TLDR: Huge micromanaging problems that could be solved with better design.

Okay so let me start of by saying I'm a HUGE fan of games like this. I have a few hundred hours in Banished, my favorite game is Factorio (which is a little similar but not really) and that mars colony game and all kinds of games like this are right up my alley. I took a few months long whack at Dwarf Fortress and when it comes to Steam it will probably be my favorite game.

This game would be GREAT except for a few REALLY really game breaking design problems that I don't think would be that difficult to fix:

1) Citizen AI inventory management: Citizens hold onto the things their working until their inventory is literally full *or they get fired from their current job*. This means VITAL things that don't take up a lot of inventory space like tools and clothes will just sit in a citizens backpack until you manually hunt down and fire that citizen to get them to drop them. This problem is made *worse* with techs like the basket, because having a larger inventory means that you'll have to do even MORE micromanaging of who's hording all the vital resources. That really quickly becomes a chore when you're spreading your people pretty thin.

1b) The inventory tool doesn't count stuff that your citizens are carrying. Your tailor could have 60 clothes in his pockets, but if you're not manually clicking on him to know that, you might think you're about to run out. You have to have a constant mental tally of who's been working on what to know if you're actually about to run out of something or if you just need to fire a citizen to get them to empty their pockets. This also becomes a HUGE chore in a game that should be more about macro managing to really scratch that "Banished" itch.

2) Some numbers just don't make any sense at all. Building a pasture increases the wood cost exponentially when it should be increasing per the perimeter formula. A 8x8ish pasture costs DOUBLE the amount of wood it takes to build a church (80 vs 169). Like come on! Citizens drink a ♥♥♥♥ ton of water and die pretty quickly after they're "thirsty." This is also exacerbated by the "full inventory hoarding" problem. Citizens don't care if they're holding the last remaining food or water in the village. They'll happily go rest with it, wander around while their families are dying. The stone lying on the ground will fill up my reserves pretty fast, but a quarry is REALLY really slow. If it takes 1 person to mine 80 stone of the ground in a day, why do they only generate about 10 from a quarry in a day? Why do I have a third of my village foraging for herbs but I'm still constantly out? There's NO WAY I'm sinking 4 points into getting the herb seed.

3) The research and proficiency systems are pretty bad. I really appreciate the effort of taking Banished's system and adding whole new systems to it. That's a fantastic concept for this game and I'm happy to see that someone picked up where Banished left off. It's a really good attempt, but taking the "points to research the next thing increase exponentially forever" instead of "everything has a set amount of points that they need to be researched" approach is really quite bad. If you wasted your first few points exploring industries that don't turn out to be super necessary for you, you are in a HUGE DEEP HOLE when it comes to waiting for the later points to trickle in. Thinking that the points just got slower and slower forever really killed my drive to play the game. It just becomes so much more waiting than it needs to be. The "School development points +100%" tech straight up doesn't work. My schools still outputted 20 per tick. Not really sure what paper did. I didn't notice a change in my labs output. The only thing that made it go faster was building more labs and sinking even more people into research. This is really not sustainable because, as I said, the costs to research the next thing just keep going up and up forever.

4) Micromanaging production problems: Instead of butchers just working with whatever meat you have, you have to manually select the exact product they can work with, wait until that meat is used up, then manually select the next meat they can work with. You can't queue production orders or give them multiple acceptable meats to work with, so when your hunters bring in a bunch of different types of meat, you can only butcher them one at a time. You have to literally micromanage your butchery or else it'll just sit there doing nothing. Game dev: PLEASE JUST COPY FROM DWARF FORTRESS. Production orders are orders of magnitude less micromanagey and really take away from the "chore"y-ness of the game. All industries would benefit from a production order system, but the Butchery is particularly bad without one.

5) Small one, but builders work on roads LAST. They'll build every other possible thing before finally getting around to the roads. Kinda dumb because building the roads first would make building everything else first faster, thus wasting less time. If you want them to manually do that, you have to set up where you want your buildings to go, build the roads around them, then pause the buildings so they build the road first. Kinda wonky. Also you can't prioritize roads so that's the only workaround if you want to build em.

6) TOOLTIPS! The game has some but more would be fantastic. The game has a lot of "hidden" information that you just have to kinda figure out yourself which really feels bad. Like the roads thing in point 5. Do houses burn coal first or chopped wood first? What are farmers actually doing between planting and harvesting? Do them whacking at the field actually make it more fertile? Why are my hunters looking for footprints while they're literally standing next to a bunch of animals? When is an animal "mine" so I can put it in a pasture? Does food spoil? I have 2K fish, should I sell it? Does light actually do anything other than look cool? Why are 10 year olds claiming houses by themselves? WHY ARE MY PEOPLE "messing around" WHEN THERE IS REALLY IMPORTANT STUFF FOR THEM TO DO THAT THEY REALLY SHOULD BE DOING?!? PEOPLE ARE STARVING TO DEATH JEBADIAH, PLEASE HUNT. I don't have a definitive answer to any of these questions. Just guesses.

7) Why don't river merchants have any coins? It's not a huge deal, you can still build up wealth with resources, but it's just slightly annoying and immersion breaking lol. All it does is force you to do the math to figure out your own wealth (thus adding to the micromanaging chore aspect of the game.)

HUGE potential. Again, I'm really happy to see someone picked up Banished and took another whack at it, but there are a lot of really unfun design choices that have been made. If the devs took this list and ran with it, this would easily become my favorite game on Steam.