Foundation

Just buy it dude seriously, best purchase ever. Wonderful graphics, peaceful or challenging gameplay depending on what you want, no playthrough feels the same. 12/10 <3

Much of this game is pretty good. But, portions of it are tedious. Specifically, the part where you build large structures. This requires you to include small sections (ie indoor rooms, entrance doors, etc.), totally worthless and micro-playing.

So far its fairly enjoyable. But, It can get a bit annoying that somethings are not explained very well (or at all) like for instance why the visitors are annoyed at my fair and other such tasks. Also annoying can be that you cant order materials to be moved around in specific amounts between storage and production buildings (actually this is super annoying)

Very immersive, I just lose track of time playing this game! It's quite challenging, some things are quite hard to figure out. I would like a little more explanation for things in the help menu... for e.g- sometimes quests require you to have a lot of things in storage and i can never accumulate as much as is required because it keeps getting taken out of storage!! it would be great to be able to stop items being taken out of storage when you're trying to save them up (or maybe you can and I just haven't figured it out yet).... But its all part of the fun!! Would definitely recommend it if you like this kind of game, village building and resource management etc.

Problems:
- Pathing. Villager can't leave his house to get work.
- Escape button doesn't close every menu. Inconsistent.
- Clicking on a building doesn't close the previous building. You get ugly overlapped windows.
- I can't assign right mouse button to pan.
- There's no easy way to say you've finished painting. You have to open some other window then close it again to get the paintbrush to go away.
- Photo tool has no way way to exclude game logo. Tiny Glade does this much better.

Loved it until it actually released... now it's unplayable due to poor optimization. WTF. Will remove this if they fix it.

I like a lot about the game, but I am unable to interact with the Map types and seed at the very beginning of the game; I am stuck on coastal maps. I have waited for patches to fix this issue (this has existed since early access for me) and it is still not resolved. When the very first screen doesn't work, it is very hard to endorse a game.

There's so much I want to like about this game. In many respects it is a good game, too - a clever take on the town builder, decently executed *for the most part*.

That's the problem, in the end. It's like...90% there, but the remaining 10% aren't minor issues that you can round up from. Pathing is a chore; farming and crop-growing and resource collecting is a huge chore, especially given the bugs related to harvesting; building placement is a chore (including bridges; see pathing); patrols and watchtowers are a chore, and you'll get notifications that a home is downgrading when patrol meters dip to like 99%. Certain aspects of the UI just don't give you the information you need. And ultimately, for a game that's billed in part on making it feel like town growth can be organic (think SimCity) as well as controlled - you really don't get the organic growth since you have to micromanage so much in light of the issues, and you don't have the tools you need to micromanage effectively.

When Foundation launched after years of being in EA I was excited - but seeing those Mostly Positive reviews I held back. But it had like daily patches and fixes rolling out so, I was (and remain) hopeful. Bought it on sale a week or so ago, put in a lot of time to it, and it's just not yet there.

It's an idle game that wants to be more, and as close as it gets to that it doesn't quite land as smoothly as you need it to for full enjoyment.

What can I say the game is fun to play. Your always having something to do. The problem with it is not performance as in Graphics. This game is fun to look at and the amount of detail is great, above most games I ever played. The draw distance is really good. no popping in. However the reason for the thumps down is do to the bugs that do affect the flow of the game. I had a bakery that just stop baking. Even though I had 100 units in the granary. I can see the icon over the building showing that it was lacking flour but I noted that it would flash as if stuck on a loop. I tried moving the building hoping this would reset it and start working. But no such luck. When the game works its great. I'll try restarting the game and maybe even destroying the building and placing a new one.

Very peaceful and laid back feel at slower speeds. You can always pause the game speed if you get overwhelmed. Resource management is tricky, documentation could be more detailed. The balance of some resources and consumption feels off at times but overall it's pretty good. I have a bunch of things i'd like to see but maybe It could all be modded since that's supported. Great game and highly enjoyable overall.

Crashes over and over. Would like refund please.

After 700 hours, I regret my purhase.

The game I was promised is not the game I currently play. This is not the organic freeform builder it was advertised as. The game has had several radical alterations in mechanics through the course of it's development and it now plays like a themed city builder. I cannot build the city I want with interconnected mechanics. I am forced to follow a certain playstyle that prevents creative freedom. Combine that with some annoyingly persistent bugs and I'm just not going to invest anymore time.

The recommended system requirement in the steam page is the minimum requirement. The game struggle to run right of the bat without heavy graphic adjustment and it get worse more down the line, it hog ram and gpu vram more than it should be for the level of details it offers. Discord support filled with white knights rather than the cs or devs the later at most will give you template answers, and they will try to blame on your rig even though it pass the requirement they put themselves here. If most recent unoptimized UE game releases can run better than this surely we know where the problem is, but alas its hard being addressed while being the voice of minority.

