Long review (So my 25 year old village collapsed in a span of three months)

[berenlazarus]

Do not recommend . . . yet, but the bones of a great game is there if the developers just flesh it out more. Having spent several hours with Patron, the game has significant issues but has the potential to be a really good game. The biggest problem is there is no centralized menu to control production of the entire colony, which this game is all about. I spent twenty five years building a town on the Pine Ridge map. My aggregate happiness of my population was in the 80s. In year 25 I had a population of 190 adults with my population growth curve on the upperward trajectory the entire game. In year 26 I was at 76 adults. My population never once had a mass exodus like that and the happiness never dipped below the low 80s and upper 70s. The reason given was due to low luxury goods. Losing over one hundred people in just a few months decimates your entire town because your production lines fall apart and you cannot mount a recovery of a town you spent hours building.

There is not enough transparency on where your production lines are breaking down to address problems you need in order to attract and retain population. For example, the menu showing you the overall snapshot of your total goods tells you how much you are producing a much of any single good, as well as how much you are using that month, but that's as far as it goes. In my main colony I had mines, and mines takes lots and lots of tools. I had a tool industry set up, but I had to keep importing tools (and lumber and firewood etc for other production line issues) because I couldn't get a snapshot of how what these mines required overall. I had to click on each mine, which does tell you the required amount of tools but only for that mine. The firewood is atrocious but I understand the developers are fixing that. I couldn't keep firewood in stock no matter what I did.

There is also no automated control of labour or stockpiles. If you have 50 labourers and 45 jobs, there’s no way to set a priorities on what jobs you want done. The Sierra city building games from the 1990s (“Pharaoh and Cleopatra”, “Caesar III”, “Zeus”, etc) allowed to set prioritize the most important jobs in sequential order so you don’t have a complete collapse like so often happens in Patron. You have to continually adjust job allocation which gets tedious.

Likewise, there is no way to set minimum stockpiles of goods your economy needs function. In year 14 of my main game I ran out of food. I had been consistently running around 4000-5000 in food the entire game and didn’t notice the stockpile was low, but somehow I ran out that year with no noticeable increase in population or radical change in industry requirements of the food produced that would indicate such a rapid decline in food stockpiles. Because of starvation, I went from 85 workers to 45 workers in the space of two-three months, which then put my colony in an absolute death spiral that I could not recover from and had to revert to an earlier saved game to continue. There needs to be a way to keep your stockpiles at consistent levels, especially if they are needed for survival, and then send the surplus to the various industries using those produced goods to manufacture the luxury items.

If the player could automate the stockpile, they could also streamline trading as well. As it stands in the game, there is no way sell off excise goods without manually opening the trade menu and doing it yourself, which can result in having thousands of items you don’t need and no room to store newly produced items of goods you do need. Say you set aside 1500 unites of wheat as the minimum you must always have on hand, then you could set aside say 500 that is used for distilleries to make beer, for a base of 2000 unites total. It would be really nice in this example to set up your trading that anything over 2000 units to automatically sell off. Also, it would be nice on the trading list if all the products were alphabetized instead of having to continually look through the list to find what you want to sell or buy. I think the goods are ordered by luxury type but it’s frustrating they are not alphabetized.

Other people have addressed the housing and roads. The NPCs do not use the roads, no matter what you do, so why have them? The housing is seriously broken because you can have houses that have occupancy levels of 10 people that only have three or four people living there, and they are demand you build housing because you are running out. The game mechanic is one house per one family, but in actual game play you end up using tons of real estate to build houses you shouldn’t need when the occupancy is so low. If the developers would like to stick with the one family/one house mechanic, then they should have other housing options (besides the “shelter”, which the game says you should only use as a temporary basis) in order to conserve on real estate space. The original Tropico from 2001 had that where you would have apartments was lower quality housing but you could put a lot more people in there and then middle houses and nice houses. Patron should have some type of tiered system of housing like that as well. When my population collapsed from 190 adults to 70 adults, I was still getting messages I needed to build more housing after losing half my village.

