Very good game. A bit of a learning curve but after a few tries on various scenarios, and at 471 hours, I now have mastered (??) the game. I still only have 75% of the achievements and I tried a number of interesting mods. Nice graphics, various levels of difficulty, easy controls, many different objectives, four main streams (simple city building, metropolis, monastery, and war castle). Not a lot of action if that's what you are looking for, mostly strategic, planning, building and adding decorations to get higher scores.Truly enjoying it

Ok, so.

The game is good, but it COULD be great. I'm hesitating to recommend or not-recommend the game, but while I enjoyed my time on it, I'll likely not play before the next update(s), because of the frustration it induces... and still recommend it.

The obvious pros: the game is cute, it's a city builder, with organic behavior of the citizens. Sound design is excellent. Modular buildings are a GREAT mechanism. Unlock tree is ok even if the system feels a bit artificial (I end up placing like a hundred bushes near the right type of building to unlock things).

After a while unlocking new stuff, seeing my pops and buildings have more requirements, I started to feel something like the fun I felt when I played Caesar III, decades ago... but at a smaller scale, as the game does not seem well optimized, and struggles to run a few hundred citizens.

Aaaand now, here is the issue.

Just like in old games and any good city builder, the mechanisms require you to optimize some stuff, so that your peasant can satisfy their needs, but here it gives you almost no tool to do it properly. The logistics issues are hard to understand and impossible to debug because you can't really control where people will store stuff, where people will sell stuff, you can't prioritize jobs, you can't really steer people to given neighbourhoods when areas lack workers when others don't and people will do 15 km to fetch food, which prevents them to go to work...

People are unhappy because they don't have access to basic stuff that are on sale 15m from them, and FINDING what's wrong is inexplicably hard. My houses are degrading, why? no way to know. Wheat does not go from storage to mill, why? no way to know. My bailiff always quits the city even when happy, why ? no way to know. Can I prioritize stone for road paving over house rerererererebuilding ? Not that I can see...

There are also quite a lot of bugs which are not all game breaking but still give an impression of an unfinished or unpolished game, but really my main remark would be this : *if you want me to build a nice city with hundreds of citizens and knights and monks with needs, give me tools to do it properly. I cannot click on individuals and buildings in the whole map, so at some scale of city I'll need to have an map overview of who does not have water, service, or whatever, of which buildings lacks what and why (is it production ? logistics ? can I fix it with more storage ? hiring more people ? where ?) Where are people going to get their food ? their clothes ? How much time does it take them that they don't use to work, and why can't I compensate that by hiring more people in that underutilized building ? People tell me they can't find a home, but all the homes around have lots of empty room, what exactly are you looking for and where ? and so on and so forth*

Basically, QoL for big cities is not there (yet ?).

Ah, and the other bad UX thing for me which gets me to eye roll is the "click on something happening at some precise point on the map before a timer" aspects, which really reminds me of bad mobile games and, imo, has nothing to do on a PC city builder. I'm *designing a city*, so I don't want to move all over the map to welcome three new citizens, just find yourself a home already, yes I need you or I would have specified it in an immigration policy. Emissary of abbess/king/whatever ? Just show me the event or show up on the side of the screen, I was *busy* trying to sort out wood logistics 30 seconds of map scrolling to the west, please. Also, having to micro my three main people who do the missions to get progress and new people, why ? just get on a loop of $mission and give me mental time to plan quarries; and having to micro the lvlup of citizens to optimize jobs, please nooo ... I have money, just auto-upgrade whoever works as a tax collector or whatever, auto-upgrade a random monk when I have 5 books, auto-upgrade soldiers, etc.

For me, the ultimate goal of a cute city-builder is to get to the point of being able to just visit the map and look around, and the city Works. See logistics flows, money gets in, people get around, go in, take free jobs and live their lives. All microgestion prevents that, and knowing the game will never let me just "enjoy what I built without having anything to click on to get it to run" is a frustration.

Overall, yes, it's a good cute city builder. You can build small villages. But for now, the lack of QoL and the forced microgestion of pops means it cannot reach the "zen" point of truly great citybuilders where you can just stop, look at your megalopolis, and enjoy looking at details of your creation or do building micro-adjustments for hours.

Its good