Settlement Survival’s appeal is turning scarce supplies into a functioning town: food, housing, industries and trade must work together while seasons and natural hazards add pressure. For solo players who enjoy long-term planning, ≈ $2.67 at CDKeys offers an entry point at the tracked historical low.
The Steam PC version is single-player; co-op is not listed.At $4.99 from CDKeys, Settlement Survival is at the site's tracked historical low, making this a timely entry point for its settlement planning and resource management.
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85%Steam Reviews7.7K reviews
Released: Oct 24, 2022
City Builder · Building · Colony Sim · Survival · Management
CDKeysSettlement Survival PC+1·Platform:Steam·~ $22.50-88%from~ $2.67(~ £1.99)ALL-TIME LOWSave $2.32 vs SteamBuy now
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Steam+1·Platform:Steam·United States Steam official price~ $19.99-75%~ $4.99Buy now
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated daily
Historical Low~ $0.452026-07Current Low Across Stores~ $17.99Kinguinvs. Historical Low+3898%
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
Lead survivors toward a new home and turn scarce supplies into a growing settlement. Settlement Survival blends city-building with survival management: plan housing and food, develop industries and trade goods while responding to changing seasons and natural threats.Steam players rate the game 85%% positive from 7,741 reviews.The Steam PC version supports interface languages including English, German and Simplified Chinese.Released October 24, 2022.
Credits
Developer
Gleamer Studio
Publisher
Team17 · Gleamer Studio
Steam player reviews
85%positiveVery Positive7,741 Steam reviews
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$0.452026-07-30 · KKinguinBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.
Language support
Language
Interface
Subtitles
Audio
Simplified Chinese
Yes
Yes
—
English
Yes
Yes
—
French
Yes
Yes
—
Show 9 more languages
Language
Interface
Subtitles
Audio
German
Yes
Yes
—
Russian
Yes
Yes
—
Spanish-Latin America
Yes
Yes
—
Japanese
Yes
Yes
—
Italian
Yes
Yes
—
Polish
Yes
Yes
—
Portuguese-Brazil
Yes
Yes
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Turkish
Yes
Yes
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Korean
Yes
Yes
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Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-21
02Before you buy
Play mode
The Steam PC version offers single-player. Multiplayer and co-op are not listed here.
Languages
Interface languages include English, German and Simplified Chinese. Full audio is not listed for these languages.
03Frequently asked questions
What is Settlement Survival about?
You lead survivors to a new settlement and manage food, shelter and growth.
Are maps the same each time?
Yes. Maps are randomly generated, with varying resources and landmarks.
Which development routes can I take?
Choose among trade, education, mining, construction, agriculture, processing, logistics and liveability routes.
Are there disasters?
Seasons and natural disasters challenge the settlement.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviews
Selected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
TL;DR: This game is *awe-inspiringly* anal-retentive. If you've been looking for a city-builder that lets you micromanage your pops' lives right down to what they sleep on at night and what sort of companion animal they keep? Welcome, friend. The graphics are profoundly All Right, as is the music/sounds. But you're here for the fiddly ****, aren't you. Just own it.
If Tropico 6 is Endless Space 2, then Settlement Survival is Stellaris.
Now I came across this game while looking for a city-builder with as much charm as Tropico 6 but, perhaps, a touch more depth. I found a lot of recs for a lot of different games, but most of them were either too aesthetically unpleasing for my tastes (give me COLORS, or at the very least some STYLE); too 'charmless'/dry (why would I want to build just another modern American city???); or too determined to raise my poor, blameless blood pressure.
Don't get me wrong -- when I play a city-builder, I *want* the challenges inherent to deep, serious micromanagement. I just don't want to spend all my time constantly fighting the game to keep my pops alive, healthy, and not committing violent rebellion. Basically, if a game isn't profoundly nerf-able? I'm profoundly not there.
So here comes Settlement Survival, which was apparently released in a state where you couldn't play sandbox until you had beaten the incredibly challenging game -- haha no. I walked away and put this bad boy on Ignore. I came back and checked after dozens of hours on Tropico 6, though, and, lo and behold, sandbox is open from the start.