There are also riots that can break out. My problem I had with the riots is that my merchants’ loyalty dipped to 15 out of a 100. It was the only significant societal issue that my village had. The people starting rioting due to the loyalty and I had no way to fix it that I knew of, other than propaganda which was an item on the research tree I hadn’t got too yet, and even then don’t know if they would stop the loyalty riots. I had other riots due to low amounts of goods but I knew I could take concrete steps to fix those riots.


TL:DR:

These issues are what’s really what's frustrating about Patron. The player does not have nearly enough control over how the production of goods is used by various industries to stave off societal collapse. In a game all about production lines, there needs to a centralised menu that allows you to take care of those production lines and allows you to anticipate potential problems that need to be addressed, as well having better control of trade and stockpiles. Trend lines of goods produced vs goods used and what various industry is using which products would be great as well. (For example, if people are suddenly starving because all the wheat is going to the beer distillery, it’d be great say distilleries only get wheat after everyone has been fed). The player shouldn’t lose over half the population he or she has built up over the course of twenty five years in the span of just a few months when the happiness has never been below 75. The social dynamic system has lots of potential but still needs to be refined further.

[boneys26]

Took me 4 years to kill my village off after turning all production off, how did you manage it in 3 months? lmao

[fredreed2000]

I highly recommend It now. It's a very good game already and It's ready. Unlike most games It has features that can be found in games like banished, foundation and many others. Patron is very simple but yet fun to play. The devs already are working on addressing the bugs and over time will add more features In. Maybe some people don't recommend It but the game is playable and very stable. There are no crashes which is a plus. Overall I think that this game deserves a rating 10/10 .

[GameKitten]

I think the calculations of the game is off and greatly in some areas.

Example one: Clothes has almost 3000. The other peasant luxuries has 2000 with exception of flowers almost 1000. Yet I had peasants leave my city because of luxuries. So, I take note of what is going in and out... The out is so low ( yes I have a market and storage near homes). So, I kick pottery and clothes for 5 years (no one making them) I still have almost 3000 clothes and 2000 pottery. The peasants are NOT picking up luxuries. Yet they complain and leave.

Roads seem also to cause issues, I've seen AI travel down a road to a storage unit for nothing. Also witness AI doing circles around a road for no reason.

Workers calculations again.

Example: Have 107 adults, 3 adults come to live in town. I need 1 coal mine and put in 1 person in the coal mine, warning goes off not enough workers (Really?). Take out said coal miner and warning goes away. 3 more AI moves to city, great... Put 1 miner in coal. Warning goes off not enough workers (why? 1 slot being asked out 6 new people and yes they are all adults).

[Neoma]

You do need to keep an eye on levels which requires a quick flick of the eye (or checking your stockpile to see what you're low on). I would say your food levels are too low and you need about 20k per 80~ adults to mitigate winter/baby booms. Fishing is 100% the way to go with other food productions working just as extra. Fishers are so cheap to upgrade and i research these straight away and build/upgrade them before any other food production buildings. Concentrate on 2 luxuries per class, and worst case place an order in your Harbor for the max amount if it becomes a real issue, rely on trade to get those luxuries up when needed. If you need gold early game, upgrade the herbalist and sell those herbs!

I agree it's a pain to have to manually trade all the time with no automation, this is frustrating, especially when the game pings you constantly if your inventory space is low.

In regards to pathing, you really have to rely on the grids, although boring, space out production, houses and storage and they will use the path. Fill gaps with decor. And be 100% sure on your path placement as I have found they will still use paths you've deleted, or they will run to the end of a path if you laid a few extra tiles, passing the building they needed to stop at then high-tailing it back xD

Wood houses are very cheap, and I use these to map out where i'll be expanding next.

Upgrading is key as you can double then triple production and so forth just by upgrading the max people and assigning a worker. I have one fully upgraded woodcutter fuelling my 100 adults and production buildings.

