Way of Gold and Steel

Game simply wont let you progress. Building placement system is so clunky I just simply can't build advanced buildings to find new lands to build

I am very impressed on the amount of gameplay you get for such a small file. it really has no tooltips and you need to look up how to play otherwise you will have a bad time. if you build a boat and settle on land, from what I can tell all your efforts dissolve at that moment into resource. combat is auto resolved which keeps the game simple. there is trade stocking ships to sail for coin or resources.

TL:DR dont buy its unfinished and i dont think its likely to change, not very fun with what works.



This game is unfinished and the creator has said that he likes it the way it is.
First off a large part of this game is combat: with natives, colonists and wild animals. You need to fight colonists for many reasons, wild animals to get gold and access to islands and natives to win the game. The only problem is that combat is impossible. Colonists, who you have to raid else they attack you later on, will pull you into a fight with a single man, one guy! And then their entire colony comes to kill you with spears, swords, armor. Want to run away? NO RUNNING AWAY COWARD!! As you are forced to click, click, click which is the only impact you have on combat: clicking determing how fast you attack capped by your weapon, you cannot run away, you fists cannot stand up to their weapomns annnnndddddd...... there are about 15 of them for you to fight with your fists. This is incredibly fustrating as a large part of the game's mechanic and your survival is based upon raiding these colonists. While it may be fun to dance with death as you try to do what you can to steal there resources and destroy, maybe one hut.

Dungeons. Dungeons in this game are horribly designed. There are chests with very little loot: the basic resources are all you can expect from the chests you can get to. Other chests are either guarded by wild animals who deal 3x your damage, have 4x your hp and lock you in combat as per the stupid mechanic until the rest of the cave is drawn to your fight.

Oh yeah natives. The one enemy you can actually click on and not die to. They have a really strange time where they do not attack you and then out of the blue they start fighting you. Do not go anywhere near one of their archer towers, of which you can expect 1-3 of on every island that has any resource you want/need. These archer towers will draw you into combat which again YOU CANNOT RUN AWAY. Only this time it is A STATIONARY OBJECT. They also deal either more or less damage than you, its hard to say but what i can say is that they have maybe 5x your hp so good luck fighting one on your own.
Enough about combat.

Early game all you can do is play another game. You can literally press 3 keys, wait maybe 40 secs then press another 3 keys then you need do nothing for the next 5 mins waiting for the 6 keys you pressed to get you resources.
Once you get to exploration you can go off frolicking through the world to find the 1 island that isnt dominated by animals, native archer towers or colonists, you then get stuck on that island for another 5 mins repeating the process all over again. Then once you return home you find that either you men have all destroyed their own houses because they dont have gold or your men are dead and the buildings occupied by colonists.

So if you have read to the end thank you for having the patience to read my rant about another good idea turned into a money grab.
If you are the creator of the game to you I say please put in the great amount of effort I know it must take to fix your game. It would be great if even the little it has at the moment just worked.

Controls are extremely clunky, movement is not fluid, and there is barely any sound in-game. I'm thinking that there is a cool concept behind all that, but it's hidden under too many frustrating things to be able to enjoy.

First review on Steam. Like the game enough so far to write a review.

It's simple. The UI is a bit unforgiving at first (it took me a bit to realize that buildings spawn workers which also spawn resources; many games make you work for each of those things individually, so I was slow to catch on). But once it "clicks" for you, which doesn't take too long, you'll be hard at work. And the "violently running headlong into crocodiles" to kill them before they eat your workers" thing doesn't get old. Especially when you can sell their skins for iron ore. Which you need for weapons because CRAP HERE COME THE ANGRY NATIVES. Like I said, it's simple, but it doesn't feel totally banal either. Losing a logger to a crocodile's maw hurts, especially when you need them to chop enough wood to build a way off the island.

The whole "pour a cup of coffee and watch your minions carry out your orders" shtick makes for a great angle. It's the perfect game to play in the morning as you wake up: just mentally taxing enough. The pastel color scheme is easy on the eyes too (though, on the flip side, I've heard some say they're not crazy about the graphics - to each his own, I guess).

Honestly, I paid a dollar for this thing. If it hadn't been so cheap, I might not have tried it. But now I have, I would definitely pay more. So long as it stays under $10, and updates come regularly, this can grow into a fun little hobby. It's no Dwarf Fortress, Gnormoria, etc etc etc. But as a relaxing management sim, it scratches just enough of the right itch.

