Years on and it's still awful. Goodness knows I've tried putting up with it, but the villagers are dumber than the rocks they won't harvest no matter how hard you throw them at a cliff. I watched them complain about housing while I had six homes waiting to be built, missing logs, while I had over 150 units of the stuff stockpiled and gathering dust, with my builders just wandering around aimlessly.

For ten days.

Sometimes three farms produces enough food for twenty villagers, other times four doesn't produce enough for ten.

Villagers run away at the first sign of enemies, no matter how heavily armed and armored they are, which isn't the most helpful thing ever when they get outnumbered by slimes on day 2.

The AI, such as it is, seems to have two different settings: pretend to work, and gleefully do jack.

"Prepare to lose often!" works with games like Dwarf Fortress, because in DF the game is legitimately difficult. In Rise to Ruin, losing happens because nobody does any freaking work, and slapping a "game hurd tho!" label on it doesn't excuse crap programming.

Give it a chance if you like, but be ready to spend a lot of time waiting for your dozen builders to decide they feel like repairing the damage done to that house a week ago, or boggle as to why your maintenance and repair guy is delivering iron ingots to the toolmaker instead of fixing the sixteen forty damaged buildings you built the damn Maintenance post specifically to get someone to fix the freaking things.

In practice, the game is utterly bloated. You need three or four buildings just to make one operational (magic turret? need an energy collector, which needs to be powered from another building, which needs...), and the workers in those buildings do whatever they feel like, which is usually 'nothing whatsoever'. Got three people working in the lumber mill making wooden boards? Well, that one guy there is bringing logs from the lumber shack to the village center while you've got four buildings waiting for boards. So fun! Not like you need those boards to repel the endless army of weak monsters that will utterly destroy everything in sight while everybody runs away, so you can avoid losing on day 2! LOSING IS FUN, DO YOU GET IT YET?

It could be an amazing game with some actual effort put in, but a Decision(tm) was made a long time ago, when the game changed its name, and it has seemingly been downhill from there. The coding is like the workers themselves: it does whatever it feels like doing, which is usually nothing. I promise this is true: exiting the game and restarting it once caused all the workers to suddenly realise that they had jobs to do, and that game almost went well... for a few minutes. Restarting hasn't worked since; I think the code found the 'Make things go' exploit and patched it out.

Ive been playing this for a while.
Quit a bunch of times cause its pretty hard. But coming back to it and going custom mode has been pretty fun.
Its a fantastic city builder first and foremost. But then you have some legit and deep combat systems.
I cannot comment too much on the combat as i have not engaged with it very much.

There is a lot going on in this title, ive only scratched the surface.
On the over world map you can select a region to work in and open chests with your XP to up your god powers or get boosts... You can also doom the world to start over and keep your XP.
After you start a settlement you can send people and resources to other regions and expand your empire. This becomes very important mid game.
The general flow of the game is really slow and requires patience and concise decisions but feels rewarding as your settlements grow.

I really like the art style, it takes me back to the original Warcraft. This makes me happy.
There are a lot of particle effects and it can be fun just pushing clouds around. There are tons of little details adding to the depth.

I give this game a thumbs up and would suggest it to folks who like god games and city builders.

one of the best games that i played until the damn blood moon

will reset the world again 10/10