Common early access questions & feedback

Feedback and questions frequently seen on the forums
This relates to the early access builds available on Steam and NOT the freemium iOS game.

Powers
Cost of powers too high or rate of belief generation too low. Typical playing scenario involves logging in, collecting the belief, spending it very rapidly on moving high-altitude land or one or two god powers, then logging out and waiting for belief to regenerate, which can take 30 minutes or more.

Moving high-altitude land can empty your belief pool with just a few sculpting gestures.

Every-increasing cost for re-casting the same power - trees for example.

Gems
Currently regarded as a pointless, secondary currency, by many. There seems to be little or no reason to have gems in the PC build, other than to emulate the mobile game. The in game currency is belief. Unless you can give a good gameplay reason for gems, that couldn't already be filled by belief, they are redundant.

Stickers & Cards
Regardless of the iconography, the current sticker and card system represents a random number generator, essentially meaning that everyone opens up cards at a similar pace, regardless of their play style, not being able to focus on the completion of a card, if they want to.

The problem with stickers is that the card stickers costs are far to high and prohibitive due to being integrated into a spend gems solution. They were fixed once, but now you've gone and broken them again simply because now we can buy stickers with gems.

Also don't forget. Stickers have absolutely no strategy or tactics really to obtain them. It's random what you get from chests. It's not like they have different colors and you go "ok. I need an orange one now" or anything strategic at all really.

Timers
Progression is currently made by doing something other than playing the game. Progression, in any game, should always be about skill, not in a players ability to turn off the game and do something else for a week.

The issue with timers is that they're far too long and prohibitive due to being integrated into a spend gems solution and being used to artificially stagnate the player experience. The game needs less oversight and pacing control and more freedom by having much more accessible timer values.

Gifts & Happiness
Gifts and happiness are currently being used as an exploitative measure, to encourage the player to spend money on the iOS version with the side affect of making the PC version very dependent on procuring gems. Again, with the analog of money being gems and the procurement of which, requires the gamer to make their society miserable, you have created a closed loop. Players can see that from a mile away and will simply choose not to take any part in the mechanic after a while.

Sculpting
At present, the game has removed (previously available) tools for adding and subtracting land, because it costs the player more belief to drag land from somewhere else and the quick depletion of belief helps 22Cans make money. Since the PC version of the game should have no such consideration, why not give players the tools they need to make beautiful and varied landscapes?

The game contains no mechanism for adding height. All sculpting can achieve is lowering land.

The game rewards creating wide expanses of flat land.

Forced revisitation
The game currently requires that the player visit their homeworld every hour or two, so they can click everything in the game. Click houses to collect belief, click mines to collect ore, click fields to collect wheat, click gifts to preserve happiness. Such busy work may be seen as an acceptable thing to do in freemium titles. It is not, in retail games.

The Astari continue to hold festivals even when the game is not running, so players can lose significant percentages of their population if the game isn't continually attended to.

Voyages
Voyages feel like a shallow mini-game, added so that players would have something to do while waiting for timers to complete. Beyond collecting stickers they serve no strategic purpose.