OK, I’m genuinely confused here. I bought this game because negative reviews made it look like the game is extremely underrated, but guess what? It isn’t. But I can’t say that the original idea is bad. And that’s why I’m confused. To understand what the Way of Gold and Steel is, you should be old enough to remember how it was about computer games in the late 80s and early 90s. Those were crazy times, when just a bunch of people was able to make a cool game. Remember King’s Bounty? The game, that started one of the biggest turn-based franchises ever made, Heroes of Might & Magic? Remember how many people made it? Two programmers and three people, who worped on graphics. And that was it - the legend was born. Realistic graphics didn’t kill the gaming yet back then and people didn’t need expensive machines to make something that will look cool for everybody. Nowadays, there are cool-looking AAA projects and those poor-looking indie ones. Back in the days it was possible for indie games to look cool too. Thanks to that there were also some interesting fan-made games back then that looked almost like their commercial counterparts. Like Ukraininan guy Sergey Prokofiev made an unofficial sequel to King’s Bounty. It was left unfinished, but it was pretty cool for one-man project. Why am I telling you all that? Because that’s exactly what the Way of Gold and Steel is - a one-man project. It’s made by a Russian guy from Moscow, whose name is also Sergey, Sergey Bobrov. It may sound very interesting for old school gamers, since one-man projects are often unique, but the problem here is - the game feels like it was made in early 90s. And it isn’t a good thing.

I mean, yes, all of us can enjoy some retro. But the Way of Gold and Steel is not a retro. It's dated. Even though it was made not so long ago, it feels like an old game. Like its maker used to live in a bunker for many years. Retro is a one thing, but Sergey just ignored everything that can be improved and made his game to feel dated instead of giving players a nice retro feeling. For example, all of us enjoy Dune 2, but nobody will want the genre to willingly jump back to the uncomfortable UI after Command & Conquer showed how cool things can be. Same thing here - interface is a pain in the neck with no proper reason. But enough about that, let’s talk about the game itself.

The Way of Gold and Steel is some sort of mix between strategy and roguelike. Remember the German clone of the famous Settlers called Knights & Merchants? Check it out in Steam if you don’t. It was an RTS about the kingdom at war, where you were supposed to build yourself a village to support your army. You were supposed to build mines and vegetable gardens, plant trees and do other stuff to keep things going and produce the goods. Like you were supposed to plant the tree first and let it grow before your woodcutter was able to cut it and deliver it to the other villagers to produce some other stuff from it. Same thing here. You build the huts for various workers and make them producing things to keep your incomes going. Only all that is in roguelike-like mode now. Sounds pretty nice again and it somewhat is, but only before you understand how dull and repetitive the whole thing is. You build the lumberjack’s and forester’s huts to be able to cut and plant trees, you build some mines, you build the shipyard to be able to travel to the next island, you move and repeat the process. The end.

The only goal of the game is to collect two special coins by killing everybody in the world. The whole game is just a single map. Imagine what would happen if Sid Meier was seriously hit to his head before he started working on his famous Civilization and that’ll be it. There are no researches, there are no quests, there are no special goals, or something like that. You just build stuff to get more resources and expand. There are enemies though, but even that feels wrong.

First of all, the game is random. Way too random. You may be invaded by a huge enemy fleet during the first few minutes. or you may play for hours and see no enemies, while the battles themselves feel absolutely terrible, since enemies have no AI and just keep running across the map. UI, as I’ve already said, is a royal pain in a neck too. Also, even though you’re playing as a captain of the pirates crew and supposed to give your guys the orders directly (you can’t even do that from far away, or they won’t be able to hear you), you can’t level up. No level ups, no skills, no even proper equipment screen. You can equip weapons and some basic armor, but you just add them to your inventory and select “equip”. There can’t be anything more dull. There are some dungeons, but you’ll die from boredom long before you’ll even get to them and those are nothing in comparison with proper roguelikes.

Finally, the game looks pretty poor. You may think that it’s some sort of cool retro style, judging by screenshots, but no, it’s just a poor graphics (the whole game is only 8mb, by the way). Also, no music, no sound (no even PC speaker, lol), no customization at all (which is must for any roguelike), nothing. It’s just that - a single map with some enemies on it and you, who’re supposed to build things and get resources. Just to be able to build even more things. Imagine Civilization without researches and city management. Imagine Pirates! without being able to interact with the cities and without interesting sea battles. Imagine King’s Bounty without quests and hidden treasures… That’s exactly what we have here. An extremely uncomfortable routine without anything special in it. The game feels unfinished. Like King’s Bounty 2. With some more time in development, it’ll have a small chance. As is, it gives me a strange feeling that I traveled back in time and played some poor game from late 80s / early 90s.

