I've been looking for a game of this type for an extremely long time. I love medieval city builders that immerse the character in the world. Unfortunately, there aren't many out there. Although I think the developers still have a lot of work, I very much enjoy playing the game in its current state. This game is fairly slow, however, I love it because you feel very accomplished in your progress. I haven't gotten to the military aspect of the game yet, but I'm pretty pleased with the industry part. My only hope is that the developer works on AI activity. Some workplaces actually do a pretty good job, but others don't really make the work realistic. For example, the hunter's lodge just has 20 people standing in a big group together and then the deer just walk up to them lol. Overall, I really like what I've played and can't wait to dive into it more. If the developer sticks with it and engages with the players, it will be an extraordinary game! I usually don't buy games this early in development (especially at this price), but I'm hoping we can support this developer and keep this gem going!

If this game was your girlfriend you would end the relationship and run back to your ex.

I have invested hours in building a village. I ignored the constant crashes (sometimes every 30 minutes, if God loves you every 1-2 hours) or game destroying bugs and saved about every 20-30 minutes.
I'm talking about bugs like:
- After reloading the game (after a crash) the wayfinding of the carts doesn't work anymore,
- or the workers suddenly can't find their way to work.
- For no reason I am suddenly 17,000 in the red with resources.
- Sometimes so many wolf attacks, you think you are in Wolf D-Day. No matter if wolves actually appear or not.

What has finally broken my support for this game?
In order not to lose the support of your villagers and not to risk a revolution, every villager should be directly assigned to a profession he likes, therefore he has to be located and assigned in the village. This works quite well with 30 inhabitants, is still feasible with about 50 but almost impossible with almost 100 villagers.
After a crash and reloading the game, EVERY profession assignment was deleted. That was my breaking point.

I waited a long time for the development simply because I love the concept of the game.
The game has been on Steam for about 13 months now, the developers say the first alpha was back in 2017, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better

One of the many Early Access games that, despite a great concept, come to nothing.

Empires and Tribes offers a lot of what I've been searching for in years: a medieval city and castle building game with a lot of freedom to build what you want almost anywhere you want it. But it still needs a lot of improvements to get there...

The positives:
- a pure medieval city/castle bulding game (no wizards, dragons etc.)
- beautiful graphics
- a high level of freedom in building and forming your city and castle keep
- a lot of citizen/worker activity (makes your city come alive)
- You can walk through your city in 1st person and build in 3rd person.

The negatives:
- it's not a multi player open world with real opponents (makes you feel kind of alone and without purpose when playing)
- the maps are too limited in variants and size
- A.I. soldiers and citizens are not very clever
- minor graphical glitches that still need improvement (walls not connecting properly with towers, city walls build into towers - making it impossible to walk up the stairs to enjoy the view etc.)
- the purpose of the game needs development (see my suggestions for game improvements below)

Suggestions for improvement:
- This game would be great if you could play against real human players - building their own cities and positioning themselves in the kingdom hierarchy just as you. Right now I don't feel part of a community when playing - I'm all alone on a small map along with some, not so bright, A.I. citizens, a greedy king and one A.I. settlement not far away. I would really recommend the devs concider developing this game towards a multiplayer world.

- The game allows you to design a banner and selecting skin and hair colours and different clothing. Which is great as it's set you in the mood for a personalized game experience. Unfortunatly the personalization purpose becomes rather unclear after the game starts. I would have expected the personalization part to have some kind of in-game purpose, for instance when interacting with other players... (as mentioned above this game really lacks the presence of and interaction with other human players!)

- I would also recommend the devs to introduce more and different maps of a larger scale than the current. Random produced maps would also create a sence of "Hey, I haven't seen these lands before!" instead of "Oh... This place again".

- A.I. citizens keep asking you (a nobleman) for help to find lamps or chests they've dropped just a few yards away - what's the point of that, really? A nobleman would have sent servants to deal with these tasks. These should be either improved into meaningful tasks or completely removed from the game.

