4 playthroughs and I find myself stopping at around 100 population each time. Somehow it gets too boring, confusing and tedious. You are waiting for taxes/resources a lot of the time and there is no actual way to lose, and you have to wait longer and longer for things to happen because you start having to spend money on meticulously placing trees, or promoting villagers, or buying more territory for farmland or housing, all the while your supply chains start breaking down. The wood or stone starts to not get generated fast enough, or your villagers keep running out of food because your population keeps growing, leading to a massive slowdown in progress where you are just trying to maintain what you have.

I kept replaying to try to correct this to no avail. Call it a skill issue but it was just tough for me to enjoy a long game of this.

the best city builder I played, it checks all the right boxes for me and its setting, art direction and flexibility fuel my creativity. After playing countless hours the EA version I was a little sceptical with all the changes of 1.0, but even if it will get me some time to get accustom I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised. The game has a relative small modding scene atm, but it will improve as mods get ported from their EA version.

It's fantastic. Been yearning for something like this for ages, since Settlers 6. Later Settlers weren't the same. Manor Lords is a good idea, but not nowhere near as streamlined as this. There's Dawn of Man, but it's not really all that fun. There's Cities XL, but that's something else than this.

It's the best casual addictive city builder I've tried to date.
Has that constant progression, that feels rewarding. And a challenge to manage well.

Cons:
There's some tiny glitches, that need to be smoothed out. Nothing major, barely worth mentioning.
Lacks some QoL here and there, to mitigate micro management and looking for needles in a haystack.
The performance... GPU usage is through the roof. Shadows and GI especially. It's just atrocious, for what you're seeing on screen. Had to turn off shadows and GI entirely, to maintain 117 fps @ 3440x1440, on a 5070 Ti.