Foundation

uneventfull, boring experience. you constantly wait for few basic materials and plop another building, while being constantly spammed with patching errors.

Good management game if you are into AOE, RimWorld, Prison Architect etc

It a fun game just annoying with the number of bugs i have seen in the first 10 hours
I have had to restart game multiple times while playing to "fix" bugged behavior.
Like granary not collecting resources, leading to full storage at the generator until worker at marked picked up the items. Tried building a new granary to see if it was because i moved the granary, that didn't work. After a restart the new granary started collection resources.
Or an Iron deposit not letting me build it, saying I did not have all requirements met, after the restart I could build it even though i added/changed nothing.

Persistent and long-running bug causes the in-game production (i.e. farms, gatherers, industry, etc) to crater when the game is played at 3speed (of the 1,2,3 speed options available). This is impactful as playing the game at 1speed is only useful for carefully managed events and situations.

If forced to play at 1speed just to avoid the hit to production, it becomes a matter of making some changes to what's happening in the game and then literally walking away from the computer and coming back later just to allow the game mechanics to execute and carry out what you've asked. It's not a matter of unreasonably expecting the game mechanics to move faster and not being a patient player. The 3speed option is there and is perfect for gameplay, but might as well not be an option as choosing it means you're sacrificing the reliability of all of the production/industry you've carefully tailored and which all relies on each other to produce as expected (your gatherers expect refined food while those making refined food expect rustic (simple) food and when one of those pieces glitches because of a speed bug, the whole economy collapses).

TLDR:
Makes the game less a game and more a stop motion movie as you might as well leave and read a book and come back 30 minutes later to see if things went well, all because you're forced to use 1speed just to avoid the glitches that come with 3speed.

Don't know what to write for a review. But I just can not stop playing this game. Been a gamer since i was 7 which started with a Commodore 16.
Went on to play The Settlers, Civilization and Sim City on my Commodore Amiga 500. I like the tinkering, building, tweaking, buying and selling.
Except for Sim City I never liked the military part of these games and that is why i cannot STOP PLAYING FOUNDATION.
I do not think this review helps anyone.

It's a fun and relaxing game.
..until you start going over 300 population, then a combination of bugs and questionable design decisions start that makes it a chore to play.

1. Pathfinding starts to stop working. In the first few hours of the game there's hardly any pathdinfind notifications, then it starts going with like pathfinding issue every 5 seconds. If you look at the destinations, everything looks fine, the arrows that indicate accesibility are white, the locations are being interacted with, but from longer distances, villages are unable to reach them.

2. Wheat Farming output is different on 3x game speed than 1x game speed. This can at least be mitigated by used mods that increase resource outputs.

3. When houses upgrade and downgrade they require to be rebuilt. And house tier depends on who lives in it, serf, commoner or citizen. So is your citizen unhappy and leaves? the house downgrades. You replace him with another citizen and upgrade that other citizen? House upgrades.
Tbh the idea is fine on the paper, the problem is that because of the two bugs above, you will start running into supply chain problems and because of lack specific type of food or a way to access it, a third of my town seems to always be either downgrading or upgrading, which ties up all your builders, so your expansion is slowed down and your build resources, because you need to rebuild every house every other year

Excellent game that's probably best-in-class for city/colony sim type games.

I cannot recommend it at the moment due to a crashing bug with select AMD cards/drivers. Several users with the same AMD hardware experience some sort of VRAM leak that causes the drivers the fail and the PC to crash with only this game.

I'm yet to hear back on bug reports I've submitted regarding this issue with any potential solutions, and the game will not run past 5-10 minutes in its current state for me.

If you have an AMD RX 570 with 8GB VRAM, this game will not work for you. Do not purchase it at this time.

I collected every achievement in this game, but my greatest accomplishment was taxing my people into the ground, building a lavish palace for myself while they lived in shacks, and then pretending to be surprised when they left.

At this point, I might as well run for office.

