Anyone try playing a game called Banished? I saw a couple of YouTubers play it and decided to buy it, nice game, can be a tad sow, and is very much a micro-managing game.... controlling everything, go to off balance and its sooooo hard to get back on track!
The game is good, but it plays like a pre-alpha. It's very limited, and while beautiful, I've found it's really just "play until your people starve or freeze to death." I might just suck at it but I found that it was impossible to reach any kind of equilibrium-- something was always going wrong and in some cases it was near impossible to fix because the player has such weak control over things. (ex. "harvest the wood or you're going to die idiot!!" *citizen walks past trees highlighted for priority*) I much prefer the gameplay of something like Stronghold. Your town has a functioning economy with growth to manage and a number of resources flowing, but the citizens' efforts can be put to use in a number of ways.
It IS a survival game in all fairness. It's normal to fail. But it's not perfect - I've found that it's very difficult to keep the town surviving without constantly increasing the population.
I did expect the difficulty to be somewhat intentional, but it's sort of brutal for me at least. I'd like to build a town that works and then have to resist a greater threat than outgrowing my ability to hunt and gather.
I see two goals in this game: -Survival until you reach surpluses in all goods+healthy population growth -When you reach around >250 population, increasing efficiency so that you'll have 1/3 labourers available. Then make sure that the population has a reasonable spread in ages. When you've reached that, the population will still fluctuate a lot if you don't build more houses, but with the labourers buffer, you'll survive each 'crash'. Both are a bit hard, but when you reached both goals the game is basically over, since there aren't that many different things to do (and because some building set ups are optimal, there isn't much variation), and increasing and building new cities takes longer and longer, because of walking distances and will become a more boring fight against game mechanics and logistics.
