It's a lot like Banished, only without the soul-crushing depression.

1200 wheat 20 flour 0 bread "230 villagers are lacking food" 10/10 will simulate Soviet command economy again.

To devs: Make the people blink, maybe??? it'll be a nice touch.

I collected every achievement in this game, but my greatest accomplishment was taxing my people into the ground, building a lavish palace for myself while they lived in shacks, and then pretending to be surprised when they left. At this point, I might as well run for office. 11/10 historical accuracy. Would oppress my own people again.

You know, I didn't think I would stay up until 4am, but now my wife is pissed and all I want to do it play more.

This is a tough one for me to not recommend. It started off fun, and after 11 hours, unlocking most things, a couple maps and a lot of lessons learned (and some googling because this game is basically broken English at best for its tooltips)... I'ts just not anymore. My city was thriving. I didn't know about the treasury because the game never explained you could increase your max gold past 500. So I did, eventually got it up to 2300. I was making all the money in the world, enough for each week to be an increase. But thats there the fun ended. I kept doing what I was doing, managing needs, letting people in, building new things to cover those needs, etc. I went from making 1000 to losing 500 which is to assume my costs increased by 2000 somehow. Losing didn't make it fun, because honestly having a city where I was making all the cash wasn't fun either, because I didn't want to touch it. I didn't want to expand towards iron because I didn't even know WHY my town was the success it was. I tried building 4 more fisheries and guess what that didn't solve? If you guessed the food shortage then you're right. 200 People, 10 gatherers (buildings with 3x people working them each) and another 10 fisheries couldn't sustain people. Never had any fish in my warehouse to do quests and I wasn't even selling. No idea where my bread was going. Production/ consumption changes with every day and there's zero way to see what you're producing/ consuming on average. Save your money for a sale, or when the game gets updated. + Mods (decent ones, pretty good maps) + Camera controls + Visuals + A variety of things to do - Short - Basically every tooltip is wrong or blank - No production/ consumption feedback - Whether you're doing well or not is essentially a coin-flip. - Early access, some things feel incomplete because they are. And due to the ToS I have to recommend based off of how the game is NOW, now what it MIGHT be later. Like, I enjoyed my time. i don't regret it. But I don't see myself playing again now that my experience has soured, my city went from a success to a fail for seemingly no reason (I spent the same amount of hours detailing over everything as I did building it). Pathfinding has some work, balance issues, etc.

You wanna chill? Foundation has it. You wanna build a cute little village with the peoples and the bread and the adorable sheep (that won't crash your computer... spawn as many as you'd like! Take a risk!) and the church for the people to get indoctrinated to so that they can't tell the difference between imagined stories and real atrocities! Buy the game, love the game... eat the game? Cannot eat the game, 10/10 experience regardless.

While the devs have implemented a lot of cool features over the past 6 years, the game is riddled with bugs and crashes regularly still. A lot of features are basic and lacking in depth. Expect a lot of pathing errors while getting frustrated trying to fix them by rebuilding all your buildings. Editing existing buildings still causes crashes way too often. Over my time playing and testing during early access I have not once finished a single town. There was always a major issue preventing me from playing or the save would straight up get corrupted. The game had mod support. Now it doesn't. Lots of features were removed, like legacy churches and statues. I wouldn't be surprised of they ended up being paid dlc. On top of that I cannot condone day 1 dlc in any way. The game needed more time to cook in early access, but I doubt it would be enough with the current dev team. In its current state I can't recommend it.

I got the game when it first released for early access. In the beginning I was enthusiastic about the game. There was a lot of placeholders and incomplete aspects of the game at the time. For example: - No use for leather - no names for the people (woman 864) - buildings being built from the top down instead of the butttom up. ( church cross on top built before anything else ) ( keep roof before the base ) Since then there have been a number of stability patches and Dev blogs explaining what they plan to do, but have still not been done. Man 765 still doesn't know what to do with the leather. And sadly within the Dev Blogs there is no mention about fixing these fundamental laps in content. Instead the focus is on Mods and other content. I find it strange that the course of development after 3 months has not managed to complete the leather production chain, or provide names for the people... The game may one day live up to what was intended.. But I fear this will happen at an incredibly slow pace. There's a lot of talk.. but no action... You know there is a problem when after 3 months: - the player base went from 4,000 to 300 - there has been no completion of current content or introduction of new content. - you have 6 Dev blogs telling you what will be.. without any updates in between. - Forum discussions get locked at an increasing rate I have seen Early Access developers put out updates weekly... I realize not all of them do this.. But after 3 months the only movement on this game has been the exodus of its player base... Come back in a year and perhaps Man 765 will finally know what to do with the leather...