11/10 historical accuracy. Would oppress my own people again.

Before the 1.0 release, I would have recommended Foundation without a second thought. However, the 1.0 release has removed most of the fun from the game. The resource buildings now take up far too much space without producing enough of the resources to run even a modest village. The "upgraded" decorations and build menu for the monuments is worse than it was before. There is little to no feedback from the game about problems in your village (and even where there is, there is no way to remedy the problem thanks to the games updated mechanics). Resources have to be used to prevent villagers just walking over fields and destroying crops. The audio is broken. The list of problems grows every time I play the game.
I normally would not post a negative review, but this was a great little game before the full release. Sad to see how poorly it has been handled.

I came back to Foundation after a year, and the "fully released" version is terrible compared to the early access that I spent hours playing. The architecture is bland now, the gameplay is boring. The game just lost all of its personality. Most of the mods I've tried don't work. It's glitchier than ever. I used to love this game so much and now they ruined it. It's worse than ever trying to run it on Steam Deck.

Maybe when they get the bugs fixed I will give it another try.

Played 4 towns, ran into numerous issues that prevented me from going on, like error messages when trying to build a manor. I can't find anything in the game challenges that would cause that, so the manor just sits there not being built and I can't progress. I have yet to play a city building game that is not a frustrating mess. I enjoyed the fact that Foundation seemed more casual than the unforgiving Banished, and I found the game play itself to be fun. But the errors are not a fun part of the game, its just frustrating to not be able to progress and waste hours trying to figure out why things aren't working out. That's too much like real life to be fun.

Really like the idea, and I love the way the house building is automatic. However, ran into several issues where the citizens couldn't access their own house. I tried restarting several times and kept having the same issue. They have no path to their house. Anyway, hopefully you can fix the game breaking bugs while adding mod support :)

The new update is very different from the previous game. it would fine fine if it was just the graphics and new content. But they have change the game mechanics and other stuff that makes the game a lot more convoluted. I wish we could revert to before the new update

Building structures from smaller components can be fun, but in the long run i found it tedious. I would love to have predefined blueprints for stuff that you can then modify and expand, but building every manor, keep, tavern etc each time from scratch is not for me.

I will recommend this game once the major bugs have been fixed. As it stands currently, you'll have a hard time growing your city beyond 200 citizens, before the bugs will make everything fall apart.
Otherwise good, relaxing, and fun game.

One of the best city builder games I've played. All the updates have greatly improved the game as well. It's addicting and allows so much freedom to build creatively while still being very functional. I really like being able to modify buildings without having to completely demolish them and rebuild them in a new location. I often have a hard time stopping to go to bed. I always just want to add that one more building or accomplish one more goal. I like the inclusion of military aspects but without having to personally direct battles or race a computer to build your military first before they come to destroy you. It's so relaxed and cozy I could spend all day fixing up my village to be perfect.

This really is a tough one. I like the game, its art style, the organic non-grid building and emerging path structures, the beautifully animated construction phases, the relatively serene and peaceful atmosphere ("relative" because you can "send out your troops", which plays out more like a dice roll with a couple of modifiers applied than a real strategy game, but you can get your pixel soldiers killed)

Then there are the bugs, of which there are plenty, ranging from "bah, 'tis but a flesh wound" to joy-sapping annoyances like the idiotic pathfinding, to reportedly save game breaking errors (which I have frankly not encountered, but the number of bug reports about those is not insignificant).

I don't know whoever thought it was a good idea to "release" this game from early access; I have been playing intermittently for some four or five years in EA, and it feels like another four or five years wouldn't have been too long to iron out at least a couple of the more annoying shortcomings. Who knows if the game would have been ready by 2030, but it certainly was not ready in 2025.

Foundation is playable, and it is beautiful and highly addictive, and it is indeed enjoyable, but calling it a smooth and bug-free "release" version is just pretentious.

Not recommended in 2025 if you are looking for a polished experience – maybe check back in a couple more years – but do give it a try if you are willing to accept that you're but a paying beta tester.

