Foundation is a cozier, more expressive medieval city-builder

I've had Foundation on my wishlist for years, while it was in Early Access, but I never got around to buying it and playing it while it was Early Access. As soon as it released to 1.0, I bought it, but I was still neck deep in Manor Lords, and so it took me a while to put any notable amount of time into the game.

Foundation is certainly a very different kind of game compared to other recent, popular, medieval city builders. Most other medieval city builders over the past decade or so (Banished, Manor Lords, Settlement Survival, and the like) have been "survival city builders", with harsh winters, weather disasters, and lots of other ways for your population to die. Foundation takes a different approach. It doesn't have the survival elements of these other games. There's no harsh winters, no droughts or floods, and no bandits. Foundation feels a lot more like a medieval version of classic city builders such as SimCity or Cities: Skylines, in that the principle challenge is keeping your economy balanced and your population happy. Foundation is a much more cozy game than most of its peers.

Your home; your castle

What Foundation lacks in danger, it makes up for with extensive customization and expressiveness. Many buildings in the game can be customized with modular parts, giving the player a lot of control over the look and feel of your village. Buildings ranging from the Lord's Manor, to churches, to taverns, to market squares, to woodcutter camps, and others all have modular parts that can be freely placed to your heart's content. Most parts have locking points that they will stick to, but you can also freely place these modular parts to create even more unique designs.

Better yet, these modular parts are not purely aesthetic; they have function. For example, adding a Treasury to a Manor will increase the maximum amount of money that you can have on hand at any given time. Adding an Inn extension to a Tavern will give visitors a place to stay and increase their comfort.

Even without placing full sub-buildings, almost all pieces that you add to a building will provide some function or purpose. Adding new rooms or an extra floor to a church or tavern will increase the capacity of villagers that it can serve. Increasing the height of a Watchpost, or adding a new room to it will increase the number of town watchmen that you can assign to provide security and guard patrols. Adding an extra tent to a Woodcutter camp will increase the worker capacity, and adding an extra storage cart will increase the capacity of wood that the camp can store. Many decorative elements will increase the "splendour" of the building, which is used for unlocking higher tier buildings and upgrades. Decorating your little village is actually the primary means of progression through the game!

Better yet, these decorative elements will also often be used by the villagers. People will sit at tables or chairs, take naps under your planted trees, and walls and fences will actually control the flow of traffic through your village. All of this helps to make the town look more lively and organic, and it makes an outdoor courtyard, park, or tavern patio look like a more bustling part of your town.

Tax burden

Don't let the cartoony graphics and focus on cosmetics give you the wrong idea though: Foundation does have plenty of challenge in its own right, even without all the survival elements found in other similar games. Nobody ever dies in Foundation (at least not as far as I've seen). Instead, if someone living in your village doesn't have enough food, or proper housing, or is unhappy for any other reason, they simply leave. As such, all the challenge of the game comes from maintaining happiness and a balanced economy, and the learning curve is surprisingly steep. Some of this challenge is due to the game's robust and complicated economics and logistics, but some of it is due to ass-bad U.I. and poor player feedback.

All buildings in the game have maintenance costs, and you'll likely have to import some supplies from trade routes in order to meet your people's needs. The map is also full of irregularly-shaped regions that must be purchased, and a recurring land tax must be paid for each region you own. You can earn money through taxation or from exporting trade goods. But each trade route can only buy or sell a certain subset of goods, so you may not be able to sell all of the goods for which you have excess supply.

You also have to unlock taxation by building a Tax Office extension to your Manor. The number of tax collectors you can hire depends on the size of your Tax Office, and each Tax Collector can only collect so many taxes per in-game month. So you need to have a sufficiently-sized Tax Office, or build multiple Tax Offices around your town in order to make sure that you collect taxes from everybody who owes. Otherwise, you may find yourself coming up short.

Unfortunately, the game does not do a very good job of telling the player how efficiently your taxation is working. I haven't seen any overlays that show the area of effect of a Tax Office, or that highlights which homes or businesses a given Tax Collector is capable of reaching, or of which homes currently have un-collected taxes, or anything like that which would be useful for troubleshooting low tax income. Since the game doesn't give a whole lot of information about whether your tax collectors are working efficiently or not, it might take some trial-and-error to get your tax-collection optimized. This makes balancing your budget a little bit harder than it probably needs to be.

Snobby neighbors

The greater challenge (for me) comes from Foundation's novel caste system. Your city's residents can be upgraded to higher classes. All residents start as serfs, and can be upgraded to commoners, and then to citizens. There's also other specialized types of villagers, such as your militia, who can be upgraded to soldiers and knights. Different jobs work best with different classes of worker. Most menial labor will require serfs, while skilled jobs will require commoners and citizens, and military jobs and guard duty will require militiamen. A serf won't be able to perform a higher-level job effectively, while a commoner or citizen will be unhappy if assigned to a job that is best suited to a serf.

In addition, higher classes of villager have more needs that must be met to keep them happy, and to prevent them from leaving the village. They'll want higher-level housing, closer to where they work, and with more decorations and beautification. They'll want to live and work within fortifications or along guard patrols in order to feel safe and secure. They'll want higher quality food, clothing, and other goods. And they have greater spiritual and entertainment needs. They also dislike paying taxes a lot more than the serfs do.

So far, keeping commoners and citizens happy has been the greatest source of my struggles, as I've had a very hard time being able to reliably fill and maintain the advanced needs of commoners and citizens. I frequently have commoners and citizens move out of my village, forcing me to have to pay to upgrade another serf in order to fill the now-vacant artisanal job, only to have that promoted serf eventually become unhappy and also leave. This drains my money, slows population growth, and makes it hard to keep all the necessary jobs filled.

