Well, first of all, thanks for making such a cool game. Of course I enjoyed it; otherwise I would have quit. No screen shot of the score, but I think it was around 66XX.
1) Yes, game = fun. As others have noted, the high points in the game tend to come when fights get large and chaotic. You have a fairly limited ability to control what your monsters do, and I think most players learn quickly that a lot of success versus death has to do with time/turn management. For me, the high points were when I was wedged between a couple different groups of monsters, with my team in the yellow, wondering whether I should cast regenerate on someone or unsummon them. Choosing between limited options to get the best odds are what makes a RL fun.
Also fun: matrices. IMO half the reason for the success of the SMT series is the demon fusion mechanic. People love the grind, and they love slot machines. It's fun to look through the various possible combinations, something that feeds into gamer geekery very well.
The few battles I had with enemy summoners were also surprisingly fun. I like that they'll unsummon and resummon throughout, and if you kill them before whittling down their menagerie, all of their monsters a) become available to potentially recruit, and b) can also potentially overwhelm you because they are no longer bound into groups of 3.
2) I like the challenge level in this game. This is one of those games where you pretty much need to be dominating all the time, much like the SMT series. If things go south, they tend to go south quickly, and once they go south, you may be screwed. The few times I found myself in serious trouble (lost that egyptian jackal unique and my main healer while trapped between two enemy groups, for instance), I realized that unless I turned things around very quickly, even if I won this fight, I'd probably be so depleted that I'd lose the next one.
3) 3 I think. This ain't my first rodeo! This build was Buff + Healing. Previous two attempts were Mind + Dark (<-about as fucking useful as the mentalist in ADOM
) and Melee + Healing (<- probably a mistake since monsters display huge preference toward attacking the player most of the time, but hey, I had no idea!)
4) Well, there are a few RL staples. For instance, you can stairway dance ala Dungeon Crawl. There should probably be some penalty for doing so. I backed down to the previous level more than once. Controlling the terrain is a bit more difficult when your monsters charge and attack enemies as soon as they see said enemies, but managing the circumstances of a battle are basically what a roguelike is all about. I did this as much as possible, waiting an extra turn to cast the speed buff, for instance, so that a turn with that buff wasn't wasted closing the distance to melee.
When fighting, 90% of what I did was buff with the speed spell and heal with regenerate (eventually peppered War Cry into there as well, and took the recover breath ability that lets you get stamina back, even though I had no breath weapon.) My stats were pretty even except for Cunning - I invested no points into Cunning.
Occasionally I would try to direct monsters with kill orders, but most of the time, fights were in 2 tile corridors, and enemy monster groups are pretty good at the "retreat and recover" tactic. Ultimately, I ended up with two heavy hitters and a healer and I let them do their thing. Tried a couple times to organize a different strategy, but this was just plain powerful and suffered less from stamina attrition, which is a huge problem if you are relying on anything other than melee, especially with the prevalence of the Infection status debuff. I suppose that this is intended to make players desummon/resummon more, but that's two whole turns, dude!
Anyway, I let my allies do their thing while I buffed, healed and unsummoned when they were about to die, occasionally popping in to take a few cheap shots. When high level allies acquired a range of abilities, their actions seemed more and more difficult to predict, so I focused less on what they were doing and more on what I was doing; I was the only sane member of my party.
Speed is a very powerful buff. Once I had a couple guys who could fight, Speed + Regen + Flesheater + Counterattack made them very hard to take down. I hate to say it, but probably OP (though it could be easily undermined by monsters who are immune to physical damage.)
Last, but not least, you can attempt to recruit certain monsters to get a free ally with no penalties, make an enemy go neutral, etc., even if you have no intention of keeping them. This has a huge effect and is begging to be exploited.
5) Haha, I'm happy to be an armchair dev and tell you all the ways you should make your game like the game of my dreams, but just like you're hesitant to ask a jillion questions, I'm hesitant to offer a jillion suggestions or comments. But if I were to keep it brief, I'd say:
a) demon fusion should be more random and the monster hierarchy should be way more expansive (obviously the latter must be a WIP)
b) you should be able to direct your monsters a little better
c) i really enjoy that you've created a wide variety of recruitment tactics - delightful stuff
d) please make the game open world, with persistent towns, shops, procedurally generated quests, procedurally generated monster types, and please ensure that the mathematically sound principles you are using to determine the ebb and flow of the tides on the perfectly scaled globe take into account the fact that there are now two moons in the sky
e) seriously though, this is the kind of game that NEEDS to be expanded!
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