Wow I didn't expect such a precise feedback, so let me answer you step by step.
Okay, so feedback. Sorry if I forget names, I'm bad with them.
I managed to get through chapter 6 on my own. The first few chapters were fairly easy, though chapter 6 ended up being fairly tricky; I got through it eventually, though I do have a fair amount of experience with Fire Emblem and similar games to it (a friend forced me to purchase Lost Eidolons, for instance).
I didn't expect chapter 6 to be a problem, and honestly I still think it's a rather easy one in a sense that you can take your time to complete it. I think simply remember player they can save at the begining of the turn should be enough so most people manage to complete it.
Chapter 7 is the first one that stalled me out. I tried a few different strategies with it; I tried a strategy based on luring enemies to the south down so that I could get a couple of free turns off on them, but when I did that, my forces on the right side ended up with a slip that got the assassin girl hit, and so when the ice witch got off her first freeze attack, I got an instant game over from the damage that attack did to me.
After that, I tried a strategy based on capturing villages as fast as I could so that I could start spawning in scouts on the right to bolster my forces up there. I had a bit of success with this one as I was able to send out villagers to lure scouts and knights away from directly getting to the assassin/archer up there, but I got overwhelmed down south because capturing villagers early involved taking direct hits from the scouts down there early on.
I tried a variation on this where I focused on using the villagers to defend up north and started spawning scouts down south, but found that the north struggled to hold, and the incoming damage on the south started to snowball until eventually the first knight down south managed to land a hit on Chloe and that snowballed into a loss when the ice witch did her first attack.
I tried variants of the first two again, just trying different positions and seeing if I could lure enemies into different ranges for Chloe and my archers, but that ended up leading into failure as well.
Eventually, I gave up and watched the Youtube guide. I could see the logic in it- the villagers form a wall up north that prevents enemies from getting through to the archer/the assassin and you use those two to snipe away scouts and knights each turn, and you position your units down south to lure enemies into ranges they can't hit from and then build up enough strength to form a strike force you can breach the wall of enemies with and strike the witch down in one turn- but it wasn't one of the first strategies that left to mind, and after five previous tries, I just gave up attempting it on my own.
Chapter 7 is really hard, I think I'll have to make adapt the easier mode to do different things depending on the level instead of just giving stats. Because if I boost the stats some level will be too easy, and if I don't I can't get level 7 to not be too hard.
This game is more like an advance war/wargroove like game than fire emblem, and the main difference is, some of your unit may die without consequence. Because of that, I think chapter 7 is the perfect level to explain 3 concepts in a tutorial I'll add promptly.
-Walling, in SoM, not unit worth the same amount and it's worth to hide your archer behind cheap unit to advance. If they don't attack the villager you'll manage to get closer, and if they do, they'll have killed a villager and your archer get a unit on a much more valuable unit.
-Economy, you should usualy always try to capture village fast in SoM, but only if you can't be punished for that, in chapter 7 you can avoid being hit by trying to capture all buiding except one.
-Economy2 : Because of walling, villager are extremely usefull unit, because of that, it is often a good idea to try to always have something produced in your bases, if you can buy a strong unit it's fine, but it's usualy better to produce units in every base than to skip a base to get a stronger unit.
So I think if I reduce the amount of enemy unit in "easier mode" and give those 3 advices maybe it'll feel ok? We'll see.
Idealy I'll have more detailed tips for mission when player is about to gameOver. But that would be a lot of work and I also have to make Chloe's illustration and her power animation this update and it's going to be hard to do everything.
Chapter 8 I gave three tries to, but I couldn't follow the logic the map wanted at all.
What happened with chapter 8 is that I found that eventually attrition would wear me down. I tried using my archers to snipe any scouts/knights that hit my defensive walls, and that worked for a while, but the scouts getting hits off when they approached my defensive lines would weaken my defences each round, and it only took 4-5 rounds of that to have the enemies kill two layers of defenses and get a knight in behind my lines to hit an archer. At that point, everything would snowball horribly- and this would happen on both sides of the field.
