Hexarchy: light, card driven, 4x game, Civ clone

Light, card driven, 4x game-Civ clone. It had a demo earlier in the year and I liked it. Now a new demo has been released:

That looks cool/interesting. Thanks for the heads up.

The current demo allows private online games against bots, which amounts to enduring a short wait and then being able to play the full game. As advertised, it took me about an hour. Does anyone know if a roadmap is online?

Wishlisted

Are demos the new quasi EA?

I don’t know, but this one didn’t allow you to save the game, so I lost interest quickly

I kickstarted the game, and it just met its goals! Re the lack of saves, I don’t know if they are planned for the release version, but none of my games has taken more than an hour and I don’t mind the no-takebacks in such a short game.

It’s got nothing to do with takebacks. I game in short spurts, often only 15 or 20 minutes at a time, so even in a game touted to take no more than an hour, no saving is a deal breaker

fair enough! I just alt-tab out and leave it running in the background.

I played the demo and thought it has a lot of promise. It strikes me as a fundamentally different gaming experience than 4X games.

You and opponents are in such close proximity, in such a limited map, and depending on card draws for options. Obviously, all these games are extremely unrealistic, but in a sense, this might better recreate the situation of a budding civilization than Civ-games generally do.

I am a slow, deliberate player, so ymmv, but I did not find this to be an overly short game, certainly not a one hour game. Which is great by me, I don’t need a 20 hour game, but I am not looking for the Wordle experience, either. However, I found that alt-Tabbing out of the game sometimes caused a crash, so a save feature is going to be a must.

On the whole, I found the UI to be well designed, but I sure hope that mouseover info and other rule documentation is on the way.

I hadn’t seen this thread, and I happened to stumble upon a video of someone playing the game. It looks great, but I do wonder whether the AI is done yet. In the game I watched, the player seemed to win an easy victory, scoring 100 to the second-place civ’s 52-ish, with the other civs even further behind. I would think there’s hope for a stronger AI, given the smallish map, short game length, relatively simple mechanics and tech tree, etc.

Here’s the playthrough I watched:

I backed it on Kickstarter and got my steam key today. The game seems quite smooth in its play but it is still considered to be in Alpha. I have played plenty of fully released games much more rough than this.

I also ended up supporting on Kickstarter, so I am now playing the game, as it now stands, rather than the demo. Just got through losing a close game to the Chinese.

My impression is that the AI at present is a little bit indecisive, as to whether to play for score (in other words, to win) or to play overly aggressively, so as to supply speedbumps to the human.

Definitely fun, but I see areas they will still need to work on.

I agree with that. As an Alpha I was expecting more roughness than I have encountered. The benefits of taking development slow, and having generous game demos with lots of player input.

One thing I would add is that the game seems to offer a lot of variety, based on the terrain you get, but even more on the early cards you draw. If those things go ideally, then it feels like a very easy game. But as soon as you get sub-optimal cards the first turn or two, things get dicey. One big plus is that you aren’t going to have any no-brainer build orders.

(It seemed to me that the demo did something artificial to limit this. I played several games with the demo, and had a strong tendency to get certain very helpful cards right away. Not so much the case in the current build.)

This is indeed a huge change from normal 4x. The deck building elements work really well to give it a much more natural flow.

I do have a lot of complaints on the technical side though. The UI is just terrible, a lot of informational detail is hard to see and the loading times were excessive for the end result.

Hey, this comes out tomorrow! I wasn’t too aware of this, but it seems like an interesting take on the Civ genre.

Just watched a video by Orbital Potato:

I have it as an early backer, and I greatly enjoy it.

I played the demo, and I enjoyed it too. I like the idea of a fast-playing deck-builder 4X. Can’t tell the price from my Steam client, though.

I spent two or three hours playing this tonight, and I enjoyed it a lot! TLDR: So far I’m loving it, but I do wish the map were easier to read.

It’s Slay-the-spire meets Civ. I was a bit unsure of it after my first 20 minutes, but it gradually hooked me, and after an hour or so I felt pretty addicted. I played through the entire starter campaign, which is three tutorial games. I actually lost the third game the first time I tried it, then won on my second attempt. It’s a bit more challenging than the first two tutorial games, which are very chill. (In fact, the whole game is chill: the ambient sound features chirping birds.)

The core idea is neat: a fast-paced 4X/deckbuilder. A card-driven 4X that you can play in a couple hours. You learn techs by playing cards; you build farms and mines by playing cards; you build units by playing cards. You don’t always draw the card you want, which is cool. You can thin your deck by “burning” cards. The victory conditions can vary, or at least they did in the tutorials, but they mostly involve taking territory, earning VPs, winning battles. There’s no diplomacy at all, and I’m surprised how much I like this design choice! It frees me from my usual tendency to turtle and try to make friends.

The map is a bit hard to read sometimes. Pro tip: there’s a setting in the options menu that lets you increase resource size. That helped me a lot. Even with that, I wish the game would tell me more clearly where I can or can’t build my mines and pastures and such. Also, I don’t understand how to allocate city workers; maybe that is automatic? The graphics are pleasant, especially the card art, but the map is a tad busy. I did mostly get used to it, though, and the UI is otherwise quite polished, so I bet the devs will improve the map’s readability. It’s sure not going to stop me from playing a lot this weekend!

Also, there’s both single-player and multi-player, and the single-player has several cool options. Hegemon mode lets you pick a Civ and try to complete challenges; the game tallies all our efforts and tracks which civs are advancing fastest. Then there are daily and weekly PvE challenges, and you can compare your results with those of the rest of the playerbase. And of course there’s your standard skirmish mode. I watched the devs play a little multiplayer, and that seems as fast-paced as the single-player.

Finally, it’s on sale right now, 20% off, so this is a good time to try it.