The game is good, but the games lags a lot, I'm playing on a low setting with 60fps, with a rtx 3070 ti graphics card, it's so laggy, especially when you have lots of buildings that already build, it lacks of optimization, so I don't recommend this game for those who have a lower graphics card than mine

This is an excellent, excellent game as far as city builders go. It's extremely complex and detailed, and there are tons of options for growth and customization.

I do feel, however, that even on the easiest mode, it's a little difficult. It's very hard to keep the citizens happy- some of them depend on happiness from 'events', but these are randomly (and sometimes sparsely) offered to you to attempt. Another huge hurdle comes in the form of tools; you start the game with a fixed amount, and it's super challenging to get to the point where you can produce your own or purchase them from trade routes. It creates a big bottleneck in the city's growth. All in all, very fun! 9/10!

Playing this game sometimes feels like leading a very skittish horse somewhere, having the horse shy and run away, and then having to run after it and start the journey over again.

It's fun. I like the game. But some of these bugs are absurd. Sometimes they would be bad enough to where I can't finish a scenario. For instance, when doing the mission where I'm trying to have a prosperous priory, as I'm adding brothers and sisters to the monastary, I will get this bug where the unemployed number at the top doesn't change, which eventually reaches a point where there's so many unemployed villagers (that are assigned, for a certainty) that I stop getting immigrants, so I can't progress. Another killer bug is that bridges sometimes build slightly underground so villagers can't use them. Whether they'll work or not feels completely arbitrary, which is annoying because they're very expensive to build, and if you're like me and thought it would be cool to start on an island in the middle of a river and then expand over the other side of the river, you don't have access to immigrants if you don't have a working bridge. The 3x speed bug is annoying, too.

I've been following this game for years and only recently got a chance to play it, and it's downright frustrating to me that it's being such a problem so many years later. Especially bugs like that that can ruin a game. You have to play the game in a specific way in order to make it work for you, which feels counterintuitive to all the advertisements that seem to push its creativity and freedom. I cannot, in good faith, recommend this game in its current state. I'm still going to play it, because I'm way past the refund point now and have finally figured out how to play in such a way that I don't spook the horse. But for 35 dollars, I cannot recommend a game that only works half the time.

Loaded into my first game and needed to have 5 stone to make a well so my villagers could have water. However, there was no stone in the area for me to even extract. I could SEE stone however it was out of bounds. Found a Steam discussion from 2020 with people having the same exact issue. A waste of time. I don't even want to bother remaking a new settlement just for this issue to happen again. Not recommended.

It's fantastic. Been yearning for something like this for ages, since Settlers 6. Later Settlers weren't the same. Manor Lords is a good idea, but not nowhere near as streamlined as this. There's Dawn of Man, but it's not really all that fun. There's Cities XL, but that's something else than this.

It's the best casual addictive city builder I've tried to date.
Has that constant progression, that feels rewarding. And a challenge to manage well.

Cons:
There's some tiny glitches, that need to be smoothed out. Nothing major, barely worth mentioning.
Lacks some QoL here and there, to mitigate micro management and looking for needles in a haystack.
The performance... GPU usage is through the roof. Shadows and GI especially. It's just atrocious, for what you're seeing on screen. Had to turn off shadows and GI entirely, to maintain 117 fps @ 3440x1440, on a 5070 Ti.

It`s a relaxing city builder. I like it. The game could use a bit of polish, but considering the price, you get a lot of value for your money.

Super boring, tons of better options out there.

the best city builder I played, it checks all the right boxes for me and its setting, art direction and flexibility fuel my creativity. After playing countless hours the EA version I was a little sceptical with all the changes of 1.0, but even if it will get me some time to get accustom I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised. The game has a relative small modding scene atm, but it will improve as mods get ported from their EA version.

If your willing to commit the time to a large city it is a fun game once you get the population managment down

Coziest city builder I ever did play. The modular building and wayfinding of the citizens is super satisfying. This game is a gem. High;y recomend if you like a chill city builder with resource management.

Fun game, honestly a good buy, bought it before the big update, but needs a LOT of optimization, complete ram hog, and for some reason tanks my internet speed, please devs, focus on optimization, besides that a pretty good game,

I wanted to like the game, I really did. I am huge fan of ANNO and Settlers series so I should have been ideal audience for this game and yet, here I am writing negative review.

