For an old geezer like me (80 ) this game has everything going for it. Really enjoy playing this game its clear to understand and my old brain can keep up with it. Worth every penny, cent or dime your willing to pay.

The new updates have vastly improved this game and for once a developer has not succumbed to the call for" improvements" that take away the enjoyment of this game. He has improved the games quality and I would give him one suggestion enable a mods so clever clogs can go spoil the game for themselves without ruining it for others.

I introduced this game to my Old Geezers club and all of them( even the near Dementia) can play it and enjoy it.

Pros:

• Game is easy to learn for the most part
• Good graphics, detail is pretty good, not to the level of a Farthest Frontier, but season changes, harvesting, building details are pretty good
• Interface is not too obtrusive and very comprehensive, wish it had collapse option
• Auto trade system is convenient and easy to use
• Card system is interesting and surprisingly not annoying
• Overlays are useful, can be a little glitchy at times, but not annoyingly so
• Very diverse list of raw materials, food, and luxuries
• Unique buildings with interesting affects, like World Trade Office

Neutrals:

• Replayability, random map generator, but has to be engaging
• Houses upgrading and downgrading constantly
• Colonization definitely an afterthought, read it was added later
• NOT a civ-type game, but not meant to be. Very good in its genre

Cons:

• Inability to actually own a neutral city, only raze, conquer (vassalize), other options are not clear. Gifting? Didn’t seem to have any affect
• Houses need to be in proximity of work areas. Makes creating living areas very repetitive
• Difficult to find buildings once they are placed, like zoos, museums, etc
• Not very challenging at the normal level. Strong game play will result in being far ahead of AI opponents, making it simple to quick build anything, causing a bit of boredom.
• Only appears to be one way to win.

Game is still considered early access so some changes could be coming in the future.

I give this game a solid 8 as a resource-management city-builder, but only a 7 if trying to be an empire-building game.

love it

I've never felt the need to write a review, but this game has been improving so much, and after years of searching for a tactical, more advanced/explored Banished, Kingdoms is definitely able to scratch that itch.
Currently, this game feels like a hybrid between Anno and Banished, with Civilization-themed science progression. It has the food and survivability aspects that Banished can offer, tied with the luxury resources needed to advance your city into a new age and unlocks like Anno.

The straw to write this review was the latest 'mega' patch, introducing new ages tied with new building styles and an entire science tree to explore. The buildings look great, and the game feels pretty balanced considering the majority of these types of games are incredibly unbalanced, buggy and unstable. The resources you'll have to manage are complicated enough to keep you engaged, but not too complicated to call it a full-on management game. The progression in science and the buildings changing with this always creates new goals to work towards, and seeing this progression is incredibly fun. I've always despised city builders that completely focus on management, but so far this game has a great balance.

I genuinely feel like this is the best city builder I've played in many years, and I've seen many. It really deserves all the love it can get. If you like city builders with progression and a simple enough management system, a Banished with adapting buildings and an engaging progression system, you should absolutely give this game a try.

