Should You Play Foundation? A Video Game Review!
78Foundation is an Early Access Medieval City Builder that places a large focus on organic development, monument construction and resource management. And a lot of your time spent in the game is focusing on these areas.
Unlike most city builders, any specialty monuments that you build are hand crafted entirely by you. There are no prefabs. You place how every many pieces you want in however many ways you like to create anywhere from the tiniest of buildings to the largest of colossal structures. It is entirely up to you on how you want to create it. The only limitations are the selection of items you get to place.
Cities in this game will arguable look more organic then in any other city builder with little to no effort. This is because villagers build their own houses and living quarters within the zones that you designate. As well as all the paths and roads in the game are formed by the villagers as they travel from one location to the next. You will never build a house and you will never place a road. All that work is done for you. It creates wonderfully unique cities and villages as the villagers put them together on their own with only a little bit of assistance from yourself.
When it comes to the production of resources, that is where the game falls back into your hand. It is up to you to place work structures such as farms, blacksmiths, storage facilities, wood cutters, and many many more. You then assign jobs and and the workers take over the rest. When a villager goes to choose a location for its house, it will look for something already built that is close, or if possible build its own house near by its work so that it doesn't have to travel as far. It is a really neat mechanic.
When a new villager joins your town, things start out very simple as they they will only require a single food resource to survive and be happy. As time goes on you will have opportunities to promote villagers from newcomer, to Serf, to Commoner, and then to finally Citizen (as the game continues in development, other citizen levels may be added). And with each of these new citizenship levels comes new requirements. Newcomers only require 1 food source, Serfs require a food source and faith which is provided from spending time in a church, Commoners require 2 food sources, faith, upgraded living that they will construct themselves and now clothes as well (no longer will they have to be naked (sub sub comment: villagers arent actually naked up until this point)), and then the rank of Citizen requires 2 food sources, faith, clothes, lvl 2 housing, and now Luxury goods too.
So your probably asking yourself, "why even upgrade the villagers to higher ranks if it means they need more stuff to take care of them when every rank can do any kind of job and the higher the rank you get the more limitations there are on jobs that you can do. Also it costs me money to upgrade them."
Which is a valid point. You definitely don't want to upgrade everyone and you want at the very minimum more serfs then commoners, and more commoners then citizens. But villagers collect these resources by "purchasing" them from markets that you build up and place around the town. Purchasing is in quotes because villagers don't technically have any money of they own. Its just that when an item is collected from a market, you make money and that is your main source of income in the game. And different items grant different amounts of money and higher teir items like clothes and even luxury goods net you the most money. So if you have the resource chains set up and ample enough resources, its better to upgrade villagers that you can so that they can "purchase" more items from the markets and you can make more money to afford more structures as well as afford to maintaining the structures you have already built.
The developers did a fantastic job at implementing many of these features and have many more exciting things coming in the future.
A few issues that come up over time is if a worker already has a home but you change its job, normally it doesn't move to a new house. So you have to go into the house and kick it out so it will find a closer place to live. Otherwise villagers will walk the entire distance of the city just to get to work. So by the time the villager gets to work, its needs require to be filled and it will leave work to go and replenish itself. The other thing that isnt so much of an issue but something I would like to see is more cosmetic items that I can build and place around the village. Designing how everything looks is important for me and one of my favorite parts of this game in particular.
If you like City Builders, it is definitely something worth checking out.
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