6.5/10 : good but with a lot of room for improvement

The game is a decent city builder which heavily borrows from the Anno series. However, it's not quite there yet:

- there's too much micro management where you need to constantly tell settlers where to hunt, gather, chop wood, gather stone, fish, etc.

- buildings look too much alike and there's no icon or name tag you can activate to easily make you find a specific building

- the game has a LOT of bugs that make strategy fall apart.

For example I started to build a school and suddenly a merchant dropped by selling chickens. I quickly wanted to build a chicken coop, gave it priority but the school, which used 20 times as many resources STILL got built faster than the chicken coop! This happens often and it shows the priority system is broken.

Another example : the whole inventory system is also fiddly not to say downright buggy - you'll find resources at some random store house far away from where it got produced and just as far away from where it's needed. You have to manually turn off every item you don't want stored because the AI clearly doesn't use distance in its logic.

- There's also a lot of stuff that is absolutely not obvious and isn't explained anywhere and the game hides a ton of info making it hard to figure it all out. The food spoiling system for example is quite opaque making it hard to adjust your way of working since you don't know what makes it better or worse. In fact the game needs a LOT more statistics - I see a lot of people comment how they had to start over a dozen times until they figured stuff out by playing & trying which is fine if you enjoy that, but a lot of people will scratch their head, wonder why something isn't working as it should and give up.

The labour distribution for example is poorly implemented - you never know if you have free people or not. The game moves people around but you never see how many people are actually idle. I couldn't find a distribution of age either to let me know when I'll be getting more adults as the population ages.

Oh and the whole food system needs an overhaul. It's not logical for several farms to only produce enough grain to bake bread for a few dozen people and for the bread to go stale in no time. In real life, flour lasts a LONG time and bakers would bake daily. The game poorly implements the spoiling feature to the point where it punishes the player for trying to ramp up food supplies. Since the control over movement of goods is so restricted, you cannot avoid food going to waste & having no consistent way to sell the food to merchants is another big minus since you can't even offload excess food this way either.

Basically, while this is a decent game, it needs more work. The game needs to focus on giving more data to the player that lets them have better control of their settlement. Right now it's a weak Anno copy that loses a lot of its charm.

After more than a year of early access, there have been no real improvements. Yes, they fixed massive oversights and errors that should never have been there in the first place (e.g. a band-aid fix for the lack of stone, minimal control and AI improvements), and added some new luxury goods, but it still feels shallow and clunky to play.

The food and farming systems are great, but all other systems keep shooting themselves in the foot. Everything about roads is a fail: They often won't align with the grid that all other buildings use. You can only delete full segments of a road, so if you want to remove that 1 tile that's sticking out too far, you need to tear down a much longer stretch of the road. You cannot build stone roads on top of dirt roads. You can build diagonal roads, but not diagonal walls.
Raiders and Raider camps force you to deal with the terrible combat system. They're not really challenging, just annoying to deal with. The game is trying to take inspiration from RTS with its different unit types, formations and the general controls, but doesn't have any depth, is clunky to control and doesn't make fights feel rewarding.
You can't get a proper overview of your population stats such as education, age, etc.
Workers will run across the entire map to collect resources from a mine instead of taking it from a nearby stockpile, and literally freeze to death on the way during winter. Many parts of the game lack explanation and useful tooltips.
After the early game, most of your time is spent waiting for your population to grow with very little to do. Once you've unlocked and built all the buildings once, there is no replay value and nothing to achieve.

I still have hope that the devs can turn this around, but it will take a lot of work.

A very good game all in all. Not for a weak PC. I love the progression, buildings, the map, visuals, ways of decoration. This game has its flaws as well, there are quite a few from my point of view. Totally deserves a try if you're familiar with such games, but not ideal.

Great Low Commit, Mouse Only Casual Game

Overall as a 4x it’s pretty solid and I’m glad I bought it.

-City Builder: Pretty decent options. It’s is basically a checklist of things from early to end game. There aren’t many buildings you won’t use. This game stays on the same era but upgraded for buildings as you progress are available. Nice mechanics with upgrade prerequisites other than just “upgrading the town center.”
-Combat: The combat is light, but it’s there. You train different troop types (infantry, ranged, mounted - and different variants of each) to either attack enemy camps, defend your village from raids, and optionally kill aggressive creatures. The troop training is straight forward. The actually strategy is very very lite, but it’s there. You can control the troops to a certain degree.
-Farming /Resource Management: this is where this game shines. You start the game trying to quickly prepare for the first winter. You need shelter and firewood or you won’t make it. Food is the key in early game. This game has a spoilage mechanic that adds a layer of management. There are ways to mitigate. There are a variety of great farming and animal raising mechanics. Resource gathering is pretty straight forward and the tiers progress through the game as you would expect. Early on you collect stone and wood. Then iron, clay, coal, ect. And then so on.

Other Steam games remotely similar I like because they can be played mouse only: Tropico, Age Of Empires, Planet Coaster, Jurassic World Evolution, Shop Titans, Fallout Shelter. Comment if you know a game that can be mouse only if you think I’d like it.

Banished with soldiers.

Early Access
No Coop, no teams and killing graphics.

But for those that have an older PC, set the settings down, but good luck by Snowfall.
Despite writing to the support multiple time, if they can implement the "No-Snow-Fall" button, nothing happen.

For the rest.. a classical construction game. Manor Lord would be the better choiche here.

So.. right now.. it´s just thossed away money.

it really just want for me. from the first picture you would think you can turn your building or have them at an angle like manor lords you cant just another grid to play on.

ASDSADDF

Fantastically intricate game. Very challenging, in the best way.

The game isn't bad, few minor bugs, the "normal" campaign is way to easy, I have not been wiped out a single time nor didn't I restart the map, not a very good sign to me. I will try the hardest play through available and see what happens.

It's a good game, but easy. I recommend it as a chill game.