I tried spawning in scouts to bolster my defensive lines, but I couldn't rotate single units in and out of my defensive lines fast enough to keep them up; the enemies would focus the other line and eventually breach into them.
I also tried a variation where I spawned in archers and had them hiding behind my defensive lines to get extra shots off, but the enemy scouts/knights would just bust through my defensive walls that way, because it only takes one scout to kill a defender and then another high-movement enemy would walk through if I didn't have a second line in place.
I gave this one three tries, as I said, but I couldn't figure out what I was expected to do and ended up giving up, even with the 'easy mode' activated for higher damage on my end/lower on theirs.
(I also gave this one a silly little try where I did nothing at the start to see if the enemies would show patience if I didn't move to attack them. Sadly, they just spawn in hostiles and start as normal on turn 2 anyway.)
Ok from your feedback, I can see 2 things I can do (asides from changin easier mode that was just a hotfix I did last update until I make the real one anyway).
First, this level have a flaw because of a cursed problem :
I want to give some sort of immersion, so I don't want to tell the player how long they should try to survive.
But I also wanted the player to runaway when they're about to hit the time limit.
I tried to fix that byhaving Fionne say something like "it's time to runaway" a couple turn before the end, but I think it doesn't really work. I mean it works if they player run with all important character when suggested, but it feels weird to do that without knowing that you'll win in a couple turns.
I may have to give up the immersion bonus and tell the player how long they have to survive? Or maybe I'll just make the level easier. I'll see.
The other thing I can do is expand the tutorial here and add a couple concepts :
-Choke point : Archer are extremely good at defending chokepoint, if you have a couple each side with unit in the wall, you can hold for a while, of course eventualy you'll be overrun and have to flee (at least if you're not playing easier mode), but they can stall for a long time.
-Tempo : When you choose which unit you want to buy, you usualy want to think, when do I need it? Archer are by far the strongest unit in this level, but they need a couple turn to setup their position, because of that you should recruit them when you feel safe, but as soon as the pressure is getting high, you should switch to scouts.
A couple of broad comments about the experience;
I developed a habit of holding down ctrl to speed up enemy turns (it's still slow enough with that active to understand what enemies are doing, it just makes it play out faster), but this also skips dialogue, and that bit me during chapter 8. Chloe says something at some point, but each time I accidentally skipped it trying to fast-forward through enemy turns. It might be better to ensure that any dialogue goes into 'cutscene mode' if it's got any importance so that players don't accidentally skip it as part of regular gameplay?
You are right, I spend most of my time skipping enemy turn with right click because I can't afford to spend 20 minutes eveytime I playtest my game, and the good thing about that, is it will skip enemy turn but not the next cutscene, but because of that I didn't realized how frustrating it can be to get something skipped with CTRL. I really need to find a way for CTRL to not work for the first seconds of a curtscene at least, it's not that I don't want to, it's just that SRPG doesn't allow you to do it easily I think so I'll have to tinker with their code which will takes time.
Second; I find that the gameplay starts to get wearying because things tend to snowball. If you make a mistake, it's not going to immediately halt your progress on that turn- instead, the lower output on your end combined with the easier kill on theirs means that you slip into a disadvantageous position that will get worse the next turn when you have to spend an extra action to kill a unit on your turn and the damage you receive from that lets them kill an extra unit the next turn, and then the turn after that it happens again, and so on, until you've ended in a much worse position several turns later. It's unclear when this is going to end up in a failstate and when this is something you can recover from, so you're encouraged to play through and attempt to recover from it. This tends to mean that you end up playing for extended sequences when your mistake at the start meant you were probably going to fail from the moment you made that mistake, which is a frustrating experience to have.
Until know you gave me feedback that I kind of expected, and it helped but THIS my dear is far beyond usefull, you're literaly doing my job here aha.
