By Jim Rossignol on August 20th, 2008 at 4:35 pm.
This little browser-based strategy is painfully slow – so slow you can go to the post office, extricate yourself from having to talk to the old woman from next door, then make a cup of tea and still only have generated just enough resource to continue – yet it’s somehow utterly engrossing. As the title suggests, you have to break the tower at the far end of the island. You can only do this by placing buildings on the island, and eventually masons at the foot of the tower. That’s all the influence you have on the lives of the peons and warriors who populate the island, and who battle with the monsters that emanate from the tower. No, really, it’s got something. Try it. (And don’t accidentally click away from a twenty-minute game, as I just did. NoooOOOo.)
I found this minuscule treasure over on Indiegames.com.
20/08/2008 at 16:57 TychoCelchuuu says:
Sounsd a bit like Majesty. I’m excited!
20/08/2008 at 17:08 cullnean says:
25 mins in monster’s 0 me 1
20/08/2008 at 17:11 Jochen Scheisse says:
The planter is a scam! Resources are your enemy!
20/08/2008 at 17:23 Optimaximal says:
It’s like browser Settlers!
20/08/2008 at 17:27 Rosti says:
Loving this game as a background activity. 10 mins in, not sure how it’ll go…
20/08/2008 at 17:28 Erlam says:
Forgive me for being dense (I’m working 12 hour days six days a week), but is it install only? Or is there a flash version? Something I don’t have to install at work?
28/01/2012 at 03:47 CT3LA says:
There is no install version. it’s an online Java game. You just go to the webpage and click in the game window to start up. Protip: If you build a farm and windmill and forget about the game for four hours, you’re set for life in food.
20/08/2008 at 17:28 SteevR says:
How do you build a miller to make more food?
20/08/2008 at 17:32 Crash says:
@Erlam: it uses Java, so no need to install.
20/08/2008 at 17:38 Ben Abraham says:
It reminds me of Black & White, except without the stupid creature.
20/08/2008 at 17:40 Him says:
SteevR – Farms grow food which is taken to a miller.
20/08/2008 at 17:41 phuzz says:
it’s like a cut down settlers, only without the pretty graphics.
20/08/2008 at 17:42 mysticsika says:
I seem to be living in perfect harmony with the tower, its rather benign.
30 min in and my island is a peaceful haven, when can I build hotels?
20/08/2008 at 17:45 cullnean says:
1 hour in i think im winning?
ill let it run
20/08/2008 at 17:46 InVinoVeritas says:
@SteevR- The miller can be made at any time! I thought it was crossed out too, it’s just the windmill blades that look like an X.
20/08/2008 at 18:09 Colthor says:
I won! Time 39:25, score 15570.
But I wasn’t paying attention at the time, I was reading the Sam and Max entry :/
Still, this is like Settlers, and Settlers is good.
20/08/2008 at 18:10 Crash says:
Oh noes, those pesky tower ninjas (they’re black so they MUST be ninjas!) can attack my buildings and peasants!
Unrelated: after one hour of happy tree-chopping I ran out of wood. Best lesson of ecology ever.
20/08/2008 at 18:16 mysticsika says:
If only my lil guys built boats and sailed away.
20/08/2008 at 18:22 Erlam says:
Yeah, when I load the website, it’s just:
Breaking the tower
(tonnes of space)
Check out my youtube video…
20/08/2008 at 18:24 Cooper says:
Now I’m gonna have to play settlers when I get home.
20/08/2008 at 18:25 DSX says:
Very fun game, took me an hour and 10 minutes, thanks RPS!
20/08/2008 at 18:27 Ben Abraham says:
Woohoo! I won! 51:07, Score – 12,007
20/08/2008 at 18:41 SteevR says:
Now this game REALLY reminds me of the bad old days of 320×240 and 16 colors… you had to be good at guessing what things were!
20/08/2008 at 18:41 Jim Rossignol says:
It might need Java installed?
20/08/2008 at 18:57 Crash says:
Do you guys use guardposts? I can’t find any good use for them, my peons and soldiers are walking wherever they want, no matter where I place signposts.
20/08/2008 at 19:13 roBurky says:
That was fun. 40 minutes to victory.
20/08/2008 at 19:14 Senethro says:
I put 3 guard posts around the tower and 50% of my warriors are there at one time.
Important info: BUilding houses raises pop cap.
Building barracks raises warrior cap.
Peons seem to evenly distribute themselves around the different buildings. If you’re not getting enough food, increase the relative proportion of farms and delete some of your lumberjacks.
Edit: Oh, and heres another one. I thought 1 mill would do 3 farms (this being Settlers and all). I was wrong. You have to build lots of mills to encourage them to harvest.
20/08/2008 at 19:18 Nimic says:
39 minutes, and I wasn’t really paying attention for a while. Kinda fun.
20/08/2008 at 19:20 Half Broken Glass says:
Java is not a programming language.
