TownsFolk

Obnoxiously luck-based. You can get up to the point where the king demands over 140 population and food in spite of you having about 15 population and +4 per turn with 10 turns to go. You somehow manage to pull everything together so you'll make it with one turn to spare, and then a random event hits you with the choice between losing 80 population or -12 food for 10 turns. There's a campaign mode, but the game can give you an absolutely unplayable start, like if you have wolves two tiles away from your town hall that get revealed after you built the only housing you can afford, so you're now in an irrecoverable death spiral with no resources because all the other tiles are mountains or oceans so you have almost no population, no food, and no means of gaining any while your population is eaten by wolves. In skirmish mode, this just leads to frequent restarts until you get a good start, (which is already a plague on the Diet Civiilzation subgenre,) but in campaign mode, this ruins a run that you've played for hours. Add to this, the "Civpedia" of this game is blank until you actually build a building. (And you need to unlock the information on buildings for EACH FACTION, so st…

The game mechanics are decent. BUT. For mouse and keyboard the controls are horrendous. Sure they work, but there are SO MANY CLICKS. Want to build something? Klick the tile, click arrow keys until you find the building you want to build (a radial menu would have been a million times more convient), than click "build". Also if you have a controller plugged in the game will show it's hotkeys, even when you use mouse/keyboard (in this day and age games should auto-detect what inputs you actually use). You can do much better in the 4X-genre, especially on PC.

For the price, it has a pleasant base play cycle and the tutorial does a reasonable job explaining mechanics, though it takes longer to get through than might be merited, since each mechanic starts the town at the beginning. I find starting over every time kind of frustrating, especially in the campaign where you seem to have to succeed at every map in order to proceed. Restarting the whole campaign instead of getting to restart each map seems prohibitively punishing for a single player game. If you just want to try for a high score, maybe you will find more joy and less frustration. I wanted to get more economy synergies, but a lot of the building bonuses for more advanced buildings seem impractical or too low impact to bother aside from a few specific combinations. Perhaps I will play more later and find the logic in it.

I liked the demo I played last year but somehow, between it and release, they completely messed up the balance with insane RNG.

The best part of this game is honestly the tons of fun gamemodes and intense but rewarding resource management. The random events and occurences in the game always keep you on your toes but forces you to have all of the resources in case of emergency. The different factions to play as also changes the playstyle so much and makes it interesting. The game can be extremely difficult on harder difficulties but also relaxed on the easier difficulties. I honestly recommend this game to anyone, its super fun if you are looking for resource management and exploration games. ( Also technically a colony simulator game ).

simple , deep and pixel strategy game ... love it