I've played the game for about 4 hours.

I think my main issue is that there is very little simulation going on.

A simulation, to me, is more than a set of tasks that needs to be performed in a certain priority. It's more than having 30 bots running between X and Y task. The people don't feel alive - they get born, educated, work, and die. They might gather up some food meanwhile, maybe put on some clothing every second year, and they might idle at a graveyard or a tavern. But there's no life to them whatsoever, running in the same straight paths that the guy before them ran 10 years ago. They don't stop to talk, they don't laugh, they don't have any feelings other than "happiness" which is always topped out. And perhaps most egregiously, they don't seem to learn anything about their tasks. Someone dies after 70 years of working as a teacher? Replaced instantly by a toddler from the workforce. -1 Laborer, +1 Teacher. End of event.

And it's not an economic simulation either. While the essence is there, the mechanics are lacking. Unlike games like Settlers and Anno, there's almost no escalation of worth with your resources. A garden of plums is as useful as a gathering station in the forest. Would you like to eat some mutton or fish for dinner? It doesn't matter. You can trade for new types of farm animals and seeds, but again, there's no point to it other than burning through your precious resources. The only two improved paths that I see are iron, replaced by iron+coal, and leather or wool, replaced by leather+wool. And as far as building goes... nothing is unbuildable, every building requires the same resources and is available from the start (although you probably don't want to build some stuff right away).

There's no overworld interaction (besides trade). What you have is all that you have, and all that will ever be. No vicious wolf attacks (didn't I see that in a video?), no diplomats, no immigrants, no emigrants, no messengers from home requesting or giving aid.

What it is, I think, is a simulation of margins. There are slight efficiency bonuses to how you plan your city, and those eventually determine how quickly your city grows. But even then, it isn't difficult at all. I don't understand how you can even lose at this game unless you put everyone in the mines and let them starve. Even at Harsh weather, with disasters, on Hard, you should have no troubles in your first game. Three houses, one gatherer, one herbalist, you "beat" the game.

Ultimately what it comes down to is that the gameplay focuses you towards building an increasingly large village. But where's the fun in that? If the game was significantly more difficult I think it might be interesting. If it introduced new mechanics as your city grew (politics, diplomacy, crime), that would work too. The only difference between hour one and hour five is that now I have 50 bots instead of 16.

I've played the game a bit over the past few days. It is certainly quite a feat for 1 person to make (it says 1 person made it on the game website), but a bit of that does show. There are a few bugs and other problems that haven't been stomped out yet, like laborers traveling to the other side of the map to do a job and possibly starving and freezing in the process (because they are too far away from home when those become a problem), or problems with removing roads that haven't been built yet. I'm sure that these problems can be fixed with some work.

The game does seem beat when you have solved food problems and have a basic industry going. While iron and stone are theoretically finite (on the map at least), you can always trade for it. Basically, your best strategy is to develop things to the point where things are self sustaining, and try to do so before you make things difficult for yourself. Once you have the means to trade for things, you can always sell off your surplus for things that are finite for you. Basically: Self Sustaining + Surplus + Trade = Success.

Edit: I'm sure that the game will be improved in time, it just needs a bit of work until then. I don't mean to sound too harsh.

I finally picked it up, and played more than a few hours of it.  It's a fun city builder, but somewhat slow-going and leaves you with wanting more after you get most of your buildings established.

I like it though, and need to put more time in.  I just hope the developer puts some more time into this.

I am very tempted to try this game.  Sounds like i will like it.  I am a masochistic gamer.

From what I understand this game is still WIP though.

I ended up getting the game.  Just finished the tutorial and started my first town.

Get a Town Hall, it includes numbers about how much food is consumed and produced each season.

I've seen some weird problems similar to that, but for me they occurred after they started starving/freezing to death, not before. I remember one particularly well because it was kind of haunting. The whole gang was starving to death. They all just ran to the closest stockpile and spread out its contents around the area. Then they died.

I'm 50/50 on buying this game. I've read this discussion and the reviews on steam. The main con for me is that the game is described as a lot of sitting around staring at the screen; things happen very slowly. A lot of down time for the player. Have you experienced this? Not to imply I want things to happen fast, just that I do not want to wait and wait and wait for something to happen or a reason for me to interact with the game.

Order: Distribute Kool-Aid.

I wouldn't call it slow.  As the other person said, you can control the time and even in "slower" periods I use it to carefully plan out upgrades.  Not rushing is key to building a successful town.

My max so far is around 60.  I've been taking it slow, but I haven't played in a few days.

I'm around 250, the diminishing returns are really starting to show (people spend more and more time running, markets need 3-4 traders to stay balanced). I've got ~30 laborers constantly because I've got nowhere to put them. I think I will preemptively start building graveyards because there doesn't seem to be any way to slow down population growth besides letting people freeze to death. Yay communism.

I got my town to slightly over 250 habs but at this point my interest started to lower if only because I had every building built and it had gotten into a bit of a repeat loop. Even though the dynamic changes with a growing town.

My town seems to be running smoothly. I had a fire but the folks did not manage to take it out. I tried setting priority on the fire but it still took my sims lots of time to commit to bucket duty. In the end a sawmill and a home burned out... no big deal in the end.

At this point I think the game would need more meat around the stick. It has a solid core and nice UI so a few new mechanics and added content would greatly help extend it.

I poked around the official forum and it seems the dev has plans to expand the game but since it just got out he is currently neck deep in fixing all the bugs people have.  Even though I had a mostly bug free experience some poeple do have them and the forum is very bustling. He must be quite overwhelmed lol.   Once he gets the thick of the bugs sorted out I expect this game might get more content.