I still haven't quite figured out what I'm doing wrong in this regard, and am still experimenting with different strategies for appeasing these higher-caste villagers. I think it's a combination of lack of food production and not having enough high-level housing close to where the commoners and citizens work, which means I need to re-think how I lay out my villages.

Wrenches in the production line

Another underlying cause of my problems might be that production buildings just don't seem to produce enough of certain resources, which forces the creation of many copies of the same building, which requires increasing the population in order to work those buildings, which means I need more room for housing, which means I need to buy more territory, which rapidly increases maintenance costs and leads to less efficiency overall.

At the same time, goods and resources just don't seem to move around very efficiently. Buildings constantly have warnings that they don't have enough raw resources, or that their storage is full. Sometimes, a resource-generating building will say its storage is full, but then its corresponding processing building right next to it will be simultaneously complaining about not having enough raw materials. Nobody bothers to move the resources from the harvester to the processor, and so neither building does anything.

Similarly, I frequently have literally hundreds of units of food stockpiled in my granaries or in the pantries of the production buildings, but all my market stalls are empty, and nobody seems to bother moving food from storage to the markets, and so all my villagers complain about not having enough food, and people start moving out. Having more granaries and more Transporter workers doesn't seem to help. The best I've come up with so far is to add more market stalls, in the hopes that it will be more likely that at least one of those stall workers will have their stall stocked at any given time.

The micro-management just becomes overwhelming and tedious way too quickly, and the U.I. doesn't do a good enough job of showing what the underlying problems are, or how they can be fixed. Worse yet, the 3x speed isn't very fast, and so I don't feel particularly inclined to start a new village to test more optimal strategies, because of how long it takes to get things up and running. The 3x speed is just too slow. This game needs a 5x, or maybe even a 10x speed. Many of my play sessions are spent just waiting for resources to be collected or for large build projects to be completed, and I often don't feel like I even get to play the game, even though it's running for hours. It's a good idea to put on a TV show, football game, movie, or podcast in the background to fill some of this dead time

Possessed by evil spirits

Generally, I've found the game's U.I. to be lacking in many regards. I've already mentioned the lack of feedback for tax-collection, but the game is riddled with similar U.I. problems that make it difficult to notice, diagnose, or rectify problems with my village.

One of the biggest annoyances is that the game does not have a dedicated section of the screen for notifications. Instead, notifications pop up above the building or citizen who is making the request. There's also no audio cue (that I've noticed) for when a notification pops up. Yet there is an odd horn-like sound that I hear periodically, but I have no idea what it is or what it means. It's not the weekly church bells, and it doesn't seem to correspond to any notification that pops up on the screen.

If you don't have the camera pointing in the right direction to see these notifications, you just miss important notifications, tutorial tips, quest offers, new citizens, and so forth. To make matters worse, the camera cannot be zoomed out very far, so the only way to see your whole village is to pan the camera low to the ground, or use the "map view". Even the map view is not ideal, since the game locks the view based on the camera placement on the main view, and there's no way to pan or zoom on the map view. It's just inexcusably bad U.I. design.

Keeping commoners and citizens happy is also harder than it needs to be because the player has no control over where, exactly, houses are built or who lives in them. Instead of placing individual houses, you "paint" (e.g. "zone") residential areas. The villagers will build their own houses in those zones, wherever they want, facing whichever orientation they want. I can't build a medium-quality house next to an artisan workshop, and then assign a specific commoner to live there. I have to just zone housing and hope that the commoner who works in that nearby artisan shop will move in. Worse yet, promoting a citizen always causes them to move out of their home, so even if I promote a villager who lives next to his workplace, he's just going to move out and might end up living too far away.

Fortifications can also be a pain in the ass. Different types of fortifications cannot be combined to create a fully-enclosed fortification. For example, I cant merge a city wall with a castle wall.

Fortifications also cannot be upgraded in place. In order to expand or modify a wall (such as upgrading a wooden wall to a stone wall, you have to tear down the old wall and build the new wall. This can cause every house within the wall to downgrade due to a lack of fortification. If the homes downgrade, they also have to be rebuilt, which takes resources and builders away from other build projects.

There's other bugs in which deleted building modules aren't completely deleted. The footprints of doorways can sometimes remain on the ground, which blocks the placement of other overlapping modules and can cause other problems with the functioning of the building. These stray doorway footprints cannot be deleted. Again, the only way to fix this is to delete the entire building and rebuild it from scratch.

Maybe I should check and see if there's a debug console that would allow me to fix these glitches...

A little more time in the oven?

Foundation is a great ... um ... "foundation" ... for a game. There is a lot to like here. Customizing my castles and churches and so forth is very fun and addicting, and I just love how organic everything looks. In the beginning, everything works really well, and is a lot of fun to play.

As the village grows, however, these nagging U.I. issues and poor player feedback start to pile up. It gets harder and more tedious to keep the city stable, due to the poor optimization of the underlying logistics. Lackluster feedback makes it really hard to specifically diagnose problems, and to determine a viable solution.

Foundation was in Early Access for a long time. I would hate to say that I think it should have stayed in Early Access for a little bit longer in order to iron out some of these U.I. issues and bugs. Hopefully, these sorts of things can be resolved in post-release patches, and Foundation will stand right alongside (but also distinct from) Banished and Manor Lords as a masterpiece in this niche Medieval city-building genre.