This game is in many ways obviously inspired by ANNO (and there is nothing wrong with that), except worse in every single one. Don’t get me wrong, there are some nice ideas, like painting the areas of interest and modular monument building, free placement of building instead of grid to create more organic towns. However, none of these are well implemented and at times these are more frustrating than fun, even though some of the ideas themself are really good.

On top of it, the joy when something is finally working the way you imagined it is missing. Just like the satisfaction of watching your town working like well-oiled machine because it never happens. None of this happens for me in Foundation and it as a lot to do with control.

The so important information and control over your production chains is completely missing here. Something is not happening and you have no idea why and how to fix it. Why are workers and builders not fetching the resources, when there is plenty of it? Why this worker cannot find the way when there is clearly a bridge? Why some granaries are working fine and some are not? Logistic chains are not working well and you lack information to optimize based on production vs. demand. But what is the city builder game without the proper logistics you ask? It is just tedious, frustrating and INCREDIBLY slow, even on 3x time.

Not to be only negative, it is quite nice to look at although the inability to at least slightly modify terrain sometimes leads to absurdly looking buildings standing in 45° hill.

If they ever fix these major issues, I would be willing to give it another go but, in this state, stay away.

This game is like a super long version of Age of Empires with 100 less lumberjacks, and more just traffic to various buildings.
its actually more like Cities Skyline or a flat version of The Universim.
Actually... it's just like the Universim, but on flat land...
Prepare to build a huge Kingdom, with intricate complexities in supply, demand of various resources.
I suprisingly don't suck that bad on my 2nd attempt at playing, but i am a bit disappointed with the pacing.,

maybe im slow because i suck, but it takes a long time to get anywhere in this game.
dont expect to raise a busting kingdom on any New Game. it takes time. i started new today, and been develping all day, and still havent even built a castle yet... 12 hours of playing, i still havent build a castle. In Age of Empires, that would be crazy. but this isnt Age of Empires.
Its Cities Skylines meets Universim, in the Medieval Ages

I really love this game and I love the newest update. I cannot, at this time, recommend this game.

Unfortunately, the latest patch has made the game too unstable to play at this time. It just is not playable. Crash to desktop every few minutes.

I hope that a few more updates will fix this so we can all enjoy this excellent offering. I would love to update my recommendation to thumbs up in the future.

Ok, so.

The game is good, but it COULD be great. I'm hesitating to recommend or not-recommend the game, but while I enjoyed my time on it, I'll likely not play before the next update(s), because of the frustration it induces... and still recommend it.

The obvious pros: the game is cute, it's a city builder, with organic behavior of the citizens. Sound design is excellent. Modular buildings are a GREAT mechanism. Unlock tree is ok even if the system feels a bit artificial (I end up placing like a hundred bushes near the right type of building to unlock things).

After a while unlocking new stuff, seeing my pops and buildings have more requirements, I started to feel something like the fun I felt when I played Caesar III, decades ago... but at a smaller scale, as the game does not seem well optimized, and struggles to run a few hundred citizens.

Aaaand now, here is the issue.

Just like in old games and any good city builder, the mechanisms require you to optimize some stuff, so that your peasant can satisfy their needs, but here it gives you almost no tool to do it properly. The logistics issues are hard to understand and impossible to debug because you can't really control where people will store stuff, where people will sell stuff, you can't prioritize jobs, you can't really steer people to given neighbourhoods when areas lack workers when others don't and people will do 15 km to fetch food, which prevents them to go to work...

People are unhappy because they don't have access to basic stuff that are on sale 15m from them, and FINDING what's wrong is inexplicably hard. My houses are degrading, why? no way to know. Wheat does not go from storage to mill, why? no way to know. My bailiff always quits the city even when happy, why ? no way to know. Can I prioritize stone for road paving over house rerererererebuilding ? Not that I can see...

There are also quite a lot of bugs which are not all game breaking but still give an impression of an unfinished or unpolished game, but really my main remark would be this : *if you want me to build a nice city with hundreds of citizens and knights and monks with needs, give me tools to do it properly. I cannot click on individuals and buildings in the whole map, so at some scale of city I'll need to have an map overview of who does not have water, service, or whatever, of which buildings lacks what and why (is it production ? logistics ? can I fix it with more storage ? hiring more people ? where ?) Where are people going to get their food ? their clothes ? How much time does it take them that they don't use to work, and why can't I compensate that by hiring more people in that underutilized building ? People tell me they can't find a home, but all the homes around have lots of empty room, what exactly are you looking for and where ? and so on and so forth*

Basically, QoL for big cities is not there (yet ?).