If you need help let me know :)

[fredreed2000]

I can tell you that the devs will get these issues fixed ASAP but maybe you need to post what needs to be fixed so they can look at them.

[neviem]

i'm too missing a page where I can see overview how much of what is being used by what - eg. how much wood is going for mines, fisherman and other production lines all I can say now from the ledger is total amount used monthly including new buildings or click every single building and check and count manually

[kyberion]

not sure we're playing the same game:
1) How many mines do you actually need? I have one of each and they are enough for a town of 100+ adults
2) Firewood is actually my earliest money maker. A fully upgraded sawmill not only provided enough to warm all houses but also brought in tons of money when sold at the docks
3) Lumber used to be a bit of a problem until I built 3 forresters in the best locations of the map. Then I actually started to sell off lumber as well. Of course all three are fully upgraded.
4) I have 4 harbors fully upgraded through which I can import 2800 goods every 2 months or so if needed. In fact, I do it consistantly for luxury goods as it's easier than crafting everything myself.
5) Why do you have happiness at 80? I have happiness hovering close to 100 all the time. Building guard houses, shrines and wells is easy and having a couple of policies activated to keep people loyal is not a problem.

[berenlazarus]

Originally posted by kyberion:

not sure we're playing the same game:
1) How many mines do you actually need? I have one of each and they are enough for a town of 100+ adults
2) Firewood is actually my earliest money maker. A fully upgraded sawmill not only provided enough to warm all houses but also brought in tons of money when sold at the docks
3) Lumber used to be a bit of a problem until I built 3 forresters in the best locations of the map. Then I actually started to sell off lumber as well. Of course all three are fully upgraded.
4) I have 4 harbors fully upgraded through which I can import 2800 goods every 2 months or so if needed. In fact, I do it consistantly for luxury goods as it's easier than crafting everything myself.
5) Why do you have happiness at 80? I have happiness hovering close to 100 all the time. Building guard houses, shrines and wells is easy and having a couple of policies activated to keep people loyal is not a problem.

1. You can never have enough gold mines or mints, which is what I was doing.
2/3. There is a known issue with firewood. Had a fully upgraded sawmill and several forestry huts and kept running out.
4. I think importing is a great idea and definitely will be useful when they do the auto-trading harbor update.
5. I never got my happiness above the 90s.

[Caz]

So another Banished-style city builder that suffers from what I call the "Banished Bug". BB can come in many stripes, but it always has the same result: a cascade failure. Usually it's caused by something like starvation even though the populace has abundant available food, often walking around with food in their pockets and starving anyway. But it can be anything that results in the cascade failure that shouldn't be.

Before I buy any banished-style game, I always look to see if it has this issue. And, sadly, it appears this one does. Ah well, hope springs eternal that someone will make a game like this where this doesn't happen.

[kyberion]

Originally posted by berenlazarus:

1. You can never have enough gold mines or mints, which is what I was doing.
2/3. There is a known issue with firewood. Had a fully upgraded sawmill and several forestry huts and kept running out.
4. I think importing is a great idea and definitely will be useful when they do the auto-trading harbor update.
5. I never got my happiness above the 90s.

1. I have 50K+ of gold, so money is not an issue once you start trading excess goods. No mints or gold mines necessary.
2. Never had the bug. Did you insulate and upgrade houses?
3. I have so much gold that buying a full load of 700 luxuries at one time isn't an issue. So it works without the auto-trading fairly well for me
4. Not sure how happiness got this low and how you kept it there. Every once in a while you get a request that stomps on it but then it creeps back up, at least for me.

[Alexander]

I think this may actually be caused by a single bug.
Houses sometimes randomly start hording all resources but this doesn't remove them from being counted.

I once found a house that had 3000 firewood inside it which shouldn't be possible!

It hasn't happened again to me, yet, but I think this may be what's happening to many people. People aren't getting the items they need because they lose access to them because the items are in the storage and instead are inside some random house.

Please check it out and see if you can locate any houses doing this as I'd like to report the bug but I haven't been able to recreate it.