But let me tell you about sandbox, friends and neighbors:
You can, if you wish, play with the deep and, yes, awe-inspiringly anal-retentive tech tree off, meaning you can have the fun of researching all those techs without so much pressure.
You can, if you wish, crank the difficulty of the sandbox seed, just in case you're a ridiculous masochist.
You can, if you wish, play with all sorts of special goodies to build -- I'm not spoiling.
Sandbox is big and glorious. You will quickly rue spreading out your buildings too far on your great, big map. You will marvel at the insane -- but searchable -- number of potential resources. You will wait impatiently for the merchant ships, and chew your nails over letting immigrants join your settlement. Aliens and serial killers will wander by, but if you follow the instructions in the tutorial, you're going to be okay. You'll cheer every time your hunters bring home a baby animal for you to raise, and you will wonder how one village can possibly use so much wood.
I'm having so much fun with this, y'all -- and you will, too, if you enjoy games that make you spin about 9,000 plates at once.
Buy it.Show moreShow less
24.4 hours at review558 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
Not recommendedSteam player
This game seems amazing at first, the graphics are nice, the music goes well, the load times aren't too crazy & the UI is pleasant to use
But after about a good 3-5 hours, this is by far the most infuriating Colony sim/City builder i have played, and I hate that i kept thinking I could overcome this game's problems instead of immediately uninstalling & just spending my weekend on ANY other city builder. If you're gonna give this a try, be warned. You can't notice the faults in the first 2 hours of the refund period
1. LACK OF DESCRIPTION: This is a chinese game that's been translated. And as a result, the item description for LITERALLY everything in game is cut off. Like the in-game description starts off with "Peach: This is grown in Orchards, its a rough food so long term consumption results in-"
The end.
Like... you couldn't even find a way to squeeze in the proper description for each item? Or shrink the font size so it fits in? In mandarin i suppose the characters have the full length, but not in english for sure.
On top of that the game's mechanics are VERY hidden/confusing, im not sure if this is a translating issue
There's multiple difficulties but other than saying "the resources are harder to find", it doesn't say much else. Not the fact that winters are 3x longer, arrive sooner and there's lower temperatures. Nope.
Each citizen has both health & Life. You'd think one of them indicates whether someone is alive or not. Absolutely not, i have had citizens that drop to 0 health & 0 life and still live. Other times, my 1 citizen dipped to 0 health but full life and instantly died
2. Impossible/Frustrating mechanics. A lot of reviews with in-depth time have mentioned this but this game's citizen carrying priorities are so screwed
Let's say your tailor is producing clothes for the winter for your small town of 15 people.
He will literally keep producing UNTIL HE HAS 40 CLOTHES. He won't ever drop it off and he'll start wandering around doing other things like chopping trees etc. Your entire town could be freezing to death, and he WON"T EVEN wear it either to save himself
The game is hard-coded to drop off things ONLY when your citizen is full... just why? Take a clue from banished/rimworld/timberborne/LITEARLLY any other city builder jesus. There's no cart-person either that takes stuff from workshops and puts it into central storages either
Speaking of storage, you cannot have your citizens prioritize a certain storage either
Let's say you build 5 plots of farm land far away from the city. And you build a warehouse close to it for them to store
Your citizens will IGNORE IT. And spend 10% of their time harvesting and 90% of the time walking to the warehouse that's 50 miles away, until that one is full
Sure, you can "trick the game" by turning off that storage & turning it on later, but why? Why is there no "radius" for picking stuff to store in? Or choosing a storage manually?
3. Technology: This is literally the worst designed tech tree in the planet. You passively get resource points that become harder and harder to unlock as you get more
I'm not even sure if its mathematically possible to unlock all the tech tree options no longer how long you play. And a lot of the tech trees aren't like "This would be nice to have, faster roads"
No. They're tech options that literally decide whether or not you Live or DIE. Notice how most games scale up the technology tree?