However! All in all I thinks this game is one of the best out there and I hope the devs continue to improve and develop it. It's got potential to be the "whole package".

I bought this game with high hopes, and it certainly has originality and fun moments, but the recent announcement that they are leaving early access is extremely premature and unwelcome.

To announce the game as feature complete at this stage is a poor decision because there are many many bugs and incomplete features as well as a whole lot of jankiness.

The game is severely deficient in polish of the basic things such as optimization, character animations, and the quest pool, bandit encounters, combat in general, as well as having no mounts in a giant land and no siege engines, but magical ability to tear down stone walls....

I don't expect stellar combat or motion capture animations, this isn't what the game is about.
The game is about being lord of a medieval fief and bringing it to prosperity, and fending off enemies if diplomacy fails or you peasants are angry.

It's not even worth going into, but at this point I would expect that all the hopes of a fully fleshed out game are all but snuffed out.

If you like this concept, try medieval dynasty. It's better for what it is because it also eschews combat and military and focuses on village management, and does it really well. It doesn't have a whole bunch of bugs, it really looks amazing and it's fairly reasonable to play. It also has fast travel options.

EDIT:

apart from the dynasty feature, the game really hasn't changed much since i last played it. I'ts not clear what military units do, research comes pretty well at the end of the game, villagers still sit or lie as if asleep as they move sometimes, they're difficult to please, it's annoying trying to buy resources and sell them for revenue... all the interface is screwey and the game fails to help.
Every single aspect needs an overhaul, and that simply wont happen, and for that reason, i don't recommend this game. Even if they do support it like they promise after release *which almost never happens* it'll never get a full overhaul if they're willing to call all this feature ready.

If i could get a refund, i would.

I'm really liking this game, but I wouldn't advice to buy it just yet unless you want to support the development, as the number of bugs, including game breaking bugs, is still huge. However, if you can stomach unfinished games and some glitches, you're in for a great experience.

The game combines a city building and management mechanics with top down RTS, RPG progression and quests, castle building and first person combat. The city building and management part of the game is quite good, and I enjoyed planing my little hamlet layout. The building is quite flexible, not grid based, which means you can build curved roads and set your buildings in more or less capricious ways, the way real medieval towns were built. The same applies to your towers and castle walls, that can be build on hills or mountains.

Your playable character, a minor noble, can do the work of 4 peasants, and carry tree logs on their back as they run back and forth around the hamlet. You have RPG experience points based progression, and quest that can be given by your villagers or by the King, that will ask for tribute now and then. The quests your villagers give are boring, sadly, I hope newer versions of the game will have more dramatic quests, as for now it's mostly uninteresting fetch quests or characters asking for wood or food.

On top of the city building you have a layer of politics, as you have council meetings to decide the policies of your Princedom, court hearings were you condemn or pardon criminals, and town happiness that can lead to peasant revolts (Jackeries). Sadly the court mechanics are based on looking for "evidence" that's hidden in different parts of town, a mechanic I can see becoming tedious once you know all the usual hiding places. I hope that mechanic was based more on interactions and dialog with your villagers and less on looking around for bits of "evidence".

I still haven't experienced much of the combat part of the game, but from what I've seen, the RTS part is Ok, more or less similar to the Stronghold series, but the First Person combat might be a little lacking. I might have high expectations, since I come from playing M&B or Chivalry, but the combat, as it is, only has one attack and one block, and things like directional attacks (as in M&B) or different mouse button attacks (like in Chivalry) are not present. 03 July edit After fighting a couple of wolves I can say the first person combat sucks big time and needs a huge revamp. Not the most central aspect of the game though.

The graphics might be on the bland side, more so if you compare them to games like Kingdom Come, but if you think of this as a colony builder, not as a first person game, then the graphics are quite acceptable. I hope they'll polish them a little, and include more animations as to make the village feel more lifelike.

The game has a pseudo-historical setting based in 1250's Central Europe (probably the Holly Roman Empire).

