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Thanks! 

Yes I'd say it is a utility based AI at it's core. The AI always simulates a few diffferent moves from the ginormous number of options, this is done following some heuristics that try to cheaply guess which moves make sense; there's a bunch of auxiliary data structures that help the AI understand which tiles are important to defend or capture etc. After it has those candidate moves, it then runs a pretty expensive utility function to properly score the end result of each candidate move sequence and pick the best looking one.

Balancing defense and offense correctly was indeed a daunting part, but the solution I ended up is pretty simple. One of the candidate moves always includes commiting everything to offense (because sometimes that's the best defense :)), and the others each use different offense/defense splits. The utility function will decide which approach works out best for this turn.

Just my personal opinion: 

• Small minority of people will always call it a ripoff as long as there is any similarity at all, even just for being in the same genre. I wouldn't worry about that.
• If you strictly remake the original game with different assets and add nothing new to the gameplay or story, but also promininetly give credit to the original, IMO that's a clone and there's nothing ethically wrong about it (see games like  OpenTTD, Remnants of the Precursors and countless other tributes to cult classic games)
• If you do the above, but without giving credit, that's where I would draw the line personaly, and that's when I think your game could get some bad rep (but as you said, you're still not in any danger legaly. (cough)not-a-legal-advice(cough).
• If you take inspiration in the original game but make some substantial changes to the mechanics or story, IMO giving credit is totally optional (how many people call Minecraft a ripoff of Inifiniminer?).

Legaly speaking, reusing assets is obviously a big no-no, and I believe there are also some cases where copying the UI can get you in trouble even if the assets aren't exactly 1:1. But I'm not a lawyer.

“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” 
- attributed to Pablo Picasso

As noted in the description, this game (same as Antiyoy) is heavily inspired by Sean O'Connors Slay!. However, it does bring some pretty impactful twists to the formula. See this older post for list of the differences compared to Slay! (and Antiyoy): https://itch.io/post/6419763

Agreed, it was too hard for such an early level and not that interesting in terms of strategy options. Just gave it a major overhaul in the newest update!

The game is totally an attempt to make my own preffered variant of Slay!, a game that has been my addiction for years :). So while it's quite faithful to it's core formula,  there's a number of subtle but impactful differences that I found make the game more fun for me. Hopefully this also makes it interesting even for Slay! veterans:

• Towns in this game don't respawn, so cutting away chunks of territory or losing towns is a lot more impactful (also makes the late game much faster and brutal); on the flip side, you also don't need to worry about towns despawning when you merge provinces
• In this game AI oponents have a relationship towards you which affects their actions, so there's more to consider when chosing who and when to attack
  
• Bandits and bandit camps fill a similar role to Slays forests, but they  work quite differently
• Towers (castles) are more expensive and have a maintenance cost in this game, but they also enable units to retreat; cut-off towers turn into bandit camps
  
• Upgrading units is more expensive in this game (you always need two units of the same kind to get a higher-tier unit)

Going forward, I hope another difference will be that this game will have a lot more interesting hand-crafted content (campaings, alternate modes etc.) and even better AI (though I will admit Slay! is not easy to beat in that aspect!), but time will tell :).

Sliding through the level is super satisfying :). Would probably enjoy it more without the one button control scheme. Waiting for he arrow to align where I want it feels frustrating under time pressure.

Proud to release this cute little turn-based strategy game I've be working on!

This is a strategy game inspired by the brilliant simplicity of Sean O'Connors Slay. The core idea is very simple board-game-like rules leading to pretty deep strategic/tactical gameplay. Easy to learn, hard to master and all that. It's supposed to be user-friendly whether you're on PC or smartphone and whether you're using touch controls or mouse.

Play it for free on https://embair.itch.io/konkr or on it's main page: https://www.konkr.io/