Weregamer's Game Musings

First a disclaimer. The tiny company developing this game is made up of friends and former coworkers, so I can't claim a total lack of bias. That said, I have a very positive impression of what this game will be like when it's done. At first blush it seems like a prettier, less intense version of Dwarf Fortress, and I think that's a fair comparison but not a fair accusation. As the blurb I saw in the stream store mentions, there's less of an overarching story and a lot more room for personalization. Their main goal is that you can grow your own personalized town, with as distinctive a visual and mechanical identity as you want to put effort into. In Dwarf Fortress there is a constant stream of events - attacks, natural disasters, the arrival of immigrants with special demands. You rarely have any time to just enjoy building your town. In Stonehearth, even if you play in the normal mode instead of the sandbox one, the number and pacing of such things is much less of...

This one is a credible improvement in the series, even if the hyped up ship model building doesn't mean much (the actual ship design process and results are really unchanged from galciv 2, what's new there are just more cosmetic options). The big meaningful changes are in the planetary economic model. Buildings are located in specific hexes on a randomized planet map, with adjacency bonuses that make clusters of related buildings important. Since even excellent planets have more unusable than usable hexes, it adds real depth to growth planning. And shifting all building bonuses to percentages makes the base population more important and population buildings as desirable as production or research or money. The new scheme for shipyards is also a good idea that meshes well with the revised planetary economics, and the full integration of racial tech tech trees and the cleaned up alignment system work really well. All that said, the game pace and flow are pretty similar to the...