20/08/2008 at 19:32 tehf0nx says:
How do you get them to attack the tower ? should i build a mason’s building next to it or will they do it automatically once there a “clear path”
20/08/2008 at 19:37 Crash says:
@tehf0nx: chop the trees, build masons. Here in England we call it Industrialism.
20/08/2008 at 20:36 Damien says:
I may have won, but now I live on a completely deforested island. I sense an impending ecological tragedy far greater than a giant evil tower could ever have caused.
20/08/2008 at 20:57 Beastman says:
Err…I destroyed the tower, but there was no message or anything saying I won.
So I destroyed all my buildings and the game lagged like hell, presumably trying to figure out what to tell 150 people to do with no buildings to do anything with -_-
20/08/2008 at 20:58 caramelcarrot says:
I’m running out of rock. Can I plant rocks?
Also, almost won at 1 hour 11, but half the map is planets – because I believe in sustainability.
edit: Won 1:17:55, score 7877. They should give points for thinking of a post-tower island future!
20/08/2008 at 21:06 JamesC says:
1hr, and of course, I wasn’t watching.
Now playing the after-game – what is the highest sustainable population of the island? I don’t think the little mens need food once created, so in theory I could end up with an island of just apartment blocks? Destroying woodcutters & stonecutters once I have enough resources, to make space.
Which will give out first, my patience or my laptop fan (it’s struggling at 220 peons).
20/08/2008 at 21:09 caramelcarrot says:
@JamesC: I call it, “HONG KONG”
Also, turns out you don’t need residences or barracks? I just deleted a few to relocate them to my METROPOLIS and it’s remaining at 170/150
20/08/2008 at 21:55 caramelcarrot says:
Managed to get up to 460 peons and 30 warriors before I ran out of stone. Boo.
20/08/2008 at 22:04 Lucky Main Street says:
What are the win parameters? I’ve got 150 population, 100 warriors, and the tower seems to have gotten smaller, but I’ve been playing for 2 hrs with no win! And I’m out of rocks!
20/08/2008 at 22:12 dave says:
Huh I got bored after I had 30 warriors just running around.
20/08/2008 at 22:16 Nimic says:
100 warriors?! 15 warriors was easily enough for me. I just built a bunch of those quarries around the tower and my guys chopped away at it.
20/08/2008 at 22:37 anon says:
Keep in mind that he made this in 48 hours for the Ludum Dare game compo, pretty amazing.
20/08/2008 at 22:48 Duke says:
Here is my happy village of 500.
http://bay01.imagebay.com/bay.php?view=52618_500.jpg
It has a garrison of 30 soldiers to keep the villagers at bay and to rid the town of those troublemakers with the silly idea that life has no meaning now that the tower is gone
20/08/2008 at 22:52 Cradok says:
I forgot about my island and left it alone for four hours. I came back to find nearly everywhere that wasn’t building had overgrown with forest, I had 0 wood and all my peons were stranded away from the huts. It took some creative building and selling before I could start to clear the area…
20/08/2008 at 23:04 Seb Potter says:
That was ace. A couple of farms and mills to get to 50 villagers and 10 warriors, a row of lumber mills to clear a path to the tower, and then a guard post and 5 mason huts next to the tower to bring it down. Victory in 53 minutes – most of which I spent playing Tomb Raider Anniversary. What a great little distraction.
20/08/2008 at 23:29 Talisker says:
35:41, 17147 points. Woot!
20/08/2008 at 23:49 Mark says:
I think I’ll study the source code for this.
20/08/2008 at 23:56 vinic says:
I dug on this yesterday. Did a little resource management, took a shower, and came back to find I had won.
It seems like the “hard” part of this game is the first handful of minutes.
21/08/2008 at 00:48 Dominic White says:
68 minutes to win on my first try. Clearly you can win a lot faster than this, as I don’t think there was a single point where monsters had lowered my population by more than 2-3 below maximum.
By the end, I had 170 villagers, 55 warriors.
21/08/2008 at 02:25 ADamnFox says:
Having won, and subsequently utterly decimated the ecology of the island, I felt guilty and thus immediately began a massive reforrestation project. I eventually demolished everything except about 20 or 30 planters. Once you have the population, you don’t need the houses anymore, so even they went. All 100 of my people and my 30 strong military apparently live in trees now.
This is how I discovered that the game is, in fact, an elaborate telling of the origin story of elves.
21/08/2008 at 02:34 feitclub says:
The guardtowers aren’t as effective as they should be. During the endgame I had at least 6-7 soldiers just wandering around aimlessly on the shore instead of defending my masons surrounding the tower, despite the fact that I had built four guardtowers in that area to keep them focused.
21/08/2008 at 04:08 Stromko says:
That was fun. I took an hour and 30 minutes to take down the tower, mainly as I avoided touching it until the rest of the stone was gone. Got rid of all the existing forests but replanted them in three locations. Always kept an army half as big as my villager population. Had 140 villagers when the tower was finally gone.
