It's not a bad game, by any means. It's just at all what was advertised, and needs alot of QoL changes to make it 'good'.

The biggest thing is repetition; every mission is basically the same. Sure, the map changes but it's all cookie-cutter.

Combine that with with game-speed mechanic, and you are often stuck waiting, sometimes for 20+ minutes at a time, just for some arbitrary event to occur so you can continue with the mission.

The game is worth playing, it's just exceptionally *slow*.

First, the positive. I think this game has some beautiful artwork and good music. Also, the menus and UI in general are very well made, imo, and feel smooth to interact with and can be easily navigated and understood with their clear structures. During gameplay, I felt like the scale of the game just felt right. the size of the maps, the size of units and buildings and the max amount of them. I never felt unnecessarily and artificially restricted. I feel like there have been some talented people working on this.

However, there's a lot missing in this game, most of all a unique selling proposition. There is nothing this game has or does that you cannot get in a better form with some other title.

I was disapointed that there are whole sections of buildings that are quasi useless. Decorations serve no purpose, food is only used to boost production in some buildings, should you choose to do so, making the whole food production chain and its buildings optional. I did not expect much, but I thought there would at least be some population or settlement management mechanics. Without anything like that, the only thing you can do is build troops and crush the other player on the map. Which makes it puzzling to me why this game even has a creative mode where you are alone on the map, if there is nothing to do.

But also the military in this is not very deep. There are 7 unit types, which is ok i guess, but they all use the same ressources. So you either get those resources fast or you don't get any troops. There is no possibility to build a mass army of cheap soldiers, if you don't have access to better ressources, and of course also no possibility to build an elite force if you have a prosperous economy and fancy resources.

The campaign is not great, not terrible, but it feels like they put it in after they had already decided what the game is going to be, not that the game would be built around the story, like a user made campaign, where they used the game's existing assets to tell teir own story.

feels like a real settlers again - more skirmish maps needed