What's up Gamers !
A Week ago i saw this game being launched on Steam, and the fact that it is Strategy Simulation game was enough to grab my attention... and my wallet.
I will bring my first impressions and gameplay so you can see for yourself what i am talking about !
Let's start knowing a little bit what the game is about.
Patron
Patron is a city builder, strategy simulation game. Here you will have to develop your city from scratch. This is all about management. Keep your city running, pay attention on the resources and the citizen needs. As your city grows, it will be more challenging and hard to control everything. If you ever played CAESAR or PHARAOH, this is very simmilar. Of course the graphics are much better, but game is still under development, and i expect to see a lot of improvement from now on.
Geting Started
The game still does not have a campaing or history mode. So far it is all about skirmish/sandbox mode.
You will choose your banner, select one of the listed maps, each one have a base difficulty level and resources quantity. Easier maps will have Aboudant quantity of resources, and harder maps, much less. Inside each map, before starting you can also change the cenario parameters, from Available Resources, disasters, random event frequency and even your start population. So as you improve on the game, you can create much harder challenged for you. its cool.
Starting From Scratch
You will start with your city hall, some citizens and nothing more.
The game will get you through a mini tutorial, but its kinda blury here. You will end up finding for yourself much better ways to start. Producing food, housing and fire is a must do in order to keep your citizens alive. they die VERY fast if they get hungry, or homeless.
Housing
This is one of the 3 main pilars in this game. Without houses, you citizen will leave. Geting new citizens its pretty hard, so you must keep an eye on available house spots. If you are reaching maximum capacity, you should build more houses. Houses will consume Firewood in order to produce heat. Without firewood houses are useless. And this take us to the next production step...
Firewood
To produce firewood, you will need Lumber ! So you will also need a Forester, this building will grow and cut trees around it. Selecting the correct place to built it will increase the productivity rate. So you must pay attention to it. If you run out of Lumber, will you run out of Firewood and people will die/leave. So you always must be focussed in here, since you can run out of it pretty fast.
Food
On the beggining you will need a Gatherer Shelter, designed workers will start harvesting around, looking for fruits, mushrooms, eggs and what ever they can find. This is your primary food source on the begining, but soon you will unlock Fisherman's hut, farms and much more. This is the hardest resource to control, sometimes during cold times, your production will be really low, and if you dont have enough stocked for winter, wou will definitely fail the cenario. I end up finding that rushing to unlock the Wheat farm is the safest way to go.
Managing your Workers
You must control, and you can set exactly who should be working where. You can manage it by directly clicking on the desired building or you can do it by accessing the Jobs Board by pressing (J). The first Workers you see, are the ones who will be building strucutres and gathering resources. Those you must keep unnasigned, if you dont have enough gree workers you will get a hint to free some of them. This can easly screw with your village. If you dont have enough People on Carrier, your products and food wont reach the Depot, therefore they cannot be used. So as you can see.. it is all about management.
The Docks
Docks are very usefull, you can simply buy/sell any resource you need. Geting a good Luxury chain production will make you be able to sell for great profits, in order to buy good quantity of any kind of resources. I usually sell Beer, and buy what ever i need in order to keep alive and evolving. Upgrading your docks will make you able to transport more resources, and faster ! So you definitely should build one asap.
What is ahead ?
Your citizens will always be wanting something new ! As soons as you give them every single one of their current needs, they will ask for more ! At first they will ask for food, house and fire. Sooner then you expect you will need start producing some Peasent Luxury Goods. I decided to go with 2 of them, clothes and furnitures. So as you can expect, these are 2 new production chains to manage.
You will end up with about 10-12 production chains, and this is where things get fun. You fix one, and break another. You will need more workers everytime, and this is dangerous. A simple mistake can break one of these chains, and people will lack stuffs, they will leave your village, and you might get fucked up with all your production chains, leading it to a very fast Game Over.
Upgrades
The ammount of available upgrades are scary. there is about 20x more upgrades then you can see in the following picture..
From building unlock upgrades, to bonus productions and special houses/road, you will have to choose what best suits you according to your plan. So far i have been focussing on unlocking the carpentry hut, this will unlock the Great Hall, which gives me he hability to plant wheat. After this im pretty much safe with food. The last upgrade available is the Patron mansion. Right now this is my goal in this game. its pretty hard to reach this point, ive being dying before i can reach 1/5 of the upgrades lol.
Final Thought and Gameplay
This game got some very cool graphics. The soundtracks are not special, but is exaclty what you are looking for in this kind of game. Peacefull and realxing music.
If you enjoy this kind of Simullation games, you will probably love this one. It won't put you into pressure. Just relax and play. Failed ? no problem just try again. It's the kind of game where you will do better and far each time you play it. I am sure there is a lot to come still and i will be watching the upcomming upgrades.
Hope you guys enjoy this new game !
It is available in steam for about $ 7.00. In my opinnion.. totally worth it !
image sources : all images were taken by me ingame.
thumbnail : source
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