Goblin Camp

About 50 hours into it now (maybe three restarts). Thumbs up because it works as intended and there were no real game breaking tech issues. It was generally enjoyable, though not particularly deep or immersive for the first 40 hours or so. It's fine if you're just looking to let a game run in the background because frankly, progress in this game is simply waiting for enough seasons to pass to buy the tech (6-8 points a year). It was fine for $20 bucks on sale, but a long way from hooking me to play the way other games have. Having said this, basically, once you get the fundamentals, it's just a waiting game to unlock tech. Don't go too big, don't go too small. 16-20 seems to be the sweet spot. Plant 'the tree' and watch it grow and seasons change to get tech points. Tech points unlock tech. Not much you can do to accelerate tech. You can't really plant a second tree. Sacrifices are pre-ordained mandatory based on tech and don't really seem to add enough of anything to make a difference in the speed of tech development points. So there was a LOT of just watching seasons change. This touches on my general criticism: it's not particularly great as a micro manager game, not particularly great as a macro manager game. Build a hut in one flavour or another (forge/house/storage.. all basically just huts). Set inventory to have NPCs build or collect things. Sit around wait for tech points to accumulate. You can't specialize the NPCs; and tech choices have few if any real costs or consequences. Walls just funnel the bad guys. You don't need them. Steel tools or pitchforks and sticks. Doesn't really mater. Once you realize you can limit colony size to between 16-20, you can just call in more when a few die. I'm a Rimworld/Kenshi type, so would have been happy to micromanage. However, you don't control individual NPCs; you don't control or assign individual jobs. Fine. With this being said, I would have expected more 'macro' management at the whole colony level (I'm also a SimCity player so I'm ok taking the mayor seat). Budgets, traffic and happiness. However, you don't really manage inventory or production, defense or budgets. Morale was always just plus or minus 10 from 50. Managing field fertility seems like it should be immersive, but isn't really. Switch on fertilize, or just rotate to a new pasture. You can control what sorts of debris gets made into fertilizer, but you quickly make more fertilizer than you can use and no way to dispose or disperse crap and garbage once full. No worries though, there are no consequences for crap and garbage just laying about; no way to apply extra fertilizer and no differences in fertilizer types/recipes anyway. Storehouses are just big boxes of inventory. Get new iron tech by waiting around and then you just build new/fresh and ignore the 10 old wood tools in storage (which you can't seem to get rid of once in storage). I might keep playing just to see why I would bother unlocking a windmill... but probably will be disappointed to discover 'not much'. I mean, it was fine but not particularly great which is too bad because it has potential. I'll probably come back to see in a year or three.