That said – if you'll excuse me, I have a city to look after.

Think i put the most hours into this over any recent game and it's hard for me to like games the older i get (33) as my taste is becoming more niche, so kudos to that.

The game is simple, calm but tickles my ocd with the layout, planning and micromanagement enough to keep me engaged and not stressed. Graphically it's not the typical game i buy, but it's cute.

I had to have a few restarts, because your first villages really are your own tutorial and when you learn what not to do in the next, you can actually concentrate on a good layout.

The progression tree is deep enough that it keeps you wanting to play longer, especially through the different 'arcs' - i'd save i've completed all of those now and can't see myself playing further unless new content was added, like a 4th progession arc or expanding deeper into the ones we already have - management of the towns at 500+ pop can become problematic

overall a really nice, cute little city builder that i'd definitely recommend to people who like the genre - tutorial could be better, i found myself googling a lot/watching youtube videos of other players

This is my first ever game review, because I really want this game to succeed. I found this game to be enchanting and relaxing. It is exactly the kind of game I want to immerse myself into. I made a wonderful coastal village, taking steps slowly to avoid running out of materials, money, and upgrading my housing and needs before progressing with new steps. Then, suddenly, for no reason after a few days of play, all my Builders stopped. All of them. They never returned to work. Unassigning and reassigning did nothing. Firing them all and hiring new builders did nothing. Destroying all the Builder's Offices and setting up just one right next to the build I needed did nothing. Destroying the house that they would not build did nothing. I wasn't having fun anymore - I was playing a simulation of a builders' strike.

I'm not currently recommending the game as it is my opinion the game is entirely too buggy. It's SO buggy that I think it should be in Early Access and not selling as though it's ready for full release. That said, there ARE updates and the Devs appear to be working on the bugs. Though I notice bug fixes often enough seem to result in yet more bugs.

So what are the bugs? Well, for me the most irritating bug is regular game crashes. I don't think I've had a play session yet without at least one crash, and most of them involve 2 or more crashes. Crashes usually close the game and a crash report with the option of reporting it pops up, though I've had a couple of crashes that simply froze the game, and one froze my laptop requiring a reboot. In 80 hours of play time, I'm guessing I have somewhere between 15 and 25 crashes, so a crash roughly every 3-5 hours. On that note, I'm playing on a relatively new (less than 1.5 years old) high end Alienware with all of my drivers/bios updated, so it shouldn't be a computer issue.

A current secondary bug is an NPC pathing error warning that starts in the very early game just after you get your initial camp set up and have built just a couple of the basic early game buildings. The warning states an NPC had their route blocked. The problem is, the NPC never had their route blocked. Once the pathing error starts, it rarely ever goes away for any length of time. The game has an in game event log, and after playing for a few hours that event log is page after page of NPC pathing error warnings.

As for other bugs, just take a look at the Steam discussion boards and you'll see a LOT of bug reports every day. I think that speaks for itself.

Like so many game companies, the Developer/Publisher has already put out a DLC in order to sell more/make more without fixing major bugs, such as the regular game crashes.

As a City builder the game has some aspects I like, but it's not completely unique.

Game graphics are nice, but not necessarily high end, and the game soundtrack is enjoyable to listen to.

Other than that, if you really feel a need to get it, I'd recommend waiting to buy it on sale.

Was looking forward to trying this but it's an automatic pass due to the extremely short zoom level. Can't really play a city builder where I'm only able to see two buildings and three trees on the screen at a time. Oh well, maybe they'll improve that at some point.

Really nice, chill and cute city builder game, except for the city part. When going over 500 inhabitants, which is needed to complete really any challenge, the game starts to chug.

5950x and RTX 3090 won't do me any good, since it's the coding thats the problem (I've seen Unity engine blamed for this). Apparently the game is run single-thread, which on the year of our Lord 2025 is kinda unfathomable . Also i've read around Steam and Discord that with big cities the code starts to fail and all kind of supply chain issues appear, which i've kind of noticed and wondered the reason for.