Beginner technology = 1 point, intermediate = 2, end-game technology =4?
Its designed this way so that you don't have guns & missiles without knowing how to purify drinking water
Except in settlement survival, all tech costs the same. And some technology trees have NO USE other than just... serving as a catalyst for others
Research a clay pit? Great -> Wait another year to unlock water mill -> Wait another year after to unlock the loom to spin cloth -> Wait another year to unlock the tailor!
Until then, most of the technology is pointless. While the tailor is considered almost critical to survive winter
4. RNG RNG RNG.
Its one thing to have a tiny amount of healthy RNG, like different map types, different goods on a merchant ship
Its another thing to have rng in POPULATION GROWTH. There are games where i literally have 80-20 gender split. Like seriously? I get a wave of immigrants and they're ALL WOMEN. Either implement polygame or fix this jesus
RNG when it comes to unlocking certain seeds wouldn't be so bad, when some crops are blatanty overpowered (Hello beans & peas kingdom.)
Also, so many other crops are pointless like cherries, lettuce etc. Like if you're planning to implement them in the future then sure, otherwise they're just a "Hah! You thought it was grapes, but it i was I the USELESS CHESTNUT Tree!!"
Or at least put a food variety in the game
RNG when it comes to unlocking cotton/flax for BASIC SURVIVAL is not how it should be. RNG when it comes to unlocking seeds for potatoes/agave for alcohol processing is just frustrating. Sure, you can get it from the merchant ship after paying off a truck load of money. But its meant for mid-game once you're established
( which btw, you lead a colony of drunkards. If they don't get alcohol, their happiness lowers and they're -20% efficiency, effectively killing your colony as everything else slows down)
TLDR: Incomplete translations. Broken individual citizen game mechanics. Severely lacking optimization options for a veteran city builder.
Buy this game maybe a full year later after they've patched it like crazy. Avoid it for now
EDIT: They fixed the font, which is nice. I'm still marking this as a thumbs down just due to the fact that they haven't addressed the citizens ignoring the closer storage, no specific item filters (if you have to look at beverages, you look at the entire thing)
Citizen carrying priority still not addressed which is the most game breaking thing still
EDIT 2: So it looks like they also imported assets from a company called Synty Studios... which really only leaves their questionable design choices/glitched game as their own making....Show moreShow less
28.5 hours at review739 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
RecommendedSteam player
---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf
---{ Audience }---
☑ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☑ Grandma
---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☑ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☑ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☑ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second live for grinding
---{ Story }---
☑ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life
---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond
---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☑ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10Show moreShow less
0.5 hours at review320 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
Not recommendedSteam player
TLDR: Huge micromanaging problems that could be solved with better design.
Okay so let me start of by saying I'm a HUGE fan of games like this. I have a few hundred hours in Banished, my favorite game is Factorio (which is a little similar but not really) and that mars colony game and all kinds of games like this are right up my alley. I took a few months long whack at Dwarf Fortress and when it comes to Steam it will probably be my favorite game.
This game would be GREAT except for a few REALLY really game breaking design problems that I don't think would be that difficult to fix:
1) Citizen AI inventory management: Citizens hold onto the things their working until their inventory is literally full *or they get fired from their current job*. This means VITAL things that don't take up a lot of inventory space like tools and clothes will just sit in a citizens backpack until you manually hunt down and fire that citizen to get them to drop them. This problem is made *worse* with techs like the basket, because having a larger inventory means that you'll have to do even MORE micromanaging of who's hording all the vital resources. That really quickly becomes a chore when you're spreading your people pretty thin.
1b) The inventory tool doesn't count stuff that your citizens are carrying. Your tailor could have 60 clothes in his pockets, but if you're not manually clicking on him to know that, you might think you're about to run out. You have to have a constant mental tally of who's been working on what to know if you're actually about to run out of something or if you just need to fire a citizen to get them to empty their pockets. This also becomes a HUGE chore in a game that should be more about macro managing to really scratch that "Banished" itch.