Yeah you are right, I already thought about that when I was considering that fact that most people that thinks that hearthstone is full luck, are player that don't realize that they often lost because of an action 3 turns ago, that wasn't immediatly punished, but made them lost in the end. But I never really realized it could be also true for a game like SoM that has no randomness in it. And this is a problem, I think at least in a solo game, player should realize why they loose a level, and this is something I really failed to do here. I don't know yet how to tackle this problem, because it's a tricky one, but thank you for bringing this to my attention, I'll really have to think about it.
Third, and a more minor thing; the attacking range that archers and Chloe have is kind of unclear. Hovering over them shows their full range including movement, even though they won't move, so you have to test out over several matches what squares around them they can attack and what squares they can't. It would be nice if you could just see that information at a glance.
There's a part of me that wants to offer suggestions like "Please let units level up so that things become a little easier over time", which would also be nice because it would encourage you to get invested in things like funnelling enemies for your archers specifically to kill (a fun gameplay element since I believe the archers are being turned against their former comrades by Chloe, emphasizing what she's doing by rewarding you for turning comrade against comrade), but I understand that's not a gameplay point you're interested in, so I won't waste your time.
What I will express is that the action economy in later chapters seems very severely tuned, and you feel very heavily punished if the action economy swings against you by an enemy getting in even one unnecessary attack. It might be a bit relieving if that action economy was a little less severe so that you have the room to make even one or two mistakes earlier on without accidentally swinging yourself into a failure state early on.
-Yeah I need to fix the archer range, the problem is SRPG isn't 100% open source and the range display use some part of hidden code so it's a bit harder to fix than usual, but I'm absolutely sure it is possible to fix it.
-Nah I won't let unit level, and I think the main reason is the problem you talked about ealier, it delay even more the time between the player "mistake" (not allocating exp properly) and the player being punished, which mean if the game is hard, you'll have to minMax mission early to not loose the late game mission, or if you don't have to do that, then you end up with a game that because too easy over time.
-Again you are right, I think this won't be as noticable later, chapter 7/8 was time limited chapter in a way, and this tend to make things snowball, so maybe I should mainly fix those chapter? I'll think about it.
Secondarily, archers also seem extremely punishing when set against you, but it's much harder to make use of archers on your own side. To get use out of archers, you have to set them up in specific positions with other units there to bait stronger opponents into moving into an archer's range; if you have to move an archer to get them into attacking range, that's it, you've lost the action economy again and your archer can't attack that turn. Enemy archers, meanwhile, are always set against natural barriers that force you to wait outside of their range until you have several units who can immediately move through their range and swing them for lethal damage inside of one turn.
Maybe it might be worthwhile to look into whether giving your named archer units you recruit early on the ability to make short movements and still attack within a turn? This would make your own positioning feel much less restrictive and open up many more options for things like making archers less oppressive on your own turns, as you would have an option for dealing with archers with alpha strikes on your own at the cost of your own archers being whittled down by return fire, making it a risky option still.
Then again, I'm not a game dev; I'm just expressing my thoughts on what would make the game feel a bit easier to me. Feel free to disregard anything I've said.
Well archer are extremely strong when setup in a choke point and defending, they are punishing against you because you have to think of a way to wall break, but the opposite is also true. In chapter 8 your archer will usualy kill 3-6 times their price in units if you set them up in choke properly with villager/scouts in front of them.
I'm not sure about giving Alice/Carol special moves, they're like secondary characters. I'll think about it.
Anyway, thank you for your feedback, part of it was just bug I would have fixed anyway, but you also gave me really valuable info about why people struggle and also reminded me of this super important concept to prevent frustration that I should limit the time between player's mistakes and punishment so they don't have illusions that the game isn't already lost when it is.
I'll try to fix most of it, maybe not in the next update cause making Chloe's illustrations + heroic power animation will takes lots of time, but maybe the next one.