Wait for optimization before buying.

I've grown up with city builders, I've basically played Settlers, Anno and their siblings all my life. This one is my favorite so and by far.

Will it be yours? That depends on what you like about city builders. Did you play Settlers for the combat? Then no, this one probably isn't for you - there is none. It is perfect for me because I love and live for slow, visible progression.

For me, whether or not a city builder feels good depends on the balance of direct action taken by the player and the resulting NPC activity to be observed. Player action should never have instant results but should trigger a process. That's why Settlers always felt better than Anno to me because I didn't just drop a house there, I told my settlers where to build a house and then I watched them get the materials and build it over a couple of minutes. Settlers 3 and 4 gave us organic dirt path formation outside of player control and Foundation took that idea and perfected it by making the roads "magnetic": You don't have a hundred paths fanning out from a church door. People use existing paths and only branch off from those once it would be too big of a detour for their destination. Build a house on top of a road and watch them trample a new path around it. Demolish a building and watch the grass slowly reclaim the ground where it stood.

Every decision the devs made seems to have been with one goal in mind: make it feel organic and alive.
There is no grid. Houses and roads don't just exist in sterile 90° angles to eachother. Unless you are a complete neat freak and want to micro-manage everything your villagers do, the streets and houses of your towns will be crooked and imperfect. While you have direct control over all trade buildings, churches, manor houses and taverns, you don't directly build residential buildings but you assign residential building *areas* and the villagers decide how and where they build their huts there. You provide better living conditions and then watch villagers upgrade their houses on their own.
You don't need flat ground to build a house, you can build entire towns on a slope.
Combined with the modular building system for most non-residential houses, no two towns look the same.

I've played this game in early access for years and enjoyed it a lot while still waiting for something even better. I was looking forward to Manor Lords because of its realistic and atmospheric look but when it came out, I was disappointed by the instant road mechanic for roads that try so hard to look organic. I realized that early-access-Foundation was better at scratching my itch for visual progression. And when it came out of early access with a bang - overhauled graphics and mechanics - I fell in love with it all over again and stopped waiting for the better city builder to come. Foundation is giving me all I ever wanted out of this genre.

If there were something I would add if I could, dynamic weather and maybe even seasons would be cool. The cosmetic lighting changes and rain/fog are nice but I'd love for them to just happen instead of what is basically a photo mode switch. And imagine how cool it would look for the grass to slowly start peeking through the snow at the end of winter or the leaves turning golden in the fall.
But I realize that these are tall orders, especially for a game that is already ticking all of my hyper-focus boxes. It's my go-to comfort game to relax after a long day at work or to play during phone calls with my dad or while listening to podcasts and audiobooks. You can see at the top how many hours I played Foundation over the past 5 years and with the full release improvements, I don't see myself stopping for another 5.

Got a decent amount of hours in some years ago- perfectly fun little civ-building game. Found at the time that it was a little too easy to enter a death-spiral by promoting too many villagers without having adequate supply of luxury goods up- (then the unhappy ones leave, which cripples supply even more with the worker shortage, driving yet more people away, etc.)
Had more fun on a second game by being stingier and more careful and preserving a stricter hierarchy :')
As of this moment however 18-3-2025 the game is completely unplayable on my computer. Not only will -it- freeze up, so will my entire computer. Cannot recommend.

Most addictive game I've played in a good while. I'm a big fan of city builders and this is up there with my favourites, The free build mechanic for building castles, churches and manors is a lot of fun (although it can be buggy). I've spent the majority of my time just creating different buildings and finding the best locations for them to fit into my city, not having placements on a grid system is so good for building up areas and makes it feel organic as you watch your village turn into a town, then into a city. I've encountered issues with allocating resources/villagers to specific locations and the game can at times be buggy/ feel a bit janky but nothing that has been too off putting, for the most part things have worked as intended. I think I'll probably sink a stupid amount of hours into this and I hope the devs will continue to support it, it's exactly what I've been looking for in a city builder, creative freedom to make exactly what you imagine and management systems that aren't super complicated but aren't shallow as to make the experience boring. Would recommend to anyone looking for a city/town builder with an emphasis on creativity.