After playing Dawn of Man for more than 3.5k hours I tried this game and immediately got hooked which means this will be my new favorite. I figured out the hardcore in DoM in more than 100 hours but I did in this game in a very short less than 40 hours. This game has multiplayer but I’m only on single player and my ultimate purpose is to build an empire up to the highest population that my new windows pc can, I did 1400+ population on DoM and only playable at minimum speed. It’s sad that this game can’t be played yet on OS X.
- still in continuous development but it’s playable to the finish/infinity.
- starting with a townhall that levels up, villagers gather food like fruits, can farm grains (for bread and beer), vegetables, herbs for medicine, fish snd many other sources of foods either suitable in your chosen location or import.
- can raise domestic animals for food such as pigs, sheep and cattle and idk what else since I only reached level 6 with 300 population in brutal difficulty.
- there are luxuries to level up your housing and increase happiness, this is one mechanics that really turned me on! In the end I would like to provide my settlers with all of them!
- has roads! Dirt paths and other forms up to stone roads!
- there are AIs to compete but still very easy and provides no challenge, eventually perhaps.
- so many structures! from immigration, employment, library banks, taverns, theaters, man there’s too many from agricultural, industrial, etc that has effects of must have.
- few hunting’s with less fauna but it’s ok and no hostile animals. Don’t delete the animals structures as they might run to the fields and eat your farmed grains etc.
- you have gold, iron, stone mines but you must expand by purchasing the province/s that they are into using either gold, food and influence points. Gemstones too!
- the foresters can chop down trees and replant any types that are in the location.
- you can make other AI as vassals,
- cards that are rolled makes some interesting mechanics but made the game easier imo.
- I really like the 4 sessions that changes from early, middle and late ones. This adds some interesting decisions.
-villagers as in other city building games can die of starvation, freezing and diseases. If your villagers have icons on their heads be aware of something.
- you have trade, warehouses, logistics mechanics.
- you can pause or speed up the game
- you only need little but if tutorial which is the basic ones snd there are only 3 icons in the bottom left to proceed without looking back.
- you can set priority snd eject number of dithers from others to do to another. No manual commands on villagers, it’s fine.
- villagers age and die, no burials.
And so many other things. I think the single developer is quite talented and trying to his best to really fix things snd add more contents.
There is no use of domestic animals like carts, plows or hunting except for food, etc.
I’m rushing my review because I want to help this dev for having created this. I only played Banished for less than 1 hour, I played, Civ 5 for 1k hours, AoE 2 DE etc for thousand hours, 0ad for 3 years and Tise of nations for many years. Now I’m into this and already had 80 hours in 6 days 😀.
The game is in early access but it’s already playable. I’m rushing my review btw. Im planning to make videos ASAP as what I did on DoM for fun.
I want to give 10/10 on this game despite not fully finished.

This IS a good game. If you like city builders, you should like this, so get it.
If you are still unsure and are in the habit of listening to the advice of a perfect stranger than feel free to read on...

I was a little unsure as it starts slow and the card system seemed odd at first, but after a few hours it begins to feel natural and it works!

There is unexpected depth in this game. It has a nice research tree AND an upgrade tree. Almost all the buildings are up-gradable so there is always a demand for your resources. The houses upgrade automatically if they have the necessary resources like in ANNO series games.

Combat is a little too simplified by using a card system. You "train" various troops and "play" them in a battle by adding their cards to the skirmish. Your troops automatically battle it out against your opponent, but as the battle goes on you can add reinforcements to replace losses. It works, but would like to see them develop this area of the game.

Co-op is fun and works well.
Graphics are simple but work and have enough detail.
UI is functional, with some nice features, but missing other quality of life features, hopefully to be added later.

I took a flier on this game because I like city builders, I'm really glad I did.
It has similarities to other city builder games like Banished, ANNO, etc., but has unique mechanics to give it it's own charm.
Runs and plays solid for EA. Only minor, non-game breaking bugs, ie. workers waling in water.
Random map generator, multiple cultures, and various game settings should help to keep replayability high.

Now if you excuse me, I have squandered to much game time on this dribble... and so have you if you are actually still reading this.

This game is cute and fun to play. But it's nothing to play again and again or where you can expect something to change in the next game.

I had fun with the game and probably will have more fun with it. But if you really look for a game, I can´t recommend it to you at this state 01.12.2023.

My reasons for that are as follows:
1. The difficulty just changes the resource consumption of your cities. So after you get the hang of the game and you change to the hardest difficulty, you just need to use your space right and build more of everything big time.
2. My next problem is that if you get a bit of the hang of the game, you will soon learn that the storage system doesn´t work well. If you want to place Stuff stratigikalie, you have options to move resources from point A to point B. First, the storage depot is where you need to invest extra gold to get resources moved from the surrounding area, not even the whole city, into this storage, and to move resources from the storage to somewhere else in your city, you need to buy a second worker slot. Now you have one small building with two whole worker slots used. To explain how much that is, a whole cow ranch where you get beef and milk just needs one worker. But that isn´t the worst; you can only move resources away from that storage 150 tiles away. For reverence from your cityhall to the maximum border of your city, you would need at least 4 stops, and that isn´t even on the large map, and I really gave it the shortest distance, so most of the time it would probably need more just to move one resource, not one trip of all those workers transports per one route, 100 of a resource, which is like a raindrop in a bucket. I don´t know if this is just to move small amounts sometimes or if the game is just not made to build gigantic empires.
Now your second method is to tell your resource production building to deliver the resource to a specific storage location. This works over the whole map; the people don't even need roads or anything; as long as there is a path, somehow they will transport your stuff where you told that building. But you can have fields with like 1k hemp, and your people will move like 10 per trip. So in the late game, you will have like 200 people moving all together your cotton to the other side of the map that just got harvested. Even this would work for me, but the problem is that you need really big RAM numbers. These thousands of people making such trips everywhere are a good stress test for your PC.