Now for the bad:

This is an early access game, it's not finished, and at this moment, the game is filled with bugs and glitches (you can watch any videos or look around the community hub's screenshots), you'll probably encounter game breaking bugs (it took me 2 tries to finish the tutorial because of game breaking bugs), and many things are broken or yet to be implemented. I have high hopes for this game, as it really fulfills my want of a medieval castle builder and manager with RTS combat, but as with other EA projects, it might take a while to be ready, and might hit some snags along the way, so just buy if you're willing to take the risk.

To anyone interested, the game emulates well in Linux via Proton, but the devs talked about an eventual Linux build and I hope they'll fulfill that promise

Revised: 09/13/20
The game is an orgy of everything I look for in a game! Like The Guild on steroids. But in its current state it's very buggy to play. I believe these devs want this to be a success and are committing their time. I have patience... Show em some support!

Alienware 17 R4
i7-7820HK 32gb
DDR4 512GB SSD, 1TB HDD
GTX 1070 8gb DDR5
Win 10

Game has a ton of potential, but the game needs a lot of fixing. Game crashes when going into a new area, crashes when skinning animals, loses saves continuously (Completely erases them after a crash...)

It would be recommendable if the game was polished properly and didn't crash all the time losing saves. Glad I didn't pay full price.

Getting tired of game developers doing half ass jobs and never finishing a game through to the end. unfortunately this is just another example to add to that list.

It is really to bad because I was looking forward to the whole concept it previews.

Pros:
Great idea
Base building cool concept
A bit of a challenge
Crafting process is interesting


Cons:
Unity engine.....
Loses saves. Very frustrating. every crash completely erases previous saves.
Crashes on transferring to new areas
Lacks clear instruction review, or at least I havent found it.
Of what little combat I did have , painfully awkward clunky
No 3rd person view


UPDATE ON SAVES:

Figured out what is happening with the saves, after a crash and you go back into the game to reload one of your saves, you will see one of the saves blanked out. ( Your most recent save) If you reload the previous save ( If you have one) Then go back into the menu and and go through load save again the most recent save will then re-appear.

So I have had a lot of fun so far playing this. But I haven't been able to get past building a town yet. It is early access so it has a TON of bugs, it crashes, bugs when you save... etc. The premise and ideas behind it are unique. I haven't played any city building game where the builder is also a character in the game. It has a ton of promise and even in its buggy state is fun to mess around in.

BUT... be warned, this game is close to unplayable at times due to all the bugs, lag that develops when you start filling your town up, and various issues surrounding saving your game. This plays like a very early beta or even alpha stage. I think most people will be unable to stomach all the issues it has right now. I will review it in the future when they are closer to it being an actual playable game. For now it has to be a no though.

I was so psyched for this game when I first saw it. Hoping for a gross between The Guild series and a city builder. Sounded amazing. However, I couldn't even get through the tutorial and this is after they apparently patched it to be shorter and less annoying. I was taken aback by how crappy the textures and graphics looked ingame even at highest settings and the horrible animations - it made me feel like I was playing a medieval Minecraft from 2008 and not a life/city simulator. Sorry, price is too high, I will continue to keep an eye on this game but well over an hour into the tutorial I thought the game was paused (brought up the save menu) then when I came back my entire village practically had burned down even though I'd yet to unlock wells in the tutorial. That was the last straw.

Not fun. I wanted it to be. I'm sorry.

A bit early to make this a full release. If you see it on sale for less than 5$ you can give it a try! But ten years ago this would have been considered a pre-beta version of a game.

Recommendation for improvement:

Replace all your staff involved with the UI. They are not worth the money even as unpaid interns.

Overhaul combat entirely or remove it. Weapon dmg, range and hitboxes are all at a point where I have to question why combat is even an option.

Same for graphics. Currently the clunkyness and clipping of it all makes it worse than if you just made the whole thing as an 8-bit game. Gothic 2 should be the goal in everything BUT graphics.

Game idea was nice, but if this is the full release I have to assume the game will need years of patching at which point someone will have released a better version of the same idea.