It's an actual paradigm shift. I've been waiting for years for a fun "organic" city-builder, and it's finally arrived. It's so good I don't think I can go back any of my old grid-based favorites.

I've played the game for 25 hours and had 1 crash. I lost no progress because auto-save.

Alright, so Foundation is basically what happens when a city-builder decides, "Hey, what if we didn’t do grids?" And honestly? It slaps. Instead of forcing your town into neat little squares, buildings just happen—villagers walk somewhere, roads form naturally, and suddenly you’ve got a whole medieval settlement that looks like an actual village instead of a perfectly optimized spreadsheet.

You start with a handful of peasants, some wood, and a dream. Fast forward a few hours, and you’re managing trade routes, building castles, and wondering why half your villagers refuse to take jobs that are right there. It’s got that perfect mix of relaxing and oh god why is my economy crumbling.

Why It’s Fire:
- No grids, just vibes – Your town grows on its own, so every playthrough feels unique.
- Mild chaos but in a fun way – There are no disasters or invaders, just you trying to make a functioning economy (which is somehow harder).
- Looks amazing – Zoom in and you’ll see villagers actually doing their little tasks. It’s weirdly satisfying.

Why It’s Also Lowkey Janky:
- Late-game kinda falls off – Once you’ve built everything, it’s like, now what? As with a lot of other games.
- Villager AI is... questionable – Sometimes they take the dumbest routes possible or ignore job openings for no reason.

If you like city-builders but want something more organic, Foundation is 100% worth it imo. It’s still getting updates, and even now, it’s one of the best medieval city-builders out there. Super chill, super addicting, and just the right amount of wtf are my villagers doing.

I am in the same boat as many of the other negative reviews for this game.

I really enjoyed the core game play, building up your town is satisfying and engaging but the performance issues have killed this for me. I have a reasonably decent PC (4070Ti) and while it isn't the best of the best I struggle to see why I am having such issues. .
Even with Graphics settings set to their lowest once I cleared about 200-300 population the FPS tanked to the point where having persevered to a decent sized town of about 1k my FPS is between 2 and 15 with major hitches should I try to actually do anything. This leaves the game as less of a city builder and more of a small village sim .
This issue seems well documented online from a quick google and seems to be linked to the game engine.

I have had some of the other issues people have mentioned such as villagers leaving because they are hungry even when my stores and markets are bursting with food but suspect I just have to "get gud".
The above is a real shame as other than that I was having a ball playing this and was in the process of building a suitably silly castle on a nearby hill which I suspect is what the Devs were going after with the modular building design. I have just got bored of doing it in stop-motion.

There is no way this game should use so much CPU and GPU resources. Maxed out single CPU core and GPU usage much higher than it needs to be for a builder game.

Started supporting this game in early access back when the main draw was that it had truly organic path generation. Since then it has grown into a fully fledged unique and dynamic population management game. I loved playing each update and I'm so glad I chose to support its development all those years ago. I never doubted that this would be an amazing game someday.

It's really a great game
It's just missing a way to be able to see the input/output production stats, like what's the production/min or smt
But despite that, that's probably the most enjoyable city builder I ever played

I was loving this game. However, all of the hours i have put into the game have ultimately ended in disappointment. The end game quests all seem to be bugged if not extremely unclear with the win conditions needed. This make all the effort seem like a wast of time. For example, the final quest to win the monastery, " host the abbes," was completed with 130% happiness and still ended in failure despite ONLY listing a requirement of having a happiness of 95% by the end. If there were other conditions to win they were not shown. That's not fun, that's a wast of my time.

