After coming off of playing Foundation, and while jonesing for the Manor Lords castle update, I picked up another medieval village-builder: Farthest Frontier. I played this game while it was still technically in Early Access (and cheaper to buy), but its 1.0 release was only a month away, so I was basically playing (and reviewing) the release version. So for once, I'll actually have a review of a game out on the game's release! (Instead of weeks or months later, when everybody has stopped caring).

Farthest Frontier is another city-builder that's been on my radar for a long time, but I always figured that it would have a hard time competing with Manor Lords. Sure enough, I don't think Farthest Frontier is a good as Manor Lords, but it does have a lot of features and ideas that I really like, and which I would love to see ported or adopted into Manor Lords (and to other medieval survival city-builders.

I feel like the winters in Farthest Frontier look worse than they actually are.

Frontier fog

If anything, I think that fans of Banished should really like Farthest Frontier, as it feels very similar to that game. Both are grid-based city-builders, which stubbornly refuse to allow building on diagonals. One of my pet peeves with grid city-builders is when they generate maps that have diagonal features, and allow road-building on diagonals, but do not allow buildings to be placed on diagonals.

Both Banished and Farthest Frontier also put a large emphasis on logistics and trade. They also both have harsh winters -- though I did not find Farthest Frontier's weather or winters to be nearly as threatening as I remember them being in Banished.

Instead, Farthest Frontier plays up its "frontier" nature by including a fog of war that conceals potential threats and hazards. Even though the weather never posed as much of a threat to my village as I expected it to, I always had to be careful about exploring or expanding into the fog of war. You just never know what's out in that fog. Builders, loggers, hunters, or foragers who wander out into unexplored territory may run into bandit camps or wild predatory animals. If you send them out at the wrong time of year, they can also potentially get caught in a summer drought or winter blizzard, which could kill them from dehydration or cold if they can't get back to the village quickly enough.

The fog of war can hide dangerous wild animals or bandit camps.

Bandits and predators can also wander into your village or outposts from the fog of war, and can attack villagers, plunder resources, or damage or destroy buildings. You need to be sure to keep visibility of the perimeter of your village and satellite hamlets, and be prepared to defend it on a moment's notice. Watchtowers are therefore very important, but keeping them staffed takes precious population away from other jobs.

Villages in Farthest Frontier also never feel like they turn into full-blown cities or metropolises, like they can in Banished (and other games). Farthest Frontier actually has a hard cap on how high the population can get. This cap can be configured in the game's options (based on your computer's specs), implying that it's a technical and performance limitation (rather than a stylistic choice), and it defaults to 500 people. So unlike other games, you'll never fill up the map in Farthest Frontier (though you may have satellite villages all over the map). This limit may be a technical concession, but it does also contribute towards the "frontier" feeling of the game.

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.

Foundation is much more colorful and pastoral than other medieval city-builders.

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.

Sub-buildings add additional functionality to a building, and extra rooms may increase their capacity.

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.

All progression is tied to the aesthetic customization of your village.

I've been playing Cities: Skylines for almost 10 years. As soon as I started playing it, I recognized it as the definitive city-building game. It blew its contemporaries, such as SimCity (2013) and Cities XL out of the water. It was a smash success that developed a massive following and spawned 11 full expansions, 4 mini-expansions, 21 asset packs, numerous music packs, and thousands of player-created mods and custom assets.

Creating a sequel to a game that is so beloved and content-rich can be challenging or daunting. Sequels to extensively-expanded games, such as any given entry of The Sims, Civilization, Crusader Kings, World of Warcraft, Rock Band, and so forth, run the extreme risk of feeling bland, empty, and incomplete compared to their content-rich and/or mechanically-complex predecessors. This can leave the sequel feeling underwhelming to long-time audiences, who might return to the older game because they crave the extensive, familiar content. The Sims in particular is infamous for stripping out popular expansion content, and then selling that content back to consumers again (and again) as an expansion pack for the sequel. The most notable example is probably that every Sims game has a "Pets" expansion, because EA could never bite the bullet and just put dogs and cats in the vanilla launch of a sequel.

Sequels to expanded games often strip out popular content to re-sell as expansions.

The sequel to Cities: Skylines is a bit of a mixed bag in this regard. On the one hand, yeah, a lot of content from the original game is absent from the sequel, and the options for what players can build can feel a bit sparse. On the other hand, the vanilla release of Cities: Skylines II retains something from almost every one of the original game's expansions. It even includes content and mechanics that were part of some of the smaller content packs and from popular mods.

The vanilla game includes a day/night cycle that was introduced in the original's After Dark expansion. Some of the economic models of the After Dark and Industries expansions have been expanded in scope to apply to the entire game, thus alleviating some of the need for explicit tourism, leisure, or specialized industry districts. It took the winter themes of Snowfall and fleshed it out into a full seasonal cycle. It includes some of the weather and disaster events from Natural Disasters, as well as some of the early-warning and shelter infrastructure. It includes modular upgrades and customizations to certain buildings and infrastructure, as well as large industrial areas, that fills a similar role as the modular areas of Parklife, Industries, Campus, and Airports (though I'll talk more about this mechanic later in the review). It includes pedestrian roads from Plazas & Promenades. It includes eco-friendly variations of utilities that were part of the Green Cities expansion. And of course, it has road-building and transit-planning tools that largely leave Mass Transit in the dust.

It even includes sports parks and parking lots, which were late DLC content released for the original game in the last couple years. And the road-building and traffic-management tools have much of the functionality from the popular "Road Anarcy" and "Network Extension" mods. And that's to say nothing of all the brand new content, mechanics, and more complicated simulation! So even though it is not as full or content-rich as its predecessor with its double-digit expansions (how could it be?!), Cities: Skylines II is still a fully-featured and content-rich city-builder that can be played for many hours before going stale.

