Me defeating 3 snowmen battalions and a tank with a single elven guard:

On my first attempt, the game felt super hard. I was doing well at the start, but then I got overwhelmed by santa's attacks.

On my second attempt, the game felt super easy.  The game is easily winnable with just elf guards. Here's a breakdown of my strategy for those interested:

On day 1, take 3 neighboring territories with the 3 elf guards, one per territory. Since the snowmen's attack patterns are simple and since there is only one guard in each territory, it should be straightforward to kite them without taking damage. The snowmen will try to move to where the elf guard is, so simply move away from your tile than attack the tile you were just at.

After completing day 1, build as man xmas tree farms as possible. Territory is easy to get for the first couple of days, and winning a battle gives you chocolate coins, so the limiting resource at the start is xmas trees, which you need to build other factories / elf guards.

On day 2, since the elf guards should be at full health and santa's enemies aren't at full strength, you should be able to take another 3 territories with just the elf guards you had previously. I have only seen 4 snowmen or 1 cavalary on day 2; the 4 snowmen can all be kited by one elf guard, and one elf guard can kill one cavalry by tanking all of the hits.

After completing day 2, you should have a lot of territory to build in. At this point, there should be a clear frontline separating santa's territory from your territory, but if there are any of santa's territories lingering on your side, you should focus on getting those so that you can move all of the troops to the frontline. Besides that, you should start spamming elf guards and xmas farms.

For the next couple of days, just focus on training elf guards and building xmas tree farms. Once you get low on chocolate coins and cookies, start building cookie bakeries and candy cane mines instead. Eventually, you'll have more resources and elf guards than you know what to do with. You can also build the elfen barracks and toy assembly for the other units, but I didn't find them very useful. By now, your frontline should be secure with many elf guards.

To get more territory from this point, you have to move your frontline into santa's territory while supplementing the old territory with more elf guards from a neighboring territory; otherwise, you might lose the territory you already have if they decide to attack that one. Repeat this step until you see the victory screen.

Really cool game JDH. I have played it for 4-5 hrs but still not beaten the game yet ;)

but here is a very common issue which needs to be fixed:

I loss a battle and then have to move back with armies form other area and fight again then santa comes back and lunches a attack on the region with I just got back and I loose that region again because the the units are in shambles and then I have to go back again this happens way-way too often and you loose the steam and can never get to santa.

You should make it so santa can't attack where unit are not enough to hold back at all or allow attacks only every other day or so.

Get hammed every day is not fun, but really good game just needs some changes. Overall great gameplay and fantastic art and music.

Edit: With 5hrs of game play I have beaten the game!

I can't get the game runnin

Attacks come waaaaay too often - getting hammered every single day isn't very fun.

idk if im stupid but i cant progress at all. every day ill get attacked by 4-6 units, and if im attacked while building something that takes 2 days the build is canceled, so i just accumulate resources from winning battles (30+ of each) until i run out of elf guards, because i cant build better units and cant build more elf guards than i lose.

speed up the movement animations

I love this game, but I feel like it's way too hard. I've been playing for hours and have struggled to beat the game.

Aside from one crash on the title screen, hitting the "X" to deconstruct a building in a region also destroys every other building in the list below that building. It was pretty annoying and I don't think it was intended behavior. However, I would like to see more serious documentation - a lot of things like fortification aren't immediately clear, and I still have no idea what "standing down" does.

All in all, this is great - I think it just needs some optimizations (the game lags a decent bit) as well as a difficulty nerf and some bug fixes.

edit: forgot to mention - the audio is very choppy on linux

nice game but needs more explanation for what sitting down and fortifying actually do, as well as showing statistics on stuff

also needs some animations to be sped up

now that i think about it, a cheap but limited scouting method would be nice to see what you can get or what enemies are actually there

Really good game, can't believe it's all in one C file

Cool game.

The game is lots of fun except I found a bug.  The first time I tried make a flag and submit it the game just crashed.  I was able to get it working on the second attempt. 

Also if your open to suggestions, the fuzziness of the CRT filter hurt my eyes a little bit.  It was a really cool effect and looks nice with the beautiful artwork, but it just hurt my eyes.  I have a similar problem with CRT filters in other games but there's typically an option to turn it off.  Maybe I'm just blind, but I wasn't able to find such an option so I'm assuming there's no way to turn it off.  It's a minor thing so feel free to ignore this, but I wanted to share my thoughts.

Overall I really like the game and your videos.

Ignoring any comments about power scaling, can't load the game again after refreshing - at all

Was perhaps a little too passive (and momentarily misunderstood a mechanic), reloaded the page looking to restart from the top, and just doesn't load at all now, completely blank screen - no clicking no fullscreen (as in nothing there when fullscreened) no audio or display or anything

Was ok until that

This game looks super cool! I love the artstyle and the atmosphere. I am having a small problem with the audio on linux - it sounds choppy - tried switching from Firefox to Chrome but the issue persists.

Love the art and the music! Still trying to figure out how to play (like trying to figure out how to advance to the next day) since I haven't really played these types of games.  Thought I'd also report this bug when I hover over the "X" button in the "Region" pane: 

works perfectly fine and is also fun!

can you please give us a bit more information on how you made it and what you used?