I'm hoping for a fix in the future, it really is a wonderful game even without the quests and scenarios.

It's by far my favourite city builder. It has an astonishing mixture of charm, heart, beauty and clever gameplay. The pure freedom and fun of creating naturalistic cities and custom buildings is something that instantly made me feel grid-based citybuilders are outdated.

I also love the tempo of gameplay: It's slow enough for the game to be relaxing and fun, but at the same time there's enough pressure to make me constantly focused on short and long term goals and keep me engaged. "Leisure stress" is the best way to describe it.

Lastly, what deserves a seperate paragraph: It has an absolutely astonishing soundtrack. It's just... Beautiful. I've enjoyed my fair share of semi-authentic medieval folk from various underground music scenes (some more goth or political than others) but some of the tracks from Foundation top even that. It's just worth playing for the OST alone.

Great game, but is currently unplayable due to crashing every 5 minutes

Purchased the game during EA and played it for several hours.
At that point, really enjoyed what was there but wasn't much content.

Came back later after considerable developments had been made.
Game just would not launch.

Searched around for info from the Devs and a response that was effectively 'Works on my machine.'
Cool story. Figured I'd give them the benefit of the doubt.

Figured now that the game has been out for quite a while, the issues have surely been ironed out.
Hit start, not a damn thing happens.
Hit stop. It's been sitting in 'Stopping' status ever since.
Searching around for launching issues shows that this is not an isolated issue.

Great job homie dawg.
Hope it still works on your machine.

Great game if your heating at home is broken. Do not fret! Foundation will make sure that your room stays warm at cozy 74°C.

Or if you love the sound of fighter jets but sadly they never fly through the skies over your house, this game will bring you the authentic sound right into your home!

Serious review: It's such a shame that even without placing the first building, Foundation causes my GPU (RTX 3090) and CPU (Ryzen 9 7900x) to burn up, making the fans roar so loudly it gets annoying. And no, I don't have a bad cooling system or too much dust in my PC since other games run silently and fine. The only solution is to cap the fps at 50 or lower which is unacceptable to me. Changing the settings even to low has no influence whatsoever.

I wish this was better optimized, the game looks great and I really, really would have loved to play this.

Until this gets fixed, I will not buy the game again (refunded it). :(

There is a really, truly, fun, enjoyable game in here somewhere.
Unfortunately it's currently being hampered by 2 major issues, both related to the housing/population aspect, that I cannot even wrap my head around why you would design the way they did:

1. The houses themselves. The way it works is you "paint" an area that you want to have houses in, and your builders will automatically build them within that area. Houses can then be upgraded, both in terms of quality and density, once they meet certain requirements like having nice decorations around, fortifications, etc. Additionally, the quality upgrades require higher status villagers (commoners and citizens respectively) to move in for that upgrade to trigger. This is the reason you upgrade the quality in the first place, as these higher status villagers will not move in to a house until the other requirements for said upgrade are met, meaning they will be homeless until they have somewhere to move in, decreasing happiness and eventually causing them to leave your village altogether. This is a perfectly fine system on its own, but for some reason the developers made it so that if a requirement which was previously met no longer is, the house will downgrade back to its previous form. This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that this bleeds your resources because every time a house downgrades, it for whatever reason needs to be rebuilt and then rebuilt again once the requirements are fulfilled, which is not only frustrating but straight up makes no logical sense??? You're telling me you have to rebuild the entire house, in a worse shape, just because the road outside no longer has stone pavement??? Why not just make the house "inactive" in some way, put a debuff on it, anything but downgrading! However, even with this mechanic everything would be fine if it wasn't for the second major problem:

