A few days ago I finished the big refactoring that I wrote about in the previous update, and now it’s time to do more fun things. The minion management UI is pretty clunky, so I added a way to change minion tasks by drag-and-dropping them into appropriate rooms. It’s much faster!

With this in place, it was easy to add a simple go-to order by dragging a minion, in case you want to quickly explore some area or order them to join a fight, without having to control them. It’s more of a convenience feature than full blown RTS-style commanding. For example you can’t give this order to an entire team.

With the new manual production there is potential to make minions smarter, for example have them automatically switch to whichever manufactory is producing something, or revert to training or studying. It’s still unclear how to reconcile it with manual assignment, and it will probably require larger internal changes, so I’ll leave this for a later update.

Right now I’m going to finish the new floor features, like efficiency bonuses, and I’ll maybe add a few special “magical” floor types. I haven’t decided whether I’m going to prepare a new release next, or keep adding more gameplay changes.

Let’s have a quick look at some of the game statistics that the game now gathers. Since Alpha19 was released 44 days ago, 1644 players played 6103 campaign and 1253 single map games. Of the campaign games, there were 3650 keepers and 2453 adventurers.

The above numbers are nice, however it turns out that only 7% of players played 10 or more games, 21% played 5 or more. 42% played only one game (this single playthrough lasted 6500 turns on the average). This confirms that I need to work more on the gameplay, to make it more absorbing, and try to make players come back more often.