2) Some numbers just don't make any sense at all. Building a pasture increases the wood cost exponentially when it should be increasing per the perimeter formula. A 8x8ish pasture costs DOUBLE the amount of wood it takes to build a church (80 vs 169). Like come on! Citizens drink a ♥♥♥♥ ton of water and die pretty quickly after they're "thirsty." This is also exacerbated by the "full inventory hoarding" problem. Citizens don't care if they're holding the last remaining food or water in the village. They'll happily go rest with it, wander around while their families are dying. The stone lying on the ground will fill up my reserves pretty fast, but a quarry is REALLY really slow. If it takes 1 person to mine 80 stone of the ground in a day, why do they only generate about 10 from a quarry in a day? Why do I have a third of my village foraging for herbs but I'm still constantly out? There's NO WAY I'm sinking 4 points into getting the herb seed.
3) The research and proficiency systems are pretty bad. I really appreciate the effort of taking Banished's system and adding whole new systems to it. That's a fantastic concept for this game and I'm happy to see that someone picked up where Banished left off. It's a really good attempt, but taking the "points to research the next thing increase exponentially forever" instead of "everything has a set amount of points that they need to be researched" approach is really quite bad. If you wasted your first few points exploring industries that don't turn out to be super necessary for you, you are in a HUGE DEEP HOLE when it comes to waiting for the later points to trickle in. Thinking that the points just got slower and slower forever really killed my drive to play the game. It just becomes so much more waiting than it needs to be. The "School development points +100%" tech straight up doesn't work. My schools still outputted 20 per tick. Not really sure what paper did. I didn't notice a change in my labs output. The only thing that made it go faster was building more labs and sinking even more people into research. This is really not sustainable because, as I said, the costs to research the next thing just keep going up and up forever.
4) Micromanaging production problems: Instead of butchers just working with whatever meat you have, you have to manually select the exact product they can work with, wait until that meat is used up, then manually select the next meat they can work with. You can't queue production orders or give them multiple acceptable meats to work with, so when your hunters bring in a bunch of different types of meat, you can only butcher them one at a time. You have to literally micromanage your butchery or else it'll just sit there doing nothing. Game dev: PLEASE JUST COPY FROM DWARF FORTRESS. Production orders are orders of magnitude less micromanagey and really take away from the "chore"y-ness of the game. All industries would benefit from a production order system, but the Butchery is particularly bad without one.
5) Small one, but builders work on roads LAST. They'll build every other possible thing before finally getting around to the roads. Kinda dumb because building the roads first would make building everything else first faster, thus wasting less time. If you want them to manually do that, you have to set up where you want your buildings to go, build the roads around them, then pause the buildings so they build the road first. Kinda wonky. Also you can't prioritize roads so that's the only workaround if you want to build em.
6) TOOLTIPS! The game has some but more would be fantastic. The game has a lot of "hidden" information that you just have to kinda figure out yourself which really feels bad. Like the roads thing in point 5. Do houses burn coal first or chopped wood first? What are farmers actually doing between planting and harvesting? Do them whacking at the field actually make it more fertile? Why are my hunters looking for footprints while they're literally standing next to a bunch of animals? When is an animal "mine" so I can put it in a pasture? Does food spoil? I have 2K fish, should I sell it? Does light actually do anything other than look cool? Why are 10 year olds claiming houses by themselves? WHY ARE MY PEOPLE "messing around" WHEN THERE IS REALLY IMPORTANT STUFF FOR THEM TO DO THAT THEY REALLY SHOULD BE DOING?!? PEOPLE ARE STARVING TO DEATH JEBADIAH, PLEASE HUNT. I don't have a definitive answer to any of these questions. Just guesses.
7) Why don't river merchants have any coins? It's not a huge deal, you can still build up wealth with resources, but it's just slightly annoying and immersion breaking lol. All it does is force you to do the math to figure out your own wealth (thus adding to the micromanaging chore aspect of the game.)