2. The villagers. God, the villagers are stupid. When they're not busy starving themselves because they don't know how to go to the market to buy food, they like to get themselves stuck in completely open spaces, or inside buildings they chose to enter. And there is no unstuck button, no reset of any kind. They are just there now until they manage to unstuck themselves or until their happiness goes down so much from not having their needs met (since, you know, they're stuck) that they leave your village. And if they happened to be the only commoner/citizen in the house they were living in... you can start to piece together the problem. But even then, even then it wouldn't be so bad if you could just decide yourself where a villager should live. You can pick what villager has what job. But their house? No, they just pick the one closest-ish (but sometimes it truly seems random) to their workplace, assuming it meets their potential requirements. So if you want to move them around you have to first kick them out of their current house, kick out someone else from another house, and hope that that villager occupies the other one's spot first. Oh, and did I mention when you kick a villager out they can take (in-game) days or even weeks to move in somewhere else? These people will straight up choose to be homeless for up to several weeks when there is an open spot in a house near them begging for them to move in. Or worse, sometimes they just don't move in anywhere at all! They are just eternally homeless now while the game tells you "Housing inefficient", even though they have every opportunity to move in somewhere.

I could go on about how the builders will be sitting at their workshop "Waiting for work" when at the same time I have an unfinished building "Waiting for workers" (and yes, it is close enough to them), or the insanely frustrating way they create paths, because you can't actually create your own paths in this game, the villagers make them themselves based on where they walk and how often they use said path. If they stop using it, it fades away with time. A cool mechanic in a game where the AI actually has, you know, intelligence. But in this game it results in ugly, crooked, sometimes strangely impractical paths that you have to forcefully "correct" with the use of objects blocking the way and steering them where you want. Beyond this there are other minor issues, most of them relating to the villagers, like how once you reach ~250 villagers the game starts to get pretty laggy, but I think I'll leave it at that because this ended up being wayyy longer than I had planned.

I really want to like this game, and in many ways I do, but these little frustrating things eventually build up to the point where they can't be ignored and severely impact your enjoyment, so for that reason I cannot recommend it; not until these problems are fixed.

The game was a perfectly balanced city builder UNTIL the high density homes started downgrading...and then upgrading again...and then...well you get it. What a miserable process. Why not just make the high density homes go into disrepair until issue is fixed...the amount of resources wasted because of this "glitch" made me quit playing and I won't go back till they fix it. Really bad QOL guys.

Housing Insufficient. No access to rustic food. No access to refined food. Path blocked. Housing Insufficient.

Just a constant stream of notifications telling you that your villagers aren't happy but the game gives you essentially no insight into why your granaries over here aren't filling up and supplying your markets but the granaries over here are full but no one is taking the food to the market. Don't bother trying to figure out how the bread pipeline works, it won't ever be enough to keep your mills going, your bread supply is always going to be fucked.

I want to like this game, it just makes it too hard to understand what is wrong with your supply lines. If stuff is too far away to be fed by my wheat farms, just tell me.

Why, why, why does no one go to my inns Foundation? They are fully stocked and staffed, and yet I get fucking hundreds of "no entertainment" notifications. Fuck offfff.

The game is fun but i can't recommend at this point i would of even refunded the game if i could. Once i reach about 200 to 300 in population the whole game get's choppy and studdery. I go from being able to run the game on the highest settings and once the chopping starts no matter what setting i put it on it doesn't fix it. Very annoying can't even play it anymore until they figure it out and fix this.

Love this game but since the full release it's been VERY glitchy. The pre-release wasn't nearly this bad.
If you're looking to buy it, wait until it's either on special (by a lot) or has more updates.

A very peaceful and relaxing city builder. Not very challenging (at least on the default rule-set), but highly satisfying. I enjoyed my time with it.

However, It has a large optimization issues. I had to turn off the shadows, because of their significant performance impact (20-50 fps difference). I do believe these will be eventually fixed tho.

The AI pathing in the game is awful, especially when you're required to build fortifications that refuse to snap with gates. Patrols don't patrol intelligently, so you'll have guards all clumped together rather than hitting different areas, and some areas are never patrolled at all. Eventually you end up in the death spiral of citizens leaving that you can't recover from all because the pathing is bad and the upgraded density housing requires patrols. For this supposedly being a relaxed game, I find it anything but. It was in EA forever and even after hitting 1.0 I've had nothing but issues, which makes me not want to play it more often.

