Blacksmith Master

tl;dr: the early game in this is excellent and the mid-game is even better, but holy crap it has an end game problem. Still, if the concept appeals to you at all, there's a ton of fun to be had here particularly at the normal sale price. That's the gist. If you want to know more, read on... First, let's get into what Blacksmith Master is NOT: Blacksmith Master is not a store simulator, and despite having the look of one, it is not a simulator game of any sort. Despite what it may look like, the closest comparison this game has is actually to city builders and colony sims. If you like city builders, then you'll like this game. But even more than that, Blacksmith Master is a middle management training game. If you want to be successful at this game, you're going to have to think about the game in terms of process flows and production ratios. And indeed, the early game will quickly disabuse you of the notion of this being a store simulator and will present itself as a factory game. Like a factory game, you'll have raw materials to manage (early on, these are iron ore and wood) and you'll have processor buildings that convert the iron ore into ingots. There are no conveyor belts in Blacksmith Master. You'll soon wish there were! Instead, you'll start hiring assistants whose sole job is to move outputs of one source into the input of another. Each assistant will only perform one task for one very limited resource: for instance, you'll assign an assistant to move iron ore from your warehouse to a storage bin inside your shop. That assistant will never smelt the ore and when the warehouse runs out of ore, that assistant will sit down and will do no further work. You'll have to hire a second assistant to smelt that ore into ingots. You'll have to hire another assistant to move your first type of wood from the warehouse to wood storage racks. Blacksmiths will take these raw resources and process them and you'll be rewarded for their output with money, with which you can buy new processing machines and you'll march up a tech tree, which will unlock new resources that you can load into these new machines. And before you turn around twice, you will have six or seven resources that need to be moved from the warehouse into the store (each with their own assistant), then more assistants to process these raw materials into things the blacksmiths can use, or even more assistants to convert these first level resources into second level resources... If you are now picturing Factorio, except with all the belts removed and with everything being done by drones, except each drone can only move one type of resource and no others, you have the general idea. By the mid game, you'll have dozens of assistants shuttling this way and that and your job as the manager will be to make sure you have the right ratio of these assistants to the materials you have coming in, and to hire more miners and lumberjacks to bring them in, more and varied types of blacksmiths to use them, and soon cashiers to man the registers and scholars to come up with new recipes for things to buy... ...and before you know it, you'll have a hundred people working for you, each with one and only one job which they will do mindlessly in a very sorceror's apprentice fashion. And that's only where the management STARTS. Because you see, you also have to manage the flow of these materials through the shop as you expand it. You'll have to decide where raw resources get stored in the shop, where the pallets of ever larger and more varied types of ingots go, and where to place the six initial crafting stations for the blacksmiths to shuttle between. If you have not studied the real life Toyota Production System in terms of how to move materials around without a lot of wasted effort and motion, you will be rapidly overwhelmed. Then the game throws trade routes and another seven resources at you, most of which need more assistants to shuttle around and process. By this point in the game (if you get to this point in the game), you will start smashing into the game's hard limits. You only get one iron mine and that one iron mine can only successfully use about 1.5 lifts to bring the iron ore to the surface which means there's a hard limit on the amount of ore you can return during one work day no matter how many miners you have (about 300, if you're curious). There are late game upgrades that increase this slightly but the limit means that you've now got a new management challenge: keeping your blacksmiths just the right AMOUNT of busy with producing things from iron versus producing things from copper, silver, gold, wood, or clay, each in their own proportions. Even if you balance out everything PERFECTLY, by the end game you'll run into a wall where there simply isn't enough room for all the cashiers you need and not enough time for the assistants to empty storage chests into the racks to sell things in your store. Since storage chests can only be accessed by one person at a time, you'll start hitting a hard limit there, too. And that's where the game just kind of stops. There's no story and no satisfying ending. Even if you completely master every mechanic, some element of the game will just end your run because you can't optimize your way out of it, and at that point you'll be done with Blacksmith Master. It is not particularly satisfying in the way that most factory games or most city builders are. By the end game, you'll have literally a couple of hundred people shuffling around the place too fast to see and literally hundreds of customers coming in and out, only half of whom will be able to buy things because there's no possible way to have enough cashiers to satisfy them all even if you could stock enough stuff for everyone to buy, which you can't. So... yeah. Great beginning, even better mid-game, but the end game kind of lands there with an unsatisfying thud. But again, if the concept appeals, you'll have a good time until that point. I myself got about 20-25 hours out of it. There's zero replay value. Once you've seen the systems on offer once, a repeated play will have zero appeal. Good, and fun, but not a classic. 7.5/10.

