After having played this game for 103.3 hours. I "may" have a handle on what it is and isn't from my perspective.

I thought I'd wait to write this until I played a full game with the 1.1 update. If I had written this review before the 1.1 update, I would have said the game is a really boring and tedious. After playing a full game with the 1.1 update, I think I can halfheartedly recommend the game. It's better with the 1.1 update, but I believe it still needs work.

The national economy improvement somewhat reduces your number of clicks,, but it is still tedious especially as your number of cities grow. It's great that units can be upgraded. The main screen, though, remains way too crowded, and zooming in and out does little to fix that. Battles are relatively boring to watch.

Anyway, on a scale of 1 to 10, I would give the game a 6. Maybe further improvements will make it more fun, but the game can be tedious, especially near the end.

Not going to rush back to play it again until additional improvements for done.

I regret buying this game. Even more so, I regret playing it for longer than the refund time.

I regret it, because it is a micromanagement hell. There are so many items and production options and buildings, taking the focus away from he 4X nature of the game. In those five hours I played, nothing of note happened. It was just adding numbers on top of numbers, and producing plows for my farms. Just boring, with nothing to look forward too, except even more complex micromanagement. After one tiger destroyed a formation of two archers and a swordsman, I just lost interest.

I should have listened to the negative reviews, and never bought it.

8/10

This game is a very fun and unique combination of traditional 4X games like Civilization and production chain management games like Anno. There is a lot of micro-management of the items your cities and buildings are consuming and also producing, which I find fun but is probably not for everyone. There is a huge variety of items to produce and learn how to best use though a decent number of them don't seem very useful to use and I tend to ignore them.

I really enjoy how large and powerful your cities get. The game caps you on a relatively low number of cities between 5-10, but each individual city can grow over a much larger space than in other games. The cities end up feeling more like entire states or provinces within your nation which is a very cool way to handle things. You are incentivized to spread your cities out more to give them room to grow. Each individual map zone you expand into has 1-5 slots for buildings on top of the usual different combination of resources, providing more depth in how you grow your cities.

Army management is also very unique. You can deploy units individually, but you unlock larger and larger combined-arms formations as you go later in the game which give bonuses for grouping specific unit types together. This reduces the unit spam games like Civ can suffer from. Combat itself is relatively basic and the city siege mechanic feels like it is over far too quickly, but combat is not the focus of this game so I think it good overall.

The biggest issue I had with the game is the sheer volume of items, structures, and units to produce and use on a given turn. It is good to have variety, but it is an almost overwhelming volume of choice anytime you go into your cities' production menus. The game needs much better organization tools within those menus to group similar items together and hide outdated items that it no longer makes sense to see. For example, there is no reason to keep showing Spearmen as an option in my units production list when I'm in the late game trying to make a jet bomber.

There are some powerful tools to reduce the micro-management of your nation. I especially liked the national industry menu where you can quickly check the status of every building in your nation of a specific type. You can set up rules to automatically add bonus items to your structures which really helps as your nation expands and you make more and more structures across your nation.

Linear. Boring. Bad Optimization.

It's a great game!

It's great. much better than 'cats.' I'm going to play it again and again.

¿Jugaste al Civilization? Bueno, este es mejor.

If you like complex resource management games you will probably like this game. If you don't, then it isn't for you. It isn't 4X strategy game like Civilization. It is a resource management game with Civilization elements. I think many people watch the promos and make the mistake thinking this game will be like Civilization. Hence the mixed reviews.

I enjoyed this game, even thought it has its issues. The biggest issue is balance. Unfortunately I don't think there is a way to balance this game because it tries to mix complex resource management mechanics with civilization mechanics. They should have not copied civilization so much and balancing might have been possible.

One example of the balance issues is that I was able to reach the Atomic age with longbows. This is because of a complex resource management mechanic and a simple Civilization research mechanic. I had the tech, but I had to build the supply chains to maintain gunpowder units. I couldn't produce the required amount of gunpowder to upgrade my units quickly enough. Researching technology had no such requirement so I could easily just keep researching the next tech.

They should have handled research differently. For example the way Humankind did research would have worked better with this system. To progress to the next era (and have access to the next tech) you need to meet other civilization requirements (not just research requirements).

Great game! Beautiful terrain and deep complexity.

1.1 Confirmed in my mind that the game is headed in the right direction and cant wait for the first major DLC