My issues with the Astari

Part of the idea behind the Astari was to add some difficulty into the homeworld. It sucks that you're having some issues though. Sounds kind of like you got into a sort of soft game over situation, perhaps. I'm sure we'll keep iterating to make it more rewarding.

I mean I get the idea of it. Difficulty = great. Other tribes = great. But I need to have options to deal with said other tribe. You have to either design a happy society that can draw them to you or go all war like and meteor them. Problem is neither of those are really an option. Because trees require belief and belief requires waiting you get into this trap that requires more waiting. At 22Cans you probably think we are all made arghhh people about gems and F2P and all that. Its not because we hate mobile or any of that we just want a game that's possible to play and one that doesn't put us in a straight jacket. Having all the gifts cost gems which lets face it are almost impossible to get in quantities without sacrificing your people is impossible. I just really wish you'd think about these things a little more before you implement them. Its killing the relationship between the buyers and the developers that you do these things to us, it seems intentionally. I don't want to be an asshole about it but when it feels like the game hasn't been played at all its just infuriating. I appreciate its beta and all that but lets just try and make it fair.

The Astari mechanic is a flawed one indeed.
If you had the presence of mind to think ahead (like I did) and not burn through your happiness at the start.
They are really easy to deal with. If on the other hand you played like you're used to and you then make use of the pit of doom as soon as it gets introduced.
Well, you get shafted.

Which makes it feel like a big middle finger towards the player for not playing the way the game was designed.
Keep in mind, they do not inform you beforehand that this mechanic is changed - however I noticed the Astari early on when looking at the new map.
And when I looked through the powers I saw the gifts thing so I put 2 and 2 together...


Long story short - if you play with the Astari in the game, you are going into a very slow and tedious style of gameplay.
You continually have to battle them with happiness and gifts and your progression is rather slow.
If on the other hand you plop down one or two swamps in their area (around their festival plaza) and kill off the stragglers.
You'll quickly find out that happiness (in the current format of the game) is no longer an issue and you can sacrifice your people to your hearts content to speed up the pace of the game.

You see, happiness is currently only relevant to the Astari mechanic. If happiness would affect the production of my people, I'd have a reason to keep them happy. But it doesn't. Happiness purely affects whether I get useless Astari followers (I noticed that their houses do NOT give belief or anything...) or you lose followers TO the Astari settlement, followers which promptly convert and become useless to you. (You can FoG them while they walk away)



Suggestions here:
1 - Make Astari usefull, give me a reason to WANT Astari. Have them give me MORE belief, have them give me happiness for their festive little carnival tents or something of the sort.
2 - Make happiness more effective overall. Have it influence more than just the Astari mechanic - without it crippling your game entirely.
As it stands right now, if you drop low in happiness it gets really hard to recover (its possible though...)

My peep's happiness was at the very bottom. I kept losing 40+ peeps to them. I was able to recover. I kept sacrificing my peeps from the level 1 homes on sand levels since they respawn super fast until I got 100 gems. I then bought 3 gifts (2 fountains and 1 tree) . Every ten minutes, I would click on them to raise the happiness by 15%. Eventually, I got 100% happiness while the astari was at around 80%.

They forget this skill as soon as they enter your territory and you can start leashing them sadly.
I actually noticed this aswell and thought it'd be a great 'second type' of follower.

One with alternate attributes, in this case the Astari can climb and therefor reach locations your other followers would not be able to reach.
In line with their own civilization they are a much more laid back people and would have sïesta's and festivals regularly boosting the happiness of the people that live around them (but perhaps keeping them up at night and lowering production a tad?)
Only, because these are such easy going people they'd be less suited for heavy manual labour and might not be as inclined to provide belief (they'd need to be converted or something?)


Right now, they just eat your food and take up space with no real benefit.

Wow so when I logged off last night I had more happiness than the Astari after spending approx 12k belief on trees. I logged on this evening and my happiness is now significantly lower and Ive lost 27 followers. You can imagine how happy I am about this development.

I thought I understood the happiness mechanic but I guess not. I can't think of any reason it would go down when I'm not playing. As for gems I guess they just ported mobile but GODUS 22cans that is frustrating as a PC player.

When you're happier than the Astari, you get their followers, who are now homeless. So they generate unhappiness.

Essentially? You either gather up some belief and bump up your happiness like that - or you restart, use your first bunches of gems on gifts and then use those to bump up your happiness.
As soon as you got access to swamps, you drop some in the Astari base and they're done. After which you can play the game to your own desires.

As much as I'd like to see a proper playthrough, the fact that it totally cripples you while you're offline totally breaks the game.
No mercy for the Astari. Atleast not untill their functionality and 'minigame' has been rebalanced and is properly functioning.

*make note, this is just another game mechanic that proves to be clearly broken if you actually play the game for a longer period on end 'like a normal human being', I wonder how this got through their preliminary testing if they actually bothered to test without using cheats rather than just testing the functionality of individual mechanics*