Your people will complain about walking 20 meters from their home to their workplace. So you need to build a marketplace, a church, a well, a housing area and what not every 20 meters or people will leave you. Imagen that, you walk out the door and literally everything you ever need is in reach of 20 meters. 50 years ago people walked 2 kilometers or more to the workplace every day. This ridiculous decision makes your village looks like a total joke. Complete unrealistic bullocks. Also why would you give the player the feature to place every kind of building with rotating feature so you can place it exactly where you want it, but then the houses for your people do not have this feature? That way you lose total control of the layout of your village. You are forced to watch where the "A.I." places those buildings. It just blows my mind how you can create a medioker game. And then butcher that poor little bastard with those terrible decisions.

The game is fun, for the first 5 hours, then it becomes repetitive. I wish the economy was better in the game. Maybe future updates will fix some of the issues

addicting

Don't know what to write for a review. But I just can not stop playing this game. Been a gamer since i was 7 which started with a Commodore 16. Went on to play The Settlers, Civilization and Sim City on my Commodore Amiga 500. I like the tinkering, building, tweaking, buying and selling. Except for Sim City I never liked the military part of these games and that is why i cannot STOP PLAYING FOUNDATION. I do not think this review helps anyone.

Right now, I recommend waiting to buy. I bought because there were great reviews and I'm extrememly disapointed. The mechanics aren't intuitive and essentially most people who didn't buy the kickstarter are lost like me on how to play. Save your money right now. It might get there, but it's not ready for prime time just yet.

A mix of eye candy and heroine, this game will take you away from your everything and transport you to a land where real time is forgotten, along with everything else in your life.

This is it. TL;DR - This game is the next great City Builder. Full explanation: I've been playing city building games since the days of Pharaoh, Caesar, and Sim City/2000. Every year, I pray to the Gods of resource management that a worthy successor to the giants that came before it will come and bless this genre. Despite signs of life, the likes of Cities: Skylines, Urban Empire, and the offshoot genres like Aven Colony and Frostpunk/They Are Billions... nothing has scratched that itch. You're better off playing RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 or trying your best to set your Banished mods up to perfection rather than playing most of the year in year out titles. Tropico has been on a steady spiral downwards of repetitive gameplay saved only by polish since Pirate Cove, and the sleek shine of Anno always falls short of the gamers lofty expectations going in based on my own and friends/family members' experience with the series. Then, I happen upon Foundation. Its like a cross between Caesar meets The Settlers in the best way, with a little Banished thrown in. Even in its unfinished Alpha state, it gives my previous recent favorite, Dawn of Man, a serious run for its marbles. This game will be nothing short of a masterpiece by time of full completion. I don't miss on these things, the last game to get this level of recommendation from me was Mount & Blade: Warband when it first released. True depth and freedom to build, with just the right level of micro and macro management, a great look, and by far the best frame-by-frame building progress I've ever seen... reminding me of what we all hoped Age of Empires 3 would be way back when. Buy it now on discount, or forever regret it and pay full price for it later, but whatever happens... do not miss this game. 10/10, would recommend to a friend. Pros: Wonderful Graphics... A. As aforementioned, best frame-by-frame construction process I've seen to date. Makes watching your hamlet and village stage growing never seem dull even without much going on. B. Combination of the Avatar toons for the townsfolk (slightly cartoonish, but very well done) as well as the on-era portrait work on their information tab gives you a solid picture of who that person really is in a different plane of existence. C. UI/Menu Graphics, Even in its unpolished Alpha state informative and concise, allowing a person to quickly learn the mechanics. Grid-free Building Mechanic - This allows you to really spread out, the paths are where your people walk and feel organic. The whole growth of the game is excellently designed to deliver on the promisedf 'organic growth feeling' Building Customization - Fantastic feature that allows you to customize all major buildings. Each market, church, keep, manor, and wall (as well as many more!) will be tailor made to suit your needs, and can be edited in the future. Again adds to the feeling of natural growth and development. Soundtrack - Clean, crisp, ambient, and immersive. While never taking your breath away, it delivers on background noise to keep your focus where it should be. On growing your Fief! More On UI - Easy to understand, with plenty of small features and intuitive additions that help one go from bumbling around to a master of all one can click in a matter of minutes.. not hours, a friendly, and robust UI that allows the game to feel like the overlays are truly there to help you and not to hold you back. Price - This game could easily charge $45 just for the base. It likely will be that price on completion, not to mention once they start filling out there amazing base game with must-play expansion content. Getting it now, and especially on sale (Got it after tax with soundtrack for ~$26 U.S.) is a true bargain. Neutral: Early Access - This means that although you will be along for the ride and seeing all types of new things come out as you already master the basics in this far from bare-bones but equally far from finished version, it likely is pretty far from a state where a dedicated mod community will take over and turn the base game from masterpiece into Genre Game of the Decade contender. Will have to have patience with some areas where we would like to see overnight improvement, but also get the experience of a random Tuesday turning into "oh look a new Major Foundation update, nice!" day too. Cons: Too Fun - Already, I can feel the jealous glares of Cyberpunk, Valhalla, Rimworld, and many others burning into my soul. They know that me having found this game has reduced their playtime by 1/2 for the forseeable future. MY OWN timelines for finishing said games went from "Eh, a few weeks.. tops." to "Uhhhhhhhh, inevitably. Before the world ends. Well, probably. World sending mixed signals on how long that's gonna be." In Conclusion: You didn't know you needed this game. If you enjoyed Banished, Caesar, Settlers, or any copycats/variations of these titles... This game is for you. This game is for you today, tomorrow and in 3 years. Do not wait. Buy. Do not thank ME, thank the developers and spread the word. That is all. With Love & Regards, -Silent p.s. please do not be mad at me for my name and picture. It's a DotA Smurf (and in my opinion, a funny one. Nothing feels worse than being 25-0 Invoker'd on after thinking "easy mid" by a guy with a Teemo Picture.) I do not play League. It is not a good game. League is as bad of a game as this is good of a game. Ok, good talk.