Some content and mechanics from almost every CS1 expansion are included in CS2's launch.

But as I said, there is quite a lot of content from the original game that did not make the cut, and which is sorely missed. For one thing, bicycles and bike lanes aren't in the game at launch, which is a kind of baffling decision (considering this game is developed in Scandinavia, where bicycling is huge). There also aren't any walls or fences or quays, and the tool for disabling zoning on either side of a road is strangely absent. So it's back to using pedestrian paths to remove zoning from arterial roads. Zoning is actually quite a bit of a pain in the ass in the sequel, and I am frequently fighting with the road layout, zoning squares, and pedestrian paths to try to get my city to look the way I want.

If you were particularly fond of leveling up and expanding things like industrial parks, nature preserves, amusement parks, universities, and so forth, then you might be disappointed by their absence. In fact, recreation, leisure, and tourism options are very spares in the sequel, as it lacks the tourism and leisure districts of the After Dark expansion. You also won't be building any small fishing villages, since Sunset Harbor is the one expansion that doesn't have anything being carried over into the sequel.

To its credit, the vanilla release of Cities: Skylines II feels more content rich and mechanically-compelling compared to the vanilla release of the original Cities: Skylines. But there's so much absent from the original game, that I un-install the original from my PC with a degree of trepidation.

There is some content from CS1 that is conspicuously absent.

This week, Colossal Order finally formally announced the anticipated Cities: Skylines 2 and released an official announcement trailer. Unfortunately, the trailer does not have any actual gameplay footage, nor are there any actual in-game screenshots available (that I know of). However, I do want to take some time to go through what is shown in the trailer and make some inferences about what may or may not be in the actual game. Even though the trailer is a pre-rendered cinematic, instead of actual gameplay, we can assume that what is shown in the trailer is intended to represent the actual content of the game -- at least on an abstract level.

First and foremost, here is the trailer itself, in its entirety. I recommend you watch it before reading on.

I will be breaking the trailer down based on 3 criteria. The first is what the narration says, which may provide some hints as to how the game will play. The second is what is actually shown in the trailer. The final category is things that are not included or implied by the trailer.

As my frequent readers probably know, I am a sucker for city-building and village-building games. I buy a few new ones almost every year, and ever since the release of Banished, the medieval village sim has been all the rage. Though it looks like post-apocalyptic settlement builders are also becoming a hot sub-genre -- probably as a result of the popularity of the settlement-building in Fallout 4. Anyway, last year, Chichian encouraged me to try out a then-Early Access title called Settlement Survival. I was hooked on it for a couple months, and then set it aside with the intent to come back to it later. In the meantime, the game saw its official Steam retail release, which encouraged me to go back and give it a second go (and formal review).

Time to plan

Settlement Survival is one of the more addictive and challenging city-builders that I've played. It features a complicated web of production chains and resources, which can be a real challenge to plan and manage. Trying to unlock and use everything in a single village will take a lot of time, effort, and planning.

Settlement Survival provides a handy-dandy timeline in the top right corner of the screen which shows when all the seasons start and end, and which also shows icons for important upcoming events. Everything from the arrival of a merchant ship, to incoming immigrants, and even disasters or other random events will be forecast a whole year in advance. This gives the player plenty of time to plan ahead, and avoids the problem of the player feeling un-prepared to take advantage of an un-expected boon or to mitigate a disaster.

This timeline is the core gimmick of the game, as it enables long-term planning.

There are also random events that are not forecast on the timeline, and they often require that the player have certain resources or tools on-hand. But these are rarely destructive, so worst case is that you miss out on the opportunity to get some free bonus resources (which you may or may not have needed anyway). Nevertheless, it does put a pressure on the player to build up a surplus stockpile of many goods in case one of these events pops up. Tools and beer being the most common items used for such events, based on my experience.

This timeline helps to create some medium and long-term planning and reward structures that really makes the game crazy addictive. There's the short-term goals for things like building the next building. Then there's the medium-term goals like completing the next harvest season. And then there's the longer-term goals like accumulating goods to trade to an incoming merchant ship, or waiting for the next batch of immigrants to give you a labor surplus that can allow you to go on the next wave of building infrastructure. There's always some milestone right over the horizon, and then another right beyond that, and I find myself playing longer than I had planned, and long after I should have gone to bed, because I want to get to that next harvest, or trade opportunity, or make sure that I get through that next disaster.

This also means that random disasters don't feel as annoying because you have plenty of warning that a disaster is coming, and can prepare accordingly. Further, the disasters themselves rarely kill population directly. Rather, they usually impact your resource-generation for a period of time. So most disasters are mitigated simply by stockpiling the affected resource ahead of time.

There are also random events that do not appear on the timeline.

The timeline also discourages save-scumming. Disasters are forecast a whole in-game year ahead of time, so re-loading to before the disaster would require going back more than a whole year. And that might not even necessarily save you, since I've noticed that the disasters still happen at the same time, even if I go back to a save from before the disaster shows up in the timeline. I'm not sure how long in advance they are generated, but the fact that I know that I can't avoid it by simply reloading and re-rolling a die means that I'm more inclined to batten down the hatches and just roll with whatever happens.

The end result is that the gameplay ends up feeling more organic, and the challenge of surviving and growing your fledgling settlement remains relatively high. When I do save-scum, it's usually to undo some mistake that I made, so that I learn from my mistake, fix it and do better; rather than to outright cheat by undoing some random event that the game threw at me.