In other words, if you want some old school, buy yourself some true classics. Like Pirates!. But don’t pay for this, because it’s literally not worth your time. It may be OK for somebody’s school project, but why should we pay for it - that’s the question.

It's very vague, which turns off a lot of players, and it almost turned me away. I realised the game wants you to learn it yourself with very little hand-holding, and I learned the mechanics over time. It's a surprisingly fun and challenging game as a result, though not for everyone - if you're a fan of rogue-likes and RTS (and if you're patient) then this game is great for you.

Although the game looks interesting in the beginning, it's just too primitive and barebones to be considered enjoyable. And I am not talking about the graphics, graphics are actually adequate, as far as indie games like Dominions go.

I am talking about the gameplay. Very simple chain of production, no flexibility in case something goes wrong (no space for shipyard?). You can't even decide whether to attack or parley with the other entities - they either sort of ignore each other, or start killing each other, without clearly defined or communicated reasons.

The feedback about the ongoing events is lacking, the detail of the simulation is lacking, the ability of the game to create interesting emergent stories is also lacking.

Dwarf fortress is fun because it creates characters with tons of details that seem unique and memorable. NPCs in this game just resemble ants - by behavior, appearance, and interactivity.

Some may like the game, but I have found few reasons to play it.

There are definitely some things wrong with this game. But the main question is...is it fun and worth the money (for me $3.14)? Yes.

You start out on a small island and must manage whatever resources you start with in order to expand onto other islands. Your starting island never has all the resources you need. After a couple hours, you could have a pretty big civilization going, but there's a big difficulty curve after your second island. It's pretty hard to manage resources between two islands and if you don't do things perfectly, you might as well start a new game...again and again. I got to a point where I actually managed to build a fortress, but I didn't have an iron mine going because my second island was too close to a big colonist island. The colonists would constantly try to settle on my island and destroy buildings and people. Make sure to explore the whole map after you get your first ship and choose wisely where you place your second settlement.

Pros:
- Good fun if you're into city/base building games
- Great, simple game mechanics that evolve as your base improves

Cons:
- No music or audio at all...it's bizarrely quiet
- A lot of trial and error learning and game restarting
- Very odd controls and game settings ('Enter' speeds up time, 'i' loots stuff, 'e' enters caves, just odd...)
- It feels and looks pretty unfinished.

Wishlist:
- I really wish there was a way to customize your own world or modify how worlds are generated. Instead of easy or hard difficulties, by modifying your starting island, you can make it much easier or more difficult for yourself

Definately not for me.

If you like the feeling from back in the 90's when a ton of games were made that weren't really very user friendly, where the main feature of the game was figuring out how the game worked, then this is for you. Compared to 90's games, this one is bad. I would rather get my old floppy disks out and play some of my old games.

Game could be fun. If it wasnt so danm clunky and if the developer gave it a lot more polish. But right now this just seems like an school project.

Looking at other reviews for this game, it seemed like those who didn't like it hadn't really given it the chance. I bought it on sale, and now 3.5 hours in I think I'm done, unless there's a serious update. The reviewer who really sold the game to me was the one that said this game wasn't about conquest, but exploration. Unfortunately, I spent more of my playtime trying to "explore" how to do anything. Others had mentioned it was a bit clunky, but it was more frustrating than I expected.

You start out on an island, procedurally generated like most roguelikes. You get a tent of workers and need to get them building. Your first option is to build a lumberjack's hut. Go grab yourself a snack, it's gonna take a bit. Once that's done, several new options will open up, but none of them matter except the forester, cause you've already chopped down half the trees on your island. Next you need a shipyard, because you're running out of gold, and it'll take a gold mine AND a mint to start producing your own coins to pay your men, and the last game your guys wouldn't even build the mint (why? good question, and I don't have an answer, cause every time I've used the building placement checker thing, it showed placing options for every building but it.)

You get a free ship with the shipyard, but you'll need a 2nd if you want to colonize another island AND don't want to abandon everyone and everything you've worked for on your first.

I experienced all of that through several restarts in the 3.5 hours I played. I never went into the underground dungeon, and never got any iron or anything that can be built with it, therefore I never got awesome armor/weapons to take on bigger/more enemies, I could definitely reach that point in another 3.5 hours, but I really don't know if I will. There's a real gem of a game in here somewhere, but it needs just a little more of both clarity and complexity.

Is cute that they wanted to add mystery and challenge to the game. But . . . most of the time you don't even know what your people are doing. You can't control resource allocation so the bloody gold mine shuts down cause someone stole the gold so it leads to a paradox situation. If I gonna play a game of anarchy and watch people defy your instructions / not listen to you, I would go play with my niece

A nice little apparent hobby project, but even for this price I feel disappointed; none of the elements listed as selling points really work.