Is it enjoyable? -Sure Is it worth €29.99? -No

I'm a 60 years young lifelong settler&citybuilder ;) enjoying this time consuming game ... waiting for some interesting add-ons and updates ... from a graphic point of view "foundation" has met my needs ;) yes, i would recommend it.

its a fun game, easily stole 50 hours of my time.. but the game is very limited. with citizens being so heavily dependent on certain items/faith you have to build your city in a certain way.. its not exactly free build. there aren't any random attacks on your village, so there is really no need to build an army. no point in stockpiling anything because your storage fills up so fast, you have to build like 25+ warehouses.. just look ugly. only 4-5 maps to choose from, all are pretty lame if i'm honest.. and the map editor app is by far the hardest creation tool i have ever used.. the town square, it kinda sucks having 30 people all gathered there randomly to have a lunch break.. this game is less like a city building- society constructing game, and more like an ant farm. hard to motivate myself to keep playing. have to get very imaginative and over-the-top immersed. (this game does have map mods you can download, but the creation tool is so hard to use the maps people are making are actually worse than the developer created ones.) i think this game has alot of great potential, this review might be written to early.. but for right now, as i look at my Steam Games library.. this game is hard to click on.

Really fun game, held back by some glaring issues unfortunately. Really there just isn't enough production information given to the player for the player to make informed decisions, and expand without disaster. This leads to the downfall of this game which is an unhappiness downward spiral that strikes your village periodically from out growing your production. It is often impossible to know when this is going to happen until you are in the middle of a shortage and oftentimes when it happens its too late to stop it without scaling EVERYTHING back and really just not having fun for an hour while you scramble to keep your population from leaving. Shortages lead to unhappiness, which leads to villagers leaving. Which leads to more shortages. So here a few suggestions that I have come up with. I hope the developer see this, or if you are reading this review it might help you make a decision on your purchase. (if these issues were solved it would be an INSTANT recommendation by the way.) >It is IMPERATIVE I know a villagers job when they leave! When a villager leaves due to unhappiness their job is vacated. I have markets and production centers all across the map, and it is impossible to track down on my own. If I don't know who left, I don't know what job needs a new villager. This just compounds the problem because the shortage becomes more widespread so unhappiness becomes even more widespread, leaving to more villagers leaving! This turns into a downward spiral of death >I really need a line graph telling me how much of each resource is being consumed and how much is being made. If I know where production is lacking I can expand the correct and expand resource production and prevent the downward spiral. >It would be nice to have a better explanation for why a villager is unfulfilled. Currently my village is in a downward spiral due to lack of clothing, which is surprising considering I have a clothing surplus and all my market stalls are full of clothes, and the market stalls have employees. Clearly there are villagers somewhere who are unable to buy clothes but i don't know who, why, and where. In the same vein I also have a housing crisis but I have tons of land available with high desirability so I don't know why homes aren't being built. I believe it's because of lack of wood, but because i didn't know which villagers left due to unhappiness so I was unaware that my wood production was lacking. >A trade route view would be nice as well. I have a lot of resources and it's impossible to centralize all of them. There are bottlenecks to be found but I have no way of doing that. Again, this just exacerbates the downward spiral. I have the resources, I just don't know where they are held up. Villagers can't access them, they get unhappy, and they leave. The downward spiral continues. >The tutorial leaves a lot to be desired but the game is still in early access so that is understandable. The wiki also doesn't provide much information but that's not the developers fault per say. An expansion of trade with neighboring towns would be great. You can only buy and sell a select few products. Sometimes you can plug a shortage by buying from your neighbors but it seems what you need is never for sale. It also applies for your production as well. Oftentimes when you over produce nobody is buying, although this may be a balance choice by the developers >That being said there are some GREAT things about this game that i love! No grid. The village expands naturally, I don't have to worry about building roads, the Villagers just make foot paths based on high traffic areas. It really is fun to watch your villagers expand organically. I can place buildings on the roads or off to the side, and the villagers will adjust automatically >Large buildings are modular. You can customize a building to look exactly as you want, increasing its height, and how many modules it has. You could make a grand church with 20 bell towers if you want, or a lord's manor with a towering grandhall. >Villagers build their own houses. All you have to do is zone an area and make sure it has the basics. High value buildings increase the desirability surrounding them and you will see bigger more impressive houses closer to the city center and smaller modest homes as you reach the edge of town. Villagers will also connect their homes to the footpath network on their own. So that being said. If the developers give us a better UI this game would be an instant recommendation and definitely the best settlement/town builder around.