Ah, and the other bad UX thing for me which gets me to eye roll is the "click on something happening at some precise point on the map before a timer" aspects, which really reminds me of bad mobile games and, imo, has nothing to do on a PC city builder. I'm *designing a city*, so I don't want to move all over the map to welcome three new citizens, just find yourself a home already, yes I need you or I would have specified it in an immigration policy. Emissary of abbess/king/whatever ? Just show me the event or show up on the side of the screen, I was *busy* trying to sort out wood logistics 30 seconds of map scrolling to the west, please. Also, having to micro my three main people who do the missions to get progress and new people, why ? just get on a loop of $mission and give me mental time to plan quarries; and having to micro the lvlup of citizens to optimize jobs, please nooo ... I have money, just auto-upgrade whoever works as a tax collector or whatever, auto-upgrade a random monk when I have 5 books, auto-upgrade soldiers, etc.

For me, the ultimate goal of a cute city-builder is to get to the point of being able to just visit the map and look around, and the city Works. See logistics flows, money gets in, people get around, go in, take free jobs and live their lives. All microgestion prevents that, and knowing the game will never let me just "enjoy what I built without having anything to click on to get it to run" is a frustration.

Overall, yes, it's a good cute city builder. You can build small villages. But for now, the lack of QoL and the forced microgestion of pops means it cannot reach the "zen" point of truly great citybuilders where you can just stop, look at your megalopolis, and enjoy looking at details of your creation or do building micro-adjustments for hours.

Still unplayable since full release due to many crashes.. but if working properly, it can be a nice chill game..

Very good game. A bit of a learning curve but after a few tries on various scenarios, and at 471 hours, I now have mastered (??) the game. I still only have 75% of the achievements and I tried a number of interesting mods. Nice graphics, various levels of difficulty, easy controls, many different objectives, four main streams (simple city building, metropolis, monastery, and war castle). Not a lot of action if that's what you are looking for, mostly strategic, planning, building and adding decorations to get higher scores.Truly enjoying it

Had this game never hit its 1.0 release, I would not be writing this negative review. It used to run perfectly and was quite fun, but ever since 1.0, the technical issues have seemingly only gotten worse. On launch day it ran poorly, but the past few times I've tried to play it, it has crashed and taken my GPU (RX 5700XT) drivers down with it. It has gotten to the point that attempting to play the game at all is impossible because I know it will brick my PC, and if it were possible I would 100% have asked for a refund because the game feels like it has taken steps back with each successive update. Perhaps 1.0 works great for people on NVIDIA or Intel GPUs, but I can't even play the game anymore.

It is incredibly frustrating and each time I attempt to play the game I go through the same cycle of hard-crash, GPU drivers are gone, then reinstalling GPU drivers in a loop of suffering that a game shouldn't cause.

Wow, has foundation come such a long way. I have been playing since it came out of Alpha and I have loved the journey. It isnt a hard core survival game, it isnt a hyper realistic simulation, it is simply what it is. Some people dinged it for being a painting game, that somehow the devs strayed too far from the original vision but i disagree. It is a relaxing and forgiving city builder and that is okay. I have had no stability or crashing issues and the full release art style was such a treat to finally play with. Honestly, after some 7+ years there is enough info out there for you to determine if this is for you or not and what you see is what you get. Chances are if youre reading this you either already have the game or should just go ahead and get it.

Foundation has cemented itself as a staple in my library and will remain so for years to come.

Looks easy, but there is more depth to the game than any other city building games I've played.

I am certainly not a hardcore city builder and I hate it when my money runs out, but Foundation offers an enormous amounts of options to make it really sandbox. Even so, there is still plenty to do and figure out and make work. But give yourself enough leeway in the start settings and you can take it at a leisurely pace. Some of the mechanics of building are a bit obscure but googling around usually resolves this. There's a logic to all of it, in the end. A lovely game, certainly addictive and graphically beautiful.

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

Well..... I admitted that messed up the save 2 times, until I finally get it.

Hold up, I didn't mean it's bad or something, just hear me out.

the game are well made and I am sure developers are detailed and take a lot of efforts to the game.

Supply Management

Villager's Satisfaction

progression

Trading

Friendly advice

While it's fun for a short time, the seams start showing just a few hours in.
It feels like it's been dumped into 1.0 and it's hoped modders will fix it, which might make it a fuller and more enjoyable game, but there are some serious underlying issues.

Probably one of the best games I have downloaded in a while. There are some finnicky things, but it is a new game! Development is continuous and i get updates every few days. I play it a TON

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.

TLDR: game saves went to shadow realm, lost half of progress
Ok, so the gameplay itself is alright, but idk what went wrong, but one of my saves must have been deleted or something went wrong because my recent saves didn't load, and I had literally clicked "Save and quit" the last time, so idk what went wrong, but I lost like half of my progress. Just go play manor lords.

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 :)