Polity Painter

Overall - its alright but maps have to be changed, most of them are poor quality ones such as the world map. I hope the game wont be abandoned and it will update 08/05/26 UPDATE: Dev actually listened and fixed the quality of the maps! Glad to know that dev is responsive and listens to the audience!

I found this game through a Youtube channel that covers some really interesting and niche history topics and given its incredibly reasonable price tag I can say that if you are into this type of game you should give it a shot. This is a solid game in a genre that seems to be rapidly emerging here on steam. The game comes out of the box with good map variety that covers every major area of the world, which gives huge flexibility for creating maps and scenarios. The UI is very clean and simple with everything laid out in a manner I found to be ergonomic and readable. The in game music was a bit unexpected but I actually ended up finding it to be quite pleasant. The nation building tools are simple but powerful here. I really enjoyed not being restricted by preset lists of religions or government types, instead you are freely able to enter any form of text descriptions for each category as you desire. This goes for the notes you can attach to each country as well. The UI was clearly built to be able to handle larger descriptions which allows for extensive in game world building, a welcome reprieve from having to use Word documents. This is not an EA title, so I am not sure how much the devs will be supporting this game after launch, which is fine as the game has released in a great state however I do see areas that could use improvement or expansion. The first one is actually the only negative aspect about the game that I found, which is while you can select a wide variety of brush sizes, there seems to be no way to have an on screen visual of where the brush is going to paint on the map. This makes it difficult to create precise borders so I would love to see that added in the future. The second one is I would like to see a way to customize cities. Such as ways to set populations like you can with nations, give each one unique colors, maybe even stuff like economic specializations or level of importance on a national level: Village, Hamlet, Towns, Metropolis, Legislative capital, Business capital, etc. Overall a well made game.

As an map painter enjoyer, i can some promise in this, to just paint a world map or specific area just to enjoy see different colors on a map. A map editor would make it much better which is on the roadmap so i will wait for it and hope its good. Only problem is that the colors in the color selection does not always match what you put on the map, they are often much much darker which i hope get fixed.

Solid game, has a lot of promise! Would recommend if you like world building. One quality of life improvement I'd suggest is moving your view around with the middle mouse button instead of being stuck centered on the map.