hammers instead of gears to put out fires? And compasses have woefully few uses [only ones I've seen are to reveal map, once, after building a new district, and to gather herbs at that building]. Since your starting die, peasant, has hammer and compass, why not give them a "dump" so they're not just dead faces most of the time. The game, that I've seen, has zero "either/or" faces. Soldier has hammer; maybe it should be hammer/compass on one face?)

EDIT2: If this and Endzone had a baby? I'd be ecstatic.

Small note of ridiculousness on 2nd play:
Upgrading a die to another one causes the original to become unhappy as if it had been sacrificed or died. This has very quickly wrecked my play since my peasants are now unhappy and they randomly (and rapidly) set fire to buildings.

Unhappiness on "lost faces" for dying, absolutely. But on upgrading? Why aren't they happy they've been upgraded? I'd like to note I *never* ran into any unhappiness in my first play. I guess I "over-optimized" this time, but it definitely feels off. At the very least, acts of anger (fire/strike/wound) feel like they should 'let it out to move them slightly toward neutral.

After 4 plays, 3 wins, I've come to a clear decision this game doesn't have replay value.

* Every game is the same. The only differences are: quantity of resources spawned on the map, difficulty you select (discussed above, raising difficulty is not worth it, and the challenges are weird), and leader you select (which still seems to have no effect on the play; not explained anywhere and I can't seem to get it to trigger in the logical ways).
* Every game plays the same. Different in only which buildings you decide to build and the order/their placement. There's no meaningful difference from game to game in terms of your strategy.
* Ascending dice to start with them the next game only... makes the next game easier.
* There are not even RNG decisions other than accidentally being hosed on one resource, but there's no mitigation to that. When you run out of stone, that's that. No more buildings that require it, and many don't have alternatives or replacements.

It's a shame, because I really like the core elements of the game, and it's rather polished for what it has. They just made a poor choice with going "roguelike" instead of something more open. It could go somewhere, but it will take considerable redo in their design, and a big touch-up on the UX. I'm dropping my star review as mentioned above.

Game has updated with the following (among other changes) This fixes one of the top complaints many of us early-players had. I'm still not so warm on the game, but this change goes a long way toward redeeming it.

Awesome thanks for the update. Despite really enjoying a game like Ironclad Tactics (a similar "thoughtful" sort of game that had a real-time component to it) I was worried about it here as it seemed like there's a ton going on.

Had sort of forgotten about this one - this will put it back on my radar!

I'm still hopeful they'll be able to turn it into a good game. The core gameplay is there, just the meta-game around it isn't. I didn't hate my experience, but I saw so much potential that wasn't cashed in.