I'm sorry, but I just cannot recommend this game, no matter how I look at it. I mean, it's not like it's inherently bad or anything like that, but beyond a solid foundation it's just incredibly shallow. After a few hours you've seen it all and done it all. None of the twists and turns (sudden house fires, crop field infestations, sickness, nomad arrivals) are particularly clever or designed to be anything more than minor annoyances if you know what you are doing - and once you have played around for 10 hours or so, you will know precisly what to do.
No matter the difficulty settings, I start the game, place exactly 2 houses each year (which keeps the population super steady for maaaaaaany years), position my food gatherers in a way that they don't interfere with each other within the same category, then assign one worker each to a bunch of 10x10 or 11x11 crop fields ... and that's it basically. Then I just keep expanding with new settlements, repeating the same process over and over and over again. Of course, you have your other production sources on the side (wood, stone, iron, animals) that you keep tweaking depending on your needs, but there is nothing particularly exciting about this, just very basic city building management.
You keep your population happy, healthy and educated (trust me, it really isn't deep at all), have a bunch of wells ready for house fires and you are set. If an infestation hits a crop field, you just insta delete it, set it up again and you are done. In case disease spreads out, you got a bunch of well placed hospitals and watch how things unfold (usually a couple of people die and that's it). Don't accept nomads.
Perhaps more recent masterpieces like Timberborn spoiled me too much, but nothing in this game made me feel like I'm on a mission. It's not addictive, you barely discover anything new and all the depth that would allow you to pursue proper personal "projects" and achievements is completely missing. We've had better city building games before and after 2014 and will continue having them.
This game is missing AT LEAST half the content you would expect from it. I've had it in my backlog for half an eternity and was actually excited to play it once I saw the number of reviews it has accumulated over the years and the review ratio. I assumed it'd be amazing by now, heavily updated, expanded and providing a content rich experience. Instead, there was apparently ... well ... nothing? From what I've just read, the modding community has done like 95% of the heavy lifting. But I'm reviewing the base game here not the mods. And in combination with that price point, I find the work that has been put into this game by the original creator, the lack of innovation, lack of depth and refusal to provide any meaningful updates, simply unsatisfactory.