HUGE potential. Again, I'm really happy to see someone picked up Banished and took another whack at it, but there are a lot of really unfun design choices that have been made. If the devs took this list and ran with it, this would easily become my favorite game on Steam.Show moreShow less
17.2 hours at review406 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
RecommendedSteam player
- DIFFICULTY -
☑️ My 90 year old grandma could play it
🔲 Easy
🔲 Normal
🔲 Hard
🔲 "Dark Souls"
- GRAPHICS -
🔲 "MS Paint"
🔲 Bad
🔲 Meh
🔲 Graphics don't matter in this game
☑️ Good
🔲 Beautiful
🔲 Masterpiece
- MUSIC -
🔲 Bad
☑️ Not special
🔲Good
🔲 Beautiful
- STORY -
☑️ This game has no story
🔲 Like playing "Temple Runners" for the story
🔲 It's there for the people who want it
🔲 Well written
🔲 Epic story
- PRICE -
🔲 Free
🔲 Underpriced
🔲 Perfect price
☑️ Could be cheaper
🔲 Overpriced
🔲 Complete waste of money
- REQUIREMENTS -
🔲 You can run it on a microwave
☑️ Average
🔲 High end
🔲 "NASA" computer
- LENGTH -
🔲 Very short (0 - 3 hours)
🔲 Short (3 - 15 hours)
🔲 Average (15 - 50 hours)
🔲 Long (50 - 90 hours)
🔲 Extremely long (90 - 110 hours)
☑️ No ending
- FUN -
🔲 I'd rather watch paint dry
🔲 Hard to enjoy
🔲 Repetitive
☑️ Actually pretty amusing
🔲 Ride of your life
- REPLAYABILITY -
🔲 It's a one - time experience
🔲 Only for achievements
🔲 If you wait a few months / years
🔲 Definitely
☑️ Infinitely replayable
- WORTH BUYING -
🔲 No
🔲 Wait for sale
☑️ YesShow moreShow less
2.8 hours at review291 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
Not recommendedSteam player
The most recent UI updates make this feel like an early facebook game. I understand development is a process, but I find the UI updates unwieldy and needlessly complicated. Certain QOL features like adding and removing workers, turning buildings on and off, etc have been made more complicated. The blue coloration of everything is also seriously off-putting. Certain Icons and UI elements have been made needlessly tiny to the point which they are almost unusable/unrecognizable.
edit: 2025, 2.5~ years since my review, UI still looks the same to meShow moreShow less
237.9 hours at review344 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
RecommendedSteam player
No one will ever read this but I recommend this gameShow moreShow less
26.3 hours at review228 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
Not recommendedSteam player
This game falls into an interesting spot simply because it is a blend of two other games. The classic Banished, that is an influence for so many others, and Life is Feudal Forest Village( LIF FV), which is almost a straight rip-off of Banished's core code and UI but with their own graphics and a few other mechanics and elements. Settlement Survival does expand on the Happiness and Health areas in a better way, which actually makes this game more challenging but cuts the knees off that mechanic with the technology and research element. And that is the primary difference between this game and Banished, the research and the technology tree. Delaying the use of buildings and technology for the sake of waiting for research points is dulling. It kills the game. I shouldn't need to research clay and sand or any other "resource" that is simply dug from the ground. It is a base resource, it is there. The fact that it requires a special building to produce it is enough. This goes with most of the technology tree, it should just be available. The resources required for it should be the limiting factor on most things. You need glass, so you need sand and a kiln of some sort. I shouldn't need to research, Clay and Sand, then a Kiln, then the building I'm wanting to build anyway. Especially when you average a single technology point a year.
In my opinion Banished and LIF FV are both much better games that will provide continued enjoyment. Yes, they have limitations once you grow to a certain point. Just consider that the end game, you won. You built to the limits that your PC can handle. Could Banished and LIF FV be better? Of course they could. This game doesn't do that though.
