Romeo's Review after an entire day of gameplay
Just played the game for the entire day, and I have mixed feelings about the game. Even though it's a blast in the early-game, the weaknesses grow blatantly apparent. I did not come here for the Total War-lite mechanics but more for the city-building.
Pros
The city-building mechanics of the game (for my case the early-stages) is good. It's really easy to get the whole grasp of how to build up your economy (mostly put resource-based buildings next to resources that are specialized in and assign those resource jobs to families there). Gather wood, get food, and build houses for your families, etc. The building system is organized, and is pretty cool to see the peasantry build up buildings material by material. There is also a seasonal system with weather that have their own effects on gameplay, like winter forcing your peasants to use twice the firewood resources than before, or how peasants time their farming schedules based on the weather. I also haven't experienced any game-breaking bugs or crashes, so that's good. The graphics are also top-notch. It's entertaining for me at least to watch my village grow. I also did not experience any bugs with the visit mode, of which the developer said it's really buggy. You can break it though by getting your noble stuck in the house (the buildings are all empty inside with doors closed).
Economy management
Regarding resource gathering in my experience, food keeps getting retardedly scarce even if you build more farms as your town grows bigger. Your food amount somehow still reaches 0 so your people still starves, and then your town starts leaving. Farming, hunting, vegetable farms are way too inefficient to be useful, and importing food is just way too expensive, so you're just stuck watching your people leave your town, which made me lose my first playthrough. I also get really embittered when I assigned a ton of my peasants to harvest the grain when winter was going to arrive, and the AI decides to just loiter around. Thanks to that, a third of my available grain was harvested, and the other 2/3rds was wasted. No wonder why my populace starved. I assume the game wants to force you to build another town in another region (speaking of regions, there is only 1 map in the entire game with the same regions with the same resources in the same locations, so no map diversity).
The tutorial for the early-game is okay, but the tutorial just falls off when it does not teach you the biggest aspect of the game: peasantry wealth. In my first playthrough, I did not know how to raise peasantry wealth because I don't think the tutorial taught me how useful it is or how to get in the early-game (you MUST build a trading post to sell stuff in the beginning of the game to raise the wealth), so I could not buy any vegetable gardens or getting more oxen, which the latter is a huge factor to your village growth. Honestly, the tutorial is way too bare-bones, and there should be a tutorial mode that gives you objectives from a small village to at most a mid-sized town with its own army that can defeat the enemy AI noble's forces.
Army and fighting mechanics
Speaking of the military in the game, army-building mechanics are really slow. It takes a long ass time to build up an army, and by the time your town gets its first fletcher to craft bows, bandit raiders already came in my town and sacked it. I had to save scum around eight times and dump a bunch of houses to create more families for more soldiers, buy more oxen, and rush to get the fletcher. There is a timer that lasts a year when the bandits do come, but not a lot of progress can be made for your village in a year if you're playing casually. Honestly think years should last longer to complete harvests and get your forces ready. I never fought the Enemy AI noble but in my first playthrough, it kept expanding too quickly to the other seven regions without obstacle while I deal with my town's problems. The noble also does not build towns in his regions, he just buys a ton of mercenaries, so you're not fighting a fair opponent. The only pro of the fighting mechanics is that the army collisions in the battles feel way better than Total War.
Conclusion
Even though I did not reach the late stages of the game, there are just so many things that make you tell that this is an early-access game. Half of the game's descriptions are placeholder text and variable names. It's impressive that this entire game is made by one guy, but people should not treat it as a good thing for a whole scope of a game like this. I guess for the $30 that I paid for thanks to the sale, it's okay. I think if I were to play this on peaceful mode and watch my city grow, maybe I would enjoyed it better, but then I'm missing a whole chunk of the gameplay, which is the combat. Honestly you should wait to buy the game until the gameplay becomes more refined and Slavic Magic hires more people.
