First and foremost , the game is great, I'd give it a solid 8/10. I really look forward to the game's full release and if you like grand strategy/city builder games you should at least play the demo since it's never far behind the payed version.
That being said, I have some gripes with the game. Let's start with the campaign map and how AI kingdoms interact with eachother outside the players influence. I have never seen an AI kingdom go to war with another AI kingdom, I presume this is because of the AI's reliance on trade? But I've never even seen large Kingdoms or Empires go to war with smaller ones, despite controlling what SHOULD be enough fiefs to not really need trade, due to all the tribute they're collecting. This could just be bad luck but I reckon it should happen more often.
Secondly, troop reinforcements instantly teleport to the army you're reinforcing. It is very annoying to take out an AI's dedecated army only for their garrison to teleport across the entire region instantaneously to reinforce, they should be guarding the city, which leads to my next point: How does a city of 1.2k people have a garrison of 4k? Is the number on the map just the amount of non-combatants a city has or does the AI just spawn them in as a wierd "last-stand" mechanic? Very annoying having to train so many troops only for Aragorn to pull the Legion of the Damned out of his arse.
"But mercenaries, lol" It just feels scummy to me, that I can spawn in a ♥♥♥♥ ton of mercs that suffer none of the drawbacks that a dedicated army suffers and all I have to do is fork over a pittance of coin. When I did use mercs, I felt bad about it because it felt undeserved, like I was putting in little effort and being given a massive army in return, so all you need you're own army for is the weak petty kings that spawn next to you at the start of the game so you can tax you're new regions to pay for mercs (of course the time investment for regions is pretty massive so you'd be better off just selling 10% of everything you produce, and just making sure you have really good production to offset the trade).
I suppose I should talk about regions too. They're pretty slow to develop, which isn't bad, but there really isn't enough manpower which makes no sense at all, and a regions population should contribute to the amount of manpower it has, but it doesn't. Manpower is acquired from title boosts and from the townhall's tier, granted you can only increase a townhall's tier when you reach a specififc population threshold, which maxes out at 9200 pops. Why then does a metropolis of 21k people have the same workforce as one with only 9.2k? Because population is treated only as an arbritrary barrier to upgrading the townhall, as well some small boosts to certain production depending on how much of a certain race is living in the region, like better regional pastures from having a bunch of Tilapi living there. This just sucks, I fought hard and many of my men died, just for one maxxed out building and EVERYTHING else having to go towards keeping the region loyal.
Titles. I like them, I guess? Some of them are nice like Lifegiver boosting health by like +0.12 (which is good enough, kinda?) but then Lord of Kings or whatever it's called, the hardest title to earn by a landslide, only gives like +0.08 happiness? Why? My incentive to overcome the hardest challenge in the game is the exact same reward as far easier challenges like the Despot (default difficulty) Challange? I'm just not even going to bother playing on the hardest difficulty then, because what should've been the main incentive to do so, just sucks.
I think the combat is fine, I have only some small issues like spears being ♥♥♥♥ for cavalry. Do they not know how to crouch a spear on horseback? It was pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ effective at skewering people in real life, not sure why they don't do it in Syx. Maybe a lance will get added to the game?
I think the city building itself is fine, dedicating like 2/3 of my population just to food production kind of sucks but I main humans so I just invest tech points into upgrading my farms and bakeries later on in the game. I will say that tech points can be pretty slow even with humans, but I've come to understand tech advancement is supposed to take years (in game) but I mainly play on custom difficulty so it can be tweaked until you get comfortable.
All of the faction leades say pretty much the same stuff regardless of personality. Sure some words get changed depending on their race but it doesn't really make sense that a Pacifist leader talks all the same ♥♥♥♥ that a Warmongerer does. Pacifist: "I've had enough of you, worm. Submit to my demands and I may just spare you're pathetic life." Doesn't really sound like a pacifist does it?
Cretonians just kind of...suck? They're good at refining and thats about all I would use them for IF I wanted to min max as much as possible. Humans are good at farming too, make for better soldiers and are the only people worth putting in administration/labs/libraries (arguably the most important buildings in the game), paired with dondorians who are great at crafting and mining, love living in the mountains where all the ore is and that's really all you need. If you really wanna min max add some Tilapi FAR away from the human and dondorian houses (murderous ♥♥♥♥♥ elves) to work pastures and wood production, maybe some Amevias to fish and shephard for eggs? But humans can basically make up for everything they lack in race bonuses by investing in tech bonuses at a much faster pace than everyone else. So yeah, #HumanSupremecy.
Map generation could be better. I mean the tile that your city is on, not the map itself. I get why you don't have things generating in a convenient way, but I'm just gonna regen until it eventually does. Maybe I could challenge myself, but it's way more convenient logistically and production-wise if everything I need is close by.
I think the noise made by production buildings should be something that people just kind of get used to over time. It might already be that way, I never really notice because people are usually just upset about not having enough torches or food servings but if that is how it works then just ignore this point.
I'm sure there's some other stuff that could be improved but that's all the things off the top of my head, I'd have to get into another game and find annoying stuff if I wanted to write an even longer review. But again, I think the game is great and I look forward to playing more of it.