So if you want a fun little game where you can get around 10–20 hours of fun gameplay where you try new stuff, It's a fun little buy.
If you are looking for a game that you can come back to and try something new, I wouldn´t recommend it.

All in all, I had my fun with the game, but at this stage, it needs a lot more polishing of the basic functions.

TL;DR: rough around the edges, solid colony builder. Know what you're getting into before buying.

It really does feel like Banished+. And if the game continues to improve going forwards towards full-release, it will be a great colony builder/logistics game.

At the moment the facet of the game I find most irritating is logistics. And the problem is extraordinarily worse on the harder difficulties. Specifically: I've noticed that citizens will spend the better part of an entire season getting food or medicine for a single-use -_-

This issue could be resolved if homes also stored a small amount of food and medicine supplies (similar to the way they do for fuel) - and citizens refrained from making longer trips to replenish their own needs rather than trips to replenish the stock in their homes.

I've played almost exclusively on Deity difficulty (the hardest) and I swear there are some avenues of food production that don't even fulfil the food requirements of those who work there.

Feedback:
- Fishing seems particularly awful in food, per worker, per time.

- Fruit gathering not much better, especially when taking into consideration the ranch-sized orchards and doubled workforce, compared to them.

- Farms feel really inconsistent. You can slap housing down right next to them, and have them near a trade post/port with significant storage, and the worker will still find a way to be miles away come autumn and miss out on harvesting most or all of the crop before winter comes

- I would love to see a 'realistic' difficulty setting that had moderate-to-high consumption penalties (less than the highest, probably), considerably slowed down the ageing of colonists, extended the duration of seasons, in general just slowed down the game. a lot.

- (unsure if this is already how it works) Luxuries should have dynamic consumption rates i.e. furniture, jewelry, pottery, books should all be 'consumed' far far slower than the consumable or perishable luxuries like flowers, alcohol, cannabis, etc. The production rates/cost of luxuries could/should/would then need to be rebalanced against their respective consumption speeds and labour cost.

- more comprehensive descriptions on the purposes of buildings(i.e. 'beer' breweries can also brew cider and other alcohols other than wheat beer, despite the description very specifically stating it brews beer from wheat.) and their production/consumption rates.

- (also unsure if already how it works) variable nutrition values for foods. Some foods replenish more food need than others. A loaf of bread should be worth more food replenishment than a single orange.

Looks like another standard issue city management game that are everywhere on Steam these days but looks can be deceiving.

Game has surprising depth and from what I've seen so far, it's made to a far higher standard than usual early access games.

If i had to define this game, i'd say some mix between Banished, Civilization and a card game. The unique mechanic is the card system. Basically game gives you an option to choose what you can build every year and this choose is done via picking a card from a deck. The deck can be reshuffled by paying some gold or waiting for the next year.

I was convinced I'd not like the card system. While i still can't see a good reason to have it, It's not as annoying is i thought it'd be either. It's just there.

Some resources seem a bit unbalanced. Gathering some things are taking longer than i feel they should but that might just be me not knowing the game.

From technology standpoint, the game runs good. Graphics are better than most and i didn't experience any crashes or stutters.

I'm yet to experience the late game stuff. The game map is procedurally generated quite huge. Which i like and it looks like trading, spying and conquering are all possibilities.

I'll update this review as I experience more of this game. But it's definitely worth the money at this stage.

Banished 2.0