Management / Sim Foundation - Medieval city builder

[4249]

https://af.gog.com/game/foundation?as=1649904300



This thing popped up and it sounds kinda interesting.

FOUNDATION : A NEW ERA OF ORGANIC CITY-BUILDING SIMULATION!
Foundation is a grid-less, sprawling medieval city building simulation with a heavy focus on organic development, monument construction and resource management.

In this strategy/city-builder/economy simulation game, players must create a prosperous settlement as the newly appointed lord of a region untouched by man.

Setting to redefine the city-builder genre, Foundation puts the emphasis on the organic aspects of urbanism in the cities of old, powered by Polymorph Games’ proprietary game engine, Hurricane, which allows for full mod support and is optimized for the thousands of moving parts that come with building humongous cities.

Among other things, the engine provides the player with robust building tools, to create countless unique monuments that will seamlessly integrate into your settlement.

With medieval architecture and urbanism at the forefront of its design, Foundation’s vision is to allow players to recreate cities of that period as they envision them or even as they really were.

FEATURES
ORGANIC URBANISM OF THE MEDIEVAL ERA: Create gridless and organically sprawling cities that grow like actual medieval cities.

LAY THE FOUNDATION, THRIVE, AND PROSPER: Weave a complex web of interactions between inhabitants needs and skills, resource availability, extraction, and goods production.

UNIQUE MONUMENT CREATION TOOL: Craft and design original free-form monuments like Abbeys, Churches, Lord Manors, Castles and more, with our proprietary node-based tool.

FULL MODDING SUPPORT FOR THE COMMUNITY: Share characters, buildings, quests, and even real topographies through our mod-support tool and be part of the Foundation community.

POWERED BY OUR OWN HURRICANE GAME ENGINE: Experience a city-building game engineered with a dedicated, tailor-made, in-house engine built with our unique vision in mind.

ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK BY PARADOX VETERANS: Immerse yourself in our blissful soundtrack by talented composers who worked on titles such as Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV!

 

[Snorkack]

Does it also have a gameplay? Is there a challenge to it?

 

[4249]

I've not bought this, so I might be talking out of my ass, but at the moment I've understood it's very light on content, since it's still in early access.

The KS campaign seems to have a bit more info on the actual gameplay plans.

In Foundation, you start by selecting an area to settle your newly appointed estate in a land untouched by man.

Just like players have come to expect from staple games of the city-building genre, your starting area determines the resources available to you.

On the other hand, your settlers have skills that can be used to extract or transform resources, create buildings, etc. They also have needs that must be satisfied in order for them to level up their skills.

Thirdly, players must unlock and build different buildings to either meet their inhabitants needs, like lodging, or to be able to transform resources, like with the windmill.

A big part of the game is juggling this precarious equilibrium between skills, needs, resources availability, building requirements, and resource transformation. Players who are experienced with the Anno (Dawn of discovery) series will feel right at home.

Foundation is meant to be played as Sandbox game with procedurally generated quests and narrative-driven events punctuating the experience. This style of gameplay will be familiar to players of the Paradox Interactive titles, such as the Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis series.

Player’s actions and decisions must carry weight and consequences. As such, one of our main ways to deliver this in Foundation is the Lord Traits mechanic. Depending on the kind of buildings you construct and how you react to events, your relationship with the Clergy, the Nobility, and the Peasantry will be affected.

For example, having a high Piety score could unlock new buildings like the winery, the monastery, or the cheese maker while a high Fealty score would allow you to build keeps, dungeons, and execution stands.

 

[Nekot-The-Brave]

So I've played a few hours in this game. The reviews compared it to Banished, but it's not like that. It's more like a less constrained anno game that's set in the medieval timeframe.

The maps aren't randomly generated yet, but there's a good variety with a lot of land that you can use. There's 5 so far, Hills, Valley, Fluvial, Coastal, and Mountains. Each has their own unique characteristics. I'd suggest using one of the more flat maps because the buildings kinda just clip into the ground otherwise.

You start out with 8 settlers (who, at least as far as I can tell, don't die) and attempt to learn the mechanics. At the start, there's several 'plots' of land that you can choose to start from and the beginning of the game is a bit more railroaded than I was expecting (even though there's no prompts or anything, it's just that there's clearly only one way to start off in regards to build orders), but it opens up as you start to pick up other adjacent plots of land to inhabit. You then build production buildings and generate different resources that your citizens use. Over time they get upgraded to another level (commoner, serf, citizen, etc.) if you meet their needs.

The building is alright, it's less constrained like I said earlier, buildings can be placed almost anywhere and rotated, and you 'zone' out several things, like extraction zones, residential (no, you don't place individual buildings), and farmland. A unique feature of this game are 'monuments' which are special (and required) buildings that you can customize and upgrade over time (by adding additional parts to the buildings in any ways that you want to); such as a Church, a Market, a Manor, Keep, Bridge, etc. You can add walls and other decorations to your village, for the most part they don't seem to do anything (as of what I've seen) other than make your village look like a time period set piece.

The game goes at a slow pace, mainly in the fact that expansion is controlled to just 'immigrants' which in batches of 2 each week of the game. Traders (which are essential for income and buying supplies) come each week as well and visit 'warehouses' that you build and stock supplies at. The traders only buy and sell specific supplies so there's only a set amount of stuff that you can sell/buy each time they come around.

There's a small quest system that's tied into the pseudo tech tree, every so often you're given opportunities to send supplies (or join campaigns if you have a keep and soldiers assigned) to a specific faction (yourself, for 'labour'; your king, for 'influence'; the clergy, for 'faith (I think)'). When you gain points for these factions you'll be able to unlock some additional buildings if you meet the other requirements (citizen count and 'splendor', which is generated by building stuff in the monuments).

The game has a clear lack of polish, but it functions just fine. I only experienced one crash and nothing seemed to be completely broken or anything. There's a lot of placeholder names for a lot of stuff that are still in the game, like '#img3' or whatever, but it doesn't really matter overall.

If this interests you, then you should try out the game.