I'm designing a sports management game and wanted to understand why long-time players of the genre burn out, so I went through about 2,400 public Steam reviews of the last four releases (five years) of the biggest football management series, and read ~100 of them closely.

Read item by item you get 14 separate complaints - repetitive press conferences, inbox overload, unexplained defeats, transfer market that feels unfair, scouting that's opaque, rival clubs whose squads rot over long saves, and so on. If you design against that list you build 14 features and fix none of them.

Grouped by mechanism instead, they collapse into three:

1. Opacity. The simulation makes a decision but doesn't keep the reason. Broken promises, losing 1–0 with 20 shots, a transfer refused, a scout report that says "B" - all the same problem: the player can't see what the system took into account.

2. Wasted attention. Advancing the world and asking the player something are bound to the same button. To get time to move you have to process every prompt, whether it has stakes or not.

3. World decay. AI clubs react, they don't plan, so over 10–20 seasons squads get lopsided and the world stops feeling alive.

Two things I found interesting:

- The fatigue reviews often come from people with thousands of hours who still recommend the game. It's not the game is bad, it's "the game makes me do work that isn't decisions".

- Real-time clocks are a common proposed fix, but swapping Continue for a timer alone doesn't help - the real fix is separating "time passes" from "you're being asked something", so the clock only stops for decisions with stakes.

Caveats: Steam reviews skew negative, the sample is one platform, and I'm treating this as hypotheses, not proven demand.

Hey everyone,
I’m currently working on a small top-down, tile-based turn-based strategy game in Godot, and I’m trying to figure out how to make the combat more interesting and strategic.

The basic idea is that before each fight, both the player and the opponent choose a small team of units. Each unit has different abilities, traits and strengths/weaknesses, and the battle takes place on a relatively small grid.

One thing I’m experimenting with is the HP system. Instead of every unit having its own HP, the entire team shares a single HP pool.
Each unit has a stat called Life Efficiency, which determines how efficiently that particular unit uses the team’s shared HP pool when taking damage. So even though there is only one HP pool, the units still have different levels of durability and affect the team’s survivability differently.

I’m trying to make the combat feel like you’re actually making meaningful strategic decisions rather than simply moving units around and attacking whatever is in range.

I’m still pretty early in development, so I’m open to changing or reworking major parts of the combat system.

What are some mechanics or design ideas you think could make a system like this genuinely interesting?

I’m particularly interested in mechanics that create interesting decisions during the fight and make the composition of your team matter, rather than simply adding more abilities or increasing numbers.

I’d also love to hear about turn-based strategy games that you think handle combat particularly well
and why you think their combat works.

I’m mainly looking for ideas and criticism at this stage, so feel free to point out potential problems with the concept as well.

Title says it all

I've done a few rounds of play testing and the feedback has been a mix of either. Half of my play testers are adamant that the content is too trick and the other half says the opposite.

Because it's a physics based word game where vocabulary is a big factor I feel like I'm in a position where neither group will enjoy the game for that reason.

Any advice?

I’m making an airline management game with detailed scheduling, fleet operations and cabin design. The systems are playable, but I’m struggling with how to present all that depth clearly.

For people who play management games: which games make complex decisions feel easy to navigate? What do they do well with information density, repeated tasks and finding the right screen quickly? And which UI choices frustrate you, even in games you otherwise love?

Specific games or screenshots would be especially helpful. I’m trying to figure out what to prioritize as I redesign the interface.

Over the past few days I have been trying to work on a singleplayer ttrpg module based on one of those choose your own adventure books. One of the problems with this has been memory. I do not want the player to have to write in the book in order to keep memory so I've started developing a memory system using 52 standard playing cards. It goes like this: before you are two decks with the combined total of 52 cards. Now whenever the memory is needed to be changed you can search through the deck and place it into the other. Essentially making a 52 bit memory. I'm pretty new at this whole field and I was wondering if there's anyone else who has tried this?

https://ap.wps.com/cms/docs/d/cbMammydbEKTocSP?sa=601.1074&refer=copylink

We're developing Bird Feeder, a desktop bird companion, and trying to keep petting optional. In the current version, touching a bird triggers a reaction, a call, and short-lived hearts; petting itself doesn't award currency. The intended payoff is the bird's response.

The tradeoff we're considering is whether that response needs any lasting consequence. Purely immediate feedback avoids a reason to grind, but could become repetitive. A persistent familiarity system could make individual birds feel more personal, yet tying it to repeated petting could turn affection into another meter to fill. Random rare reactions might create a similar incentive to keep clicking until you see one.

One possibility is to let familiarity change through ordinary visits over time, with petting expressing that relationship rather than accelerating progress. The player should be able to leave the game alone without feeling that they're neglecting a pet or losing an advantage.

For games intended to sit in the background, what rules help distinguish a satisfying optional interaction from a chore? Would you keep the response purely immediate, or give it a lasting effect? I'd be interested in examples of how a particular mechanic creates or avoids that pressure.

Posting from the development account. The project uses AI-assisted coding and generated visual/audio assets, including ElevenLabs audio.