Farthest Frontier takes the best aspects of settlement games like Banished and combines them with the mechanics of "civilization" city builders like the Sierra games (Caesar 3, Pharoah, Rise of the Middle Kingdom). This game is pretty unique as you make a settlement and all of the decisions from barely surviving carry over to give you problems/benefits later on as you expand and thrive as a town.

This game is basically Banished+ with how it starts and how its UI/mechanics work. You start with handful of settlers and assign people to tasks. Balancing travel time and harvesting basic resources just to survive. The big difference though is there is a lot more variables like food spoilage, crop weeds/rockiness/fertility, disease and aggressive animals/raiding parties. These variables are also affected by the game having different map types and a technology tree. On an more mountainous arid map it may be better to focus on hunting and rushing into a mining - preserving meat to have long term food and trading heavily in metals/rocks. On a lush plains map it may make sense to invest technology into growing forests to have wood and just overproduce food through farming and accepting that a lot of it will spoil.

After a couple of years the settlement starts to take the form of a town. It now needs a better way to keep food from spoiling, defend itself from raiders that are growing to size of small armies, ward off diseases that are actually historically accurate in how dangerous they are and make money. Like the Sierra games houses level up and generate more taxes/hold more people from getting access to resources and luxuries (this is handled through markets, not walkers). Every level requires more and more resources and ever increasing complexity.

However, this game is more than just a combo of the two before-mentioned games as it has alot more choice and replaybility. What is particularly unique about this mid-late part of the game is that a lot of terraforming starts to happen. Resources run out, animals overhunted to extinction, land where cattle was raised becomes fertile enough for farms or is destroyed by over farming and forests begin to disappear if technology was not invented to manage it. Unlike the Sierra games or Banished there is a lot more decisions with trade-offs. Decisions made to just barely survive may become crisis later on. However, the best part of it is that this game is intuitive and “historical” play is optimal without being forced. One example is the three-field crop rotation system of having one field fallow (fed on by animals eating clover), one growing regenerate crops that still give food and one growing intensive crops (wheat, flax) on a rotation actually works and you will likely get there naturally like your ancestors did by just playing the game optimally with the mechanics available.

First the good:
If you are a fan of technical city builders this is a really wonderful game. There's rewarding progression from small town to city and across a complex tech tree that makes it rewarding to play. There are hard trade off decisions between people, finances and defense that make everything impactful. On top of all that, the whole game is grounded in a seasonal rhythm that will keep you coming back to play through one more year. This is a fully built game and it's pretty great as is.

The less good:
-The combat mechanics are clunky and feel unfinished. It's a very small part of the gameplay, but it could use improvement.
-It is missing a challenge, especially in the later game. It could really use another layer of difficulty (disease, refugees, severe weather, tougher raiders etc) somewhere past the halfway mark to raise the stakes.
-It could really use some more performance optimization or more levers to pull to keep the game running as the population grows.
-Since many players will be constrained on population, it could use some later game mechanics to make extraction tasks much more efficient in the later game.
-The policy tools could use more depth - I think there are 5 policies in total right now and they don't offer much in terms of risk / reward trade off.

All that to say - this game is great. It's a very fun and original take on the city builder / RTS genre.

I was disappointed by this one; compared to similar games in the genre, the graphics feel dated, the UI is ugly and overwhelming, some systems are unnecessarily complicated, the pace is too slow even at max speed, and resources required for most things feel imbalanced. I often sit there on max speed just waiting for stuff to get done, wondering if the villagers are even doing their jobs. The AI feels dated too, both for your villagers and soldiers as well as enemy raiders - like I'm playing Age of Empires. Even actions like chopping down trees are painfully slow, and it's baffling to watch them walk to put out a building fire, or just ignore it and carry on working nearby or casually walk into the burning house.

I was also disappointed by the lack of customisation options for a new game; you can disable a few key aspects and decide on a few bits of difficulty, but not enough to adjust the speed, building costs (except the free creative mode), length of seasons...

I just can't recommend this - there are far more enjoyable games in the genre out there.