Home Quest is an interesting idle game where you build up villages, assign jobs to your villagers, raise an army and fight invaders while discovering new technologies, upgrades and resources. That sense of discovery brought me all the way to the end of the game and while I sometimes felt that you just couldn’t do anything and needed to wait with the game closed for a while - especially in the early game - at the end I was fully enjoying all the different systems you could optimize to beat the challenges the game threw your way. So much so that I bought the gold edition to support it! You should check it out if you enjoy idle games.
This game has many resources to juggle, you start with food, slowly ticking down and only a few workers. You decide where the workers go and they either produce primary resources or use those to create secondary (or even tertiary) ones. You have a building queue and each building takes specific resources - the cost goes up for every building built - and some time to make. There are no ways to shorten the time it takes to build something, and this hurts the early game a bit because I needed to wait for long stretches of time to get enough resources to build the things I needed when the game was starting and there’s nothing you can do to speed it up. On the other end, when you arrive near the ‘end-game’ you can start building factories that increase the production of all resources you make - and you can make more factories with more resources - and this also feels broken.
You need to balance food consumption with everything else. Your population drains your food, so does your army - your army drains it by a lot - and sometimes you have tributes to pay to opposing forces (but these seem to take a percentage of your remaining food production, so they’re never an issue) so you always need some farmers. Whenever you recruit more villagers, you probably need some farmers. This also becomes a non-issue when you get multiple villages and can dedicate a ton of people to food production. Different villages have different primary resources and they give you an occasion to multiply your production of whatever you think you need very quickly.
The battle system in Home Quest is pretty interesting as well. You make an army - which size depends on your barracks and unit production speed is based on the number of instructors you have - of various unit types. They usually have health and attack, but some have special abilities - healing, for example. Battles are played automatically, with every unit attacking one enemy at random until one side loses. At any point you can retreat, leaving your army to recuperate, but you still need to defeat many waves of foes to win against one specific enemy. Later on, you get the ability to use the ‘souls’ of defeated units to power up soulwells using shamans. These have a few steps to go through - you can assign shamans to help speed up specific steps - but the souls eventually turn into usable resources, so that’s a neat plus.
I had a good time with Home Quest! At some point I was wondering where the game was going, because it was clear that my resource production had exploded - via factories - and that my military might could crush any obstacle with a stunning number of units… But then the game just ended, which is a bit weird for idle games and makes me wonder about where it could go from here. Still, this is worth a shot and the gold edition IAP isn’t mandatory at all.