Nethack element means random map which doesn't make sense [most of the time], and some random events which you've mostly seen in few hours. This usually consists only of randomly appearing boars or natives which mostly seem to appear out of thin air.

The start of the game is almost literally the same every time and just consists of waiting, mostly. Combine this with the problem above, and the lack of substance just becomes a real problem.

UI is even more clunky and amateurish than in an average indie game and that's sadly saying quite a lot. The settings screen blows my mind, but in a wrong way; you'd need to see it to believe it. The game also hides almost everything from the player which is unacceptable.

It has almost non-existent audio and the few little bumps and bleeps it has would take me under an hour to whip up. Scene is full of starving artists, it's sad that the developer hasn't been ready to take that little extra step to get some decent audio and music.

Sorry, refund for me.

really shallow tech tree. Feels like the developers didn't include a tutorial or informative menus to cover up for the lack of actual content.

Dungeon crawling component seems tacked on... can't take soldiers down there, and nothing necessary in dungeons (able to beat the game without armor).

Very little replayability.

Weird game. Gather ressources and build buildings, like The Settlers, but you move a character like a rogue-like game. Then you sail around, kill locals, trade, or get killed, be carefull to save often, because you have only one life. Then there is a cave, and I didn't played that far till now. No more explications, this game is very weird...

This game is UNBELIEVABLY HARD. If you're the kind of person who likes trial and error, this game is for you. The whole point of the game is to keep exploring your options, expanding from your tiny little island to bigger, more dangerous islands with valuable resources. Of course, you have to manage your resources, or else you have to start all over again. The more you play, the smarter your choices get and you can further explore some more. Later on, you get to the dungeons, but the monsters inside will kick your ass. So more trial and error. I want to keep going with this game, seeing as how I already spent money on it and I want to see endgame items.

I reached the end of the game this evening, after defeating almost everything on the map, pity , thats the end of the game, was a nice little adventure not many bugs, was very playable and can be finished with a little hard work in management and army strength, not going to provide any spoilers, if you explore enough you will figure how to finish the game. But i understand why it was only $7, was worth every penny a fun night dying alot and the second night success, the turn based caves were interesting, however it can only be conquered with clever strategy, some mobs impossible to kill in dungeons (ancient croc) for 300 health and with ancient armor and sabre. And you cant take any beckup with you into the dungeon. Good Luck Adventuring nice little game, pity it wasnt longer cheers:)

This game is like a book.
The longer you read, the more details add to the picture.
You start with small island and few buildings.
You expand on a larger island. Build even more buildings. Kill some things. Mine some ores. Burn some enemy buildings.
Then sail around and see even larger world, meet colonists, get your butt kicked, load, get your butt kicked again, load, wipe sweat, load, run away.
Find a cave. Delve in. Get your butt kicked. Load. Avoid enemies, delve even deeper.
Find a chest. Get eaten by bears. Load.
Find another chest full of royal treasure. Equip things. Try to leave the dungeon alive. Get eaten several times.
Now we're cooking!
By the time you reach this, colonists will have weapons and large city. There's a LOT of work and sabotage to do.

Remember to save often!

This is what would happen if you simplified Dwarf Fortress' adventure mode, blended it with Tropico, and then made it take place in Oceania. Beware, bugs are liable to ruin 2 hours of work.

When I saw pictures of this game, I wanted to try it, because I think this idea is great, but when I instaled the game, it made me sad a bit.
Settings menu is stupid. How can I know, what key is key 47? Some functions doesn't work, for example closing inventory, which is funny, because there is no function for opening it. How can I use abilities, when I can't find them anywhere?

While combat there is blood everywhere, like half of my island covered with blood from two guys, you can't aim them through that, you can't even see yourself. When some enemies come on your island you have to wait until they get mad, because you cant attack them before that.

Building of structures is strange... When you tell your workers to build something, they will start reading newspaper and after a minute they'll tell you they can't build it. You can't know what to build, because there is no information about those structures, only the name and how much does it cost, which is useless, so you have to try sometimes what to build until you can make your camp functional. You can't build two buildings of the group at the same time, even if you have enough workers.You can't build two same buildings, so you will run out of resourses quite soon


Your peasants come of nowhere, when you build something there appear someone in the tent and start working. Your character moves extremely fast, like over whole island per 0,1 sec. There is no tutorial, so you are only confused of the game...

This game can be good, but now it's bugy and nothing makes sense...