I didn’t figure out until near the end that the most important thing for production was population and location, not number of buildings. Same goes for farms and planters, they’ll place lots of crops and saplings if there’s plenty of space. Most of my planters and farms instead only had about 30 – 50% of their total growing area because I thought I needed more of them.
I actually spent much of my time watching the screen kind of distractedly, rather than just doing something else entirely. I always find it oddly comforting and intriguing to see an ‘ecosystem’ I built run its course, which probably explains why I’ve spent solid weeks doing little other than watching little ASCII happy-faces with beards trundle along corridors.
21/08/2008 at 04:28 Radiant says:
30 population 15 warriors.
Removed all the masons and the woodcutters [I guess I'll build cutters when I need 'em to keep the trees in check].
Now my people are in a harmonious relationship with their island, farming and harvesting.
I’ll leave it over night just to see what happens, although, I’m terrified that when I wake up tomorrow they’d have built a bustling metropolis around a statue of my face.
21/08/2008 at 05:23 MindBrain says:
Wtf is using up my wood ??????
21/08/2008 at 10:15 JamesC says:
@All the eco-paradise builders: I cut down every tree, demolished every building, and left my 300 peons with a completely bare island aside from one mysterious statue (guard tower) in the middle. Now they just mill around at the shore, presumably licking algae off rocks to survive.
21/08/2008 at 14:05 monkeymonster says:
Cooooo, everyone at work is now wondering what it is too…. :D
30:49 19911 with 40/10
21/08/2008 at 15:21 Radiant says:
@James C that’s terrible.
I built 3 self sustaining industries.
Planters and woodcutting, farming and harvesting and the military.
I woke up this morning to find my perfectly balanced society still perfectly balanced.
The ancient legends about the great tower barely remembered by the elders and only used to scare the children when they played to close to the swathe of untouched impenetrable woodland to the south they call “the great forest”.
I LOVE this game.
It’s been running in the background for nearly 24 hours.
I love that there is very little in the way of change; I love that I can have things working perpetually and watch it effect the island.
There needs to be more! [more evil! more industry! more war! and religion and then religious war!]
The pace and perpetuity of the game is sublime.
Perfect casual gaming.
21/08/2008 at 15:24 Lucky Main Street says:
@Nimic, thanks for the tip. I realized what I was doing wrong. I thought the villagers treated the tower as a threat, so I was making lots of warriors; but they were actually treating it as a resource. So round 2, once I had a clear path, I destroyed my other Masons, and just built them around the tower. Won in just over an hour.
23/08/2008 at 01:11 emu10k1 says:
New High Score…What does that mean?…did i break it?
24/08/2008 at 00:29 Tur-Chan says:
YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! ME IN FIRST PLACE!!! 10 MIN 52 SECONDS! GOGOGOGOGOGO!!
24/08/2008 at 01:14 Ed says:
For a game created in less than 48 hours as part of a game dev competition, this is pretty awesome.
25/08/2008 at 00:39 Miles says:
@Tur-Chan
they pulled all scores lower than ~20mins, I found that out when I got a 10 min 56 seconds time :(
It is pretty easy to modify the values for the resources, they are 4 bits apart somewhere in the browser, find one and the rest should be right next to it. It is pretty tough to get more than 500 characters due to them wandering about and the slowdown that comes with them.
I want bridge builders or more stuff to attack (wood fort?) Possibly build your own tower/wall and defend it from them?
Very cool game, they should open it to cheaters because there is going to be a minimum time even with cheating. (or just give us 3,000 resources and call it the unlimited easy version)
Amazing game for 48 hours though.
26/08/2008 at 07:01 Miles says:
My best so far is 5 minutes 5 seconds, combined hack of 1,000 resources to start with and reduction of the tower to 1 stone worth from the beginning (as soon as I can find the resources the tower is pretty easy to find and manipulate <2mins).
Of all the resources when I win the only one under 1,000 is food at 955. I produced 16 guys total, I don’t think any were killed.
Strategy:
Leave trees to slow down the black dudes.
Build one domicile near the rocks and immediately destroy the guard tower.
Then strike out with a woodcutting lodge a short distance from the first rocks.
Try for a mason in the small clearing to the SW (if tower is at the top as North). It is kinda tough to get these little dudes to do what you want. But if you can get them to go the right direction it only takes a couple.
I only looked at the source to get the tower’s starting value, it is 80.
Even with the hacking it is a fun game, possibly because of it.
I don’t know what the minimum time would be without cheating, but it starts to look like very little if you can make the little guys do what you want.
16/04/2009 at 21:08 psyk says:
How can you cheat and call it your best?
05/06/2009 at 17:01 Jojoh says:
Brilliant game! Well balanced and challenging without being too difficult. Funny that one really don’t know how to complete the game, but had to explore!
09/11/2010 at 18:37 Diaperboy says:
And we all know this is the same developer as minecraft?