Hi Crate,
I’ve put in about 5 hours and here are a few of my thoughts:
-Like a lot of other city builders, there’s really not a way to play through crisis as they arise. Sometimes you’re hours past the point at which you could’ve done something about the fire or raiders that were going to collapse your town. ( I realize it’s more forgiving in that your citizens mostly survive, but rebuilding feels like you messed up and should go back and play differently, or start over. ) Maybe having small precursors to crises that allow you to prepare for or prevent them, like complaints or scout reports, would be helpful.
-There are many overlapping systems telling you where to build things and this is frustrating. Water table, fertility, land development percentage, desirability considerations, slopping, proximity to resources, etc. This makes it clear early on that the game wants things put in specific places, and your agency is marginal if you want to play optimally.
-Moreover, it’s hard to know early in the game how these various systems are going to handicap you later in the game. They don’t say what they affect or how important they are to consider. Detail oriented players are going to start over frequently to go back and try to account for them, once they understand their impact. (Add to this the amount of different buildings and mechanics the player has to balance, and it might actually be impossible to know if you’re valuing things properly, without testing and community resources.)
-Not having to order your villagers around is nice, but it’d also be nice if it was easier to unselect harvesting targets.
-The farming system is great. Might be the most interesting mechanic in the game. I wish it were a bigger part of the early game.
-By contrast, fishing doesn’t seem to be that helpful.
-There feels like there’s too many different resources and it’s not fun or interesting to balance your need to get them. Also gold feels too complicated in general.
-I like how predators and raids work. If there were more and simpler interactions like these that asked the player to manage and resolve these events, that would be a lot of fun. If there are times when the game feels like a little more of an RTS, that would help break up the time between decisions about the town.
Hope this helps. Keep up the good work!
-Cactus