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(4 edits) (+1)(-9)

An incomplete information problem disguised as an unfolding game disguised as a civ-building card game. 

Unfortunately, even after mastering the basic mechanics, you have no knowledge upon which to base your decisions. It's a deckbuilding game where you didn't actually build your deck. It's a strategy game where the concept of strategizing is alien. It's a micro-management game where there's only a tenuous relationship between the visible representations of your units on the screen and the areas covered by those units. Even on easy, you will earn spare gold from massive population satisfaction and still need to skip turns because you don't have enough gold. 

The worst part is I'm 100% certain this isn't an accident. The game was obviously carefully designed, balanced and play-tested to capture the existential horror of managing a medieval sanitation project. On Normal, I suppose people would be dying of dysentery or sacrificing goats or whatever, and it would be my fault somehow for not putting cards on colored rectangles in the correct way. 

Overall, it's the digital equivalent of a gilded, precision clockwork mechanism tasked with smacking you in the face with a dead fish for all eternity, or at least until the gearbox winds down and you run out of gold or stars or whatever and get a Game Over. 

I'm only halfway through the second age, and I can already see where this is going. In the future, every possible structure and interface remains clogged with unusable components for permanently-stalled projects, while the deck keeps cycling and piling on new mechanics and fires keep breaking out and nothing works, all because I didn't somehow predict the need for three scribes and a foreman three turns in advance, and after I got the components together, I ran out of money to finish it that turn and had to sacrifice like three red cards at once. 

Which is all a fancy way of saying I don't understand how the game works, even though I'm long past the tutorial and I remember everything it taught me. I've learned the mechanics, but the game flatly refuses to let you wrap your head around its dynamics during gameplay. You would need to lose multiple times just in order to know what cards appear in the late game so that  you can attempt to make any meaningful decisions whatsoever about which cards to keep, use or discard at any given time.

So I give up. The quaint town of Grudziądz may keep its mysteries, for I will no longer play a hand in its people's suffering.

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Seriously? If you keep running out of money, trade influence for income and money, don't buy jewelries, NEVER buy jewelries(BLUE card), it's a scam. For projects, keep 1 foremen and balance out the others, scribes only used on projects rarely, only some projects that uses 2 or more when the game introduces you the scribe. For predicting what cards will come out, well you can hover the discard pile. For placing the water carriers like you need to learn to maximize your placing and learn to sacrifice an angry house for other houses.

I honestly find the game quite easy on normal, maybe because I've played some management games before, I completed normal on 126 turns and got the achievement to complete the game before 150 turns. So, I think your management is a bit lacking, try to be patient and learn how each action contributes to what event comes after

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Unfortunately, it only offered me the card that lets you sell influence and get money once or twice at the very start of the game, when I didn't need it.

The one time I did see it offered in the late game, I skipped it because it was literally a worse exchange rate than the "2 influence for 1 gold" you get from overflowing 100 influence.

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Trust me, if your influence is in the positive, always sell influence for money.

And I think you misread the card or something, there are 3 donation cards that gives you money for influence (small = 10, common = 20, generous = 40) like their exchange rate is 1:1(unless in hard/impossible), I don't know any card that has worse exchange rate than the influence overflow.

I always use these red donation cards when I draw them. Due to this, I was very rich (300+ money) in normal, hard, and mid-game impossible mode. And with good water carrier placing, my influence never made it to negative in normal and hard mode.

I see. In that case, I suppose my real issue is I thought 100% approval was the goal. Like. It's water. If people in a certain block are only getting 50% of the water they need to survive, that's a problem that will literally kill townsfolk if it lasts for more than a day or so. Anything less than 100% is a failure state. 

Or at least, that's the way water works in real life. It never occurred to me to treat overflow like a problem to be solved or a resource to be spent. I thought overflow meant nobody died this turn because we met quota and maybe went a little over. Sure, we could try bartering away some of the excess, but what if it makes us come up short? Too risky.

I feel like I'm starting to overstate the point, but if only 90% of the people have water, 10% of the people die of thirst. That's how water works. It's one of three core mechanics of IRL literally all of us learn during the tutorial level. The game's influence mechanic feels like a weird abstraction that doesn't make sense in the real world. 

Influence and money are concepts in the real world, to be sure, but killing 10% of the population per day for money seems like the kind of thing that wouldn't be feasible for very long, even by medieval standards. If the peasants didn't revolt, at some point, you'd run out of peasants.

Remember the fact that the average human can live for 3 days without water. Use said days to amass scribes and craftsmen.

Did you ever use the "increase funding" card

I took "increase funding" literally every time it was offered, thinking "it's free money."

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It is free money

UNLIKE certain blue cards

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dude just build the sumps