Source is here: vacuumflowers.com/temp/LD18.zip

Very nice, I love expansion games! Took a few seconds to get my head around the concept, but it falls together well. Good job!

nice, great graphics and intuitive gameplay :D

Fun stuff, I love the visual style!

I love rts/expansion type games, so this was great to play. It looks lovely, too. Nicely implemented.

Wow, that was pretty cool. Had a lot of fun, things get pretty hard later on.

Wonderful graphics, smooth and silky and attractive. Great concept, I really like the blobbiness of your castles. Took me a few moments to figure out. Fantastic job: with more modes, colours, and weapons this could really be a fantastic strategy/shooter game. I'm very impressed.

Very nice.

Graphics are very cool.

It's not immediately apparent that it's going to be a hopeless struggle to just last as long as you can, so there's quite a disparity between the initial experience and the endgame.

I'm not sure how I'm meant to avoid being swarmed by a whole bunch of enemies at once, but when that happens I don't seem to have any ability to stop them.

well done, I liked the expanding / enemy-harvesting part.
but sadly I got somehow stuck outside of the screen after dying. Besides to that, well done.

Thanks for the comments so far, folks. The feedback is very much appreciated. I'm doing a post-competition build, and feedback is very welcome. Expect an upload in the next couple of days :).

The tuning is pretty off in this competition build, you're absolutely right Draknek.

Like the style, like the gameplay, like how hectic it is, not sure how it relates to the theme but feel you've got a great game concept to expand on here!

Vieko Franetovic- Ah, the lack of tutorial is probably not working in my favor here! Sorry about any confusion. It's possible to destroy enemy castles and steal their components. Once we destroy an enemy base, we can run over its components and take them home. Once we're there, the components can be placed with the mouse.

I'm happy to announce that I've got a first public post-competition build up here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/25/first-post-competition-build/

I'm still actively developing this, and there will be more builds to come.

I like the general idea of your game, but I was a bit disappointed by the method of assaulting enemy castles. It seems to be mostly the same thing every time. Run in with your one ship, and circle strafe repeatedly.

Here's my idea for attacking enemy castles. You can take it or leave it or modify it. (Some) buildings produce units. Once you've built up some units, you can give orders to a group of them (such as attack a castle), but cannot control them directly. If your units defeat a castle, then you can plunder their buildings and technology (new unit types, for example).

Good work, and it's nice to see that you're doing more with this post-competition. Thanks for your comment on my entry!

Fun game, made me want to play again when I died.

Alan Lynn-
I completely agree with your observation about castle assaults needing more depth to them. Circle strafing absolutely shouldn't work that well. Improving this portion of the combat has been my main focus since releasing this build, actually.

In the latest build, I've added in a destructible wall around each castle. Because the wall blocks incoming shots, it's necessary to focus fire on a patch of wall and break a hole through in order to damage a castle's core. This helps make circle strafing less optimal.

I'm also considering other firing patterns for the enemies. One thing I'd like to try is having turrets aim at our destination, rather than our current position. I'm also interested in trying curtains of fire rather than streams. I'll link to the new build once I've got it up.

Thanks for the comments, everyone :).

There's a new version (with walls in it) up here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/30/walls/

Great concept. Great graphics!

Awesome concept and great graphics, looks like its got a lot of potential!

Looks very interesting visually. That there was two ways to move castle pieces was a bit confusing to me, and with the mouse control I think I accidentally moved some pieces to an enemy castle a few times because I was concentrating on shooting. The shooting mechanic here isn't very interesting since you just have the one pea-shooter gun and a lot of the targets are stationary. I felt like my character had very little to do with the castle. Do you get a defensive bonus or something when you're next to the castle? I didn't quite grasp that.

Had a good time with this compo version even though I'm more familiar with the post-compo. At least I really know how to play it now! Great solid concept with a lot of cool things going on that make you feel part of an epic battle. I love the visual blobby effects and the swarms of enemies assaulting me. It is also a cool idea to have the player be able to play a 'hero' role as they move about doing pinpoint strike assaults to gather critical castle pieces. Awesome job!

Really great idea, had me hooked, and a great simple take on the theme, very impressive, shame there was no audio though.

I like the graphics but I couldn't make much sense of the game.

I went around destroying the enemy bases and dragging the bits back to build up my own, but there didn't seem to be much relationship between what I was doing and how long I lasted. After a while a whole bunch of enemies appeared and I got annihilated. I couldn't work out if there was some strategy to avoid this or not. I never was any good at strategy games so that may be my fault.

At one point I found that I couldn't fire any more. I'm not sure if that's because of something I did or didn't do, or if it's a bug.

I couldn't point to where but I feel like I've seen this idea before a few times and it's never worked for me. Looking at some of the other comments I do feel like I'm just not getting it. Sorry!