After retesting the game systems, I can say Foundation is a joy for the eye, challenging in its economy, but sometimes still frustrating by its polish.

This game is about contemplation, building the exact medieval town you wish for, where you wish for (with a great map design tool).
The ingame systems are going to keep you on your toes and wanting to optimize to avoid a happiness crisis, leaving you with no pops, great balancing overhaul.
However I have encountered one game breaking bug, and many smaller UI/glitch issues. My town island suddenly had its main bridges stop working, even by checking with official discord we could not solve it. Many UIs are not intuitive still even if it is an improvement from the beta. Some monuments cannot be edited as a "out of range" part is no longer visible, hence not deletable.

I would recommend to get this game now regardless, the team is very active and has already pushed 2 patchs in less than a mounth, this game has come a long way and player feedback is being implemented.

The core software is very good and polished. The zoning and building addon features work good on a technical level. However, there are basic issues with the mechanics that prevent me from wanting to play any further. For instance, once a serf tastes a refined food, they'll only want refined food forever and get a negative moodlet. There is no way to leverage rustic food sources into refined food through cooking, you just need to build an entirely new food chain. There's only 3 refined food in the game, so the tree of food options is actually very narrow and limiting. At minimum, being able to control who market stalls sell to would be a boost.

I'd like to see the devs put in some work on game balance and mechanics before I'd consider giving it a try again. There are a lot of really promising elements here.

Fun game with lots of potential. Biggest drawback for me is a bug, where when you play at x3 speed, your efficiency drops. Seems to be known for almost 6 years now, so I dont think it'll be fixed soon. Most noticeable on wheat production. Game breaking in my opinion. If you like to watch paint dry, go ahead and play on x1 speed. I would've refunded if I had known for this bug earlier. Maybe one day they fix it, then I'll change my review as well.

This is a tough review because I really like the game. Unfortunately, the game's current state is abysmal. If this game was still in early access, I would be able to recommend it based on where it is now. However, I am concerned about this games future given the Dev's decision to launch this "1.0" build.

The game-play is fun but all the systems and supply chains are very shallow. The 'rustic food' production, for example, quickly results in spamming the same fishing hut or gatherer hut 10 times, with no real way to improve existing buildings or supply chain. You villagers never stop needing the lower level 'Rustic Food,' so you are stuck adding more and more huts.

The 'monument' buildings are fun at first. It is essentially Lego pieces that you build your big buildings (Church, Castle, Manor, etc) with. The lack of variety of the building blocks quickly becomes apparent though. Especially when you have a larger city and need to have the same monuments multiple times. The 'edit' building mode that you use to make these buildings is the source of many headaches. The mode constantly causes crashes in the middle of building your giant castle that you spend 20+ minutes decorating.

The game's performance is rough. Especially as you start getting to 300+ villagers. With a RTX 4080 and a 7800X3D at 1440p, I am getting sub 50FPS with big frame spikes. The game also randomly pins my CPU and GPU at 100%.

Overall, I would say this game is fun when it works correctly and frustrating most of the time. The Dev's may say it left early access, but the game does not. I do not think this game is currently worth the $35. I have to give this game a 'not recommended' but I hope that the team is able to turn it around. My plan is to revisit this game in April when hopefully some issues are resolved.

Game is unplayable, refuses to start. You see people suggesting removing AV, adding launch options. None of these work consistently and this problem has plagued the game since 2019. Its long since past they find the cause and fix this issue.

Game crashed and all autosaves were somehow rolled back to population ~50 when my town was close to 700. Fun game but I wouldn't risk wasting your time until the devs fix whatever issue caused this. Game is 95% there but the 5% left is extremely important.

Released in 1.0... but it still literally is in early access. Whatever, the game is fine, I guess, but that kind of false advertisement is just bad. stop it