So, on it's own merit, is it worth it without the comparison to Banished and LIF? No. For the same reasons above, they kill the game with the required research and technology.Show moreShow less
21.1 hours at review332 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
RecommendedSteam player
---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf
---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma
---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☑ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding
---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☑ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life
---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond
---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
---{ Bugs }---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☑ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10Show moreShow less
4 hours at review200 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I really want to like this game. There are so many good things in it. But it is so buggy, and the gameplay is uneven, and often illogical.
What is the boiler room? It makes no sense. It seems like they adapted an electrical system, like it's a power plant.
The way ressources are used is unclear, it often just suddenly goes from tens of thousands of units of a ressource to 0 in a second (flax or food or water for example). Often there are ressources in the warehouses but the production location says that it has no ressources. most of these city games have staff in the warehouses who also act as delivery and also the workers often deliver to the warehouses, like farmers delivering their crops. And so, when a ressource is not getting to the warehouse, it is easy to spot the problem in the chain. But in this game it is a mystery. I can have no builders at all and yet things still get built somehow. Their delivery system is ridiculous because the range is so small.
The range for worship, theatre, health care is insane as well. Why would a population of 250 need two hospitals and two theatres and two cathedrals!
The education system is not good, why would a farmer or a miner need an education bonus. If you are a miner with a phd, that is a useless phd! The Tropico series solved that problem (a lot of problems with Tropico, sure, but the education system works).
Why no granary?
The food quality system does not work. veggie salad?? gourmet shop? what? come on! Why not have restaurants? Or a tavern? or both? or set the system communist style, like in the old impressions games where everyone has a certain quality of food... or certain neighborhoods have better food and higher expectations (here the mention goes to Emperor from impressions, when you would read what was being served, it made you want to eat it!)
Indeed, as with all these new city-building games, there is A LOT of arrogance from these developers, in that they are trying to reinvent the wheel and are not humble enough to look at previous successful city building games from the early days of video games, like the impressions series, that fine-tuned all these issues between Caesar to Children of the Nile.
A few problems persisted in these city building games, definitely, the walker system was weak...but that could be fixed with city statistics and a certain automation, city-wide between citizen and ressource.
But here, it's like they are starting from scratch, and making all the same mistakes that have already been made in the early days of gaming, but slightly differently...why not learn from those older games? ARROGANCE! As a result, it is almost impossible to track ressources or figure out exactly how to build a successful city. The happiness system does not work either.
The size of the buildings makes no sense, the water system is fantastical. No irrigation. How does the bathhouse get water? (carried from the reservoir? what?) the latrines system is silly... and the range is also fantastical (so I need three hospitals for my large city, but just two latrines is fine for 300 people!!?? Why not make toilets upgrades to the houses? (from outhouse, to central flushing toilets, with a sewage system prereq)...no instead you can buy a cat or a dog for your house! or bedding? what? Why can't bedding be a luxury ressource like ceramics or wine?
Plus, the houses don't upgrade, so you must destroy the house to replace it with a luxury house. It is a bad system, built on the pay to buy tablet/phone game model and not based on solid gameplay data. It makes more sense to have the citizens upgrade their own houses based on the necessary ressources and luxury ressources and access to wealth.
No salaries either, no taxes? You start with no money. So I guess you make jewellery and sell it and EVERYONE wants your jewellery! right.
In fact, even in the old zeus style games, you could just sell hundreds of sculptures to become very wealthy, but at least in those games, foreign powers had ressources that they wanted and ressources that they didn't want. In this game, the economy is childish and poorly thought out. Again, it is like the "economy" of these tablet phone games! And again, there are lots of really strong economy based games in the past that solved all these problems. There was one that was just economy that was really good, from the mid aughts I think, where you ran a trading family (in China I think) but I can't remember the name of it. My point is the model exists and it works! Why not do that? Instead of reinventing a terrible economic model that does not work?
I so desperately wanted this game to be good and I have tried for months, coming back after every update, but it is just not a good game. Unbalanced, poorly executed and way way too buggy.Show moreShow less
49.2 hours at review209 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.