Hey, this is a fun game. But after dumping 66 hours into it and utilizing mods, I can say that I feel little reason to come back to it. Its sort of like playing with clay. You can create your own kingdoms that expand throughout a beautiful landscape. But after a certain point, you sort of just want to fucking destroy it. Or have monsters attack or something. Anything, really... But also, I've played with this 'clay' for a long time, soooo I think its worth the buy. As you complete certain tasks, more options and buildings become available. Through these buildings you begin developing supply chains; food, clothing, carpentry, etc.. You designate zones with a paintbrush-style tool that you swathe across your landscape designating resource gathering and residential areas. The residential areas have land value that varies based on what is near it. So, placing a well in an area and then painting over it with residential zoning will attract your villagers to build their homes there. One of my favorite features in this game is how the villagers creates the paths and roads organically. Over time more villagers show up and the economy starts to get complicated and unenjoyable. Without any real guidance about upgrading my treasury, I'm sure I dumped 15 hours (at least) into just fucking around with a city trying to figure out how the hell i got to the next stage. I just straight up started downloading mods and making giant castles. Had some really cool looking kingdoms. I think I've made it to 100 villagers and let me tell you, its stressful. The economy was real jacked up when I played last- trying to get materials to different shops was confusing. Some funny stuff; When you spawn the sheep from the sheep farm you can endlessly spawn them. But after three it captions "Come on, don't abuse". So I do it anywayzzzz There was a bug last time I played I used consistently. It was a military quest that would require you send your military after a rival or something along those lines. You can complete the quest every time just by accepting it and it gives you a free new zone. The U.I. is awful. Ugly, looks like something made in Microsoft Excel. All the menus are just boxes that stack on top of each other. You can move them around but they are cumbersome. At the end of the day, I come back to it to see what updates they've made because the team works hard to keep this game going. I respect that greatly and believe that once you can create rival kingdoms and maybe battle world encounters the game could become one of the best. Its been in early access for years, there are some flaws that should have been addressed by now that are ignored. Regardless, if you like dumping many hours into making a virtual world without the depth of Sims or Simcity but with the beauty and aesthetic of a medieval kingdom, you will love this. But if you want some kind of purpose, you will find that in the end- there wasn't one.

Has potential, but the fact that the housing uses a zoning system like cities skylines ect, you have no control over where houses are built, thus they build them so that they are blocked in and entire parts of your supply chain collapse because the worker cant leave their house. I have had wishlisted for a long time and seen multiple content pushes and cant understand why such a core mechanic hasnt been fixed while rolling out more content. its broken in its current state, sure it will be better once this is fixed also their needs to be a mechanic to build your own paths, its stupid annoying watching people take the long way around when there is a clear path that they wont bother to make, yeah you could forbidden zone it, but that just takes the people you actually want to use the path off it. Other then that its good, if they fix this stuff it will be a good game especially the blocked villagers

If you love sheep milk and hate making clothes you'll love it. There is NO way to get rid of the crap. I built "sheep cheese" (who in their right mind even wants the stuff irl?) factories and nobody wants to buy that crap either (the market people wont even stock the crap to sell). This is a game breaker for me unless I don't want to sell clothes. If I don't want to milk a freakin sheep why do they make you? Sheep milk is the poison pill that some jack-a$$ put in and it ruins the game at least for me. Can't recommend.

Can't play. Don't have OpenGL 4.3

Better than city skylines 2