This game is something specific and it doesn't really pretend to be anything else. It's a vibe, and won't suit everyone. If you want lore and NPCs to talk to, this isn't it. If you want a shop simulator that is focused on balancing resources, staff management, crafting speed, profit margins, and that kind of thing, then you will probably like this. My only real complaint is that I've already gotten to the end game a few times and I'm ready for something new, but of course that's how any good game is. For me, it's a 9/10, I find it to be a very calm, relaxing game. It runs well even on integrated graphics, despite having max floors of the shop and lots of NPCs buying from my store and lots of workers around, it runs perfectly smoothly.

So I played nearly 5h of this and I must say I can't recommend this game right now. The first evening of me playing was fun because it was new and I had lots to do and learn. The second evening was just letting the simulation run on 3x speed and making little changes to the running system, accepting new orders and leveling up my workers when they reached a new level. The balancing in this, like in so many simulation games, is just too fragile. If I hire multiple new workers I would need to speed up the process and get to the next skillpoint or "tier" faster, I accept a huge risk of just not being able to earn eough. There is very little variation in what you can do except for "produce stuff, sell stuff" and it just got boring after only 5h. Also, I personally don't like the graphic style. I don't minde the low poly but the lightning is really bad, everything is just lit the same way, hardly any shadows and it's always super bright mid-day. It just looks bad imo.

A pesar de ser una reseña negativa, quiero aclarar que solo elegí esta opción porque no existe una calificación intermedia, algo más cercano a un "Meh". Dicho esto, vamos por partes. Si vienes de su entrega anterior, Tavern Master, es normal que al principio quedes fascinado con el juego. Incorpora numerosas mecánicas nuevas y añade logros que supondrán un verdadero reto si eres de los completistas, como yo. Sin embargo, los problemas comienzan a hacerse evidentes a medida que avanzas hacia el mid game y el late game. La obtención de recursos termina convirtiéndose en un cuello de botella, mientras que el comportamiento de los NPC deja mucho que desear. En varias ocasiones se quedan congelados o simplemente trabajan de forma ineficiente debido a sus animaciones, incluso cuando están al máximo nivel y cuentan con un entorno diseñado para optimizar su rendimiento. Como consecuencia, la curva de dificultad se siente excesivamente pronunciada y, en las etapas finales de la partida, resulta muy difícil mantener una fuente de recursos mínimamente estable. A esto se suma un problema que ya arrastraba Tavern Master: la caída de rendimiento al cargar una gran cantidad de entidades. Los problemas de FPS siguen presentes y considero que todavía existe un amplio margen de mejora en este aspecto. Ahora bien, también hay que ser conscientes de que esta sigue siendo una versión bastante temprana del juego. Sería injusto emitir una crítica excesivamente dura cuando el proyecto aún se encuentra en una etapa de desarrollo donde muchas de estas cuestiones pueden cambiar. Aun así, para quienes llegamos con las expectativas que dejó Tavern Master, es inevitable sentir que la experiencia pierde fuerza conforme avanzan las horas de juego. Desde mi más sincero aprecio por este juego y por el estudio que lo desarrolla, espero que puedan solucionar los problemas de rendimiento y replantear la curva de dificultad. Una posible alternativa sería permitir la tercerización de ciertos recursos a cambio de dinero, ofreciendo más opciones a quienes preferimos un ritmo de juego más tranquilo, disfrutando y analizando el impacto de cada mejora antes de seguir avanzando. En su estado actual, no puedo recomendarlo. Sin embargo, tengo la esperanza de que con futuras actualizaciones logre convertirse en el gran sucesor de Tavern Master que muchos esperamos. O, al menos, eso espero.

Just an idler. Not for me

Игра не плохая, но баланс абсолютно сломан. Если дойти до открытия возможности пользования магазином, можно отправить всех кузнецов работать на магазин, поставить цены +50% наценки и почему-то в этом случае покупателей становиться БОЛЬШЕ а не меньше, а спрос у торговцев наоборот уменьшается до 1 вещи на заказ. И тут как раз баланс ломается, если отправить всех кузнецов делать вещи для магазина, ты в любом случае будешь зарабатывать т.к. покупателей становиться много а цены огромные. 5 кузнецов оставляем на создание предметов для торговцев (в такой ситуации если у вещи 50% наценка, то торговцы делают заказ на 1 вещь) оставляем там топовых кузнецов (максимально прокаченных) и они быстро выполняют заказы. А при выполнении 25 заказов мы получаем элитного работника, т.е. по моим скромным подсчетам каждые 2 дня я могу бесплатно получать элитного работника и при этом получать хорошую прибыль и ни за что не волноваться. Надо фиксить)

面白いのだが・・・・ なんというかいちいち助手に指示を出さないと働かない 木がいっぱいなら石を運ぶとかの思考がない ストーリーは皆無なので店を大きくしていくのが目的になってる 倉庫という概念がないので店を大きくしても助手の仕事が増えるだけで大変 もう少し融通の利いたシステムで固めてほしい

Fun for the first 2 hours and then it just becomes a repeat of buying larger space, adding the same things, hiring more people and wait for more money to come in to buy more space, adding the same things etc.