Recent reviews by Jam

Absolute banger

Difficult and always entertaining, just like roguelikes should be. In the end, even with bad rng the game is fair and winnable. Greatly rewards the experience gained by figuring stuff out. In one day of binge, It feels like I have truly progressed from a Settler to a real Viceroy. Having reached Prestige 5 I think I only lost twice so far: during the very first games and a while later when trying too hard to get achievements and delayed victory too long. Sometimes you have to all-in for last victory points just moments before crumbling.

So far noticed a few tiny exploits:
- alt+F4 does allow to save scum sometimes, depending where last autosave was
- this might be intentional: moving a building puts all the resources carried by its workers inside, which can allow for faster resource dump if you move it next to the warehouse

Menu with hotkey "U" allows you to quickly check what you can already produce and where, which GREATLY helps in deciding what blueprint to pick.

Pretty cool city builder with RTS elements. Definitely going for 100% achievements with this one! Feels a bit like my favorite part of Age of Empires - the early age of hunting and gathering, but this game is very focused on it. Hunts are fun, dangerous and difficult. Not only because of the dangerous animals, but you also have to consider distance from settlement.
You are supposed to automate as much as possible, but microing still helps with hunts, capturing animals and returning people to settlement faster (sprint).

After sinking more hours into the game, I found out some useful tricks and tips:
- VERY IMPORTANT! Game is all about managing the amount of tasks. Keep the top right "workload" at or below 75%! Hotkeys '6' and '7' will show you menus with info why the hell is it always so high. Getting 200% percent workload will make your people prepare food too slow - even if you have a ton of grain stored - and avalanche into even more tasks not being finished and workload rising, wrecking your settlement until raiders finish it off!
- Technologies (hotkey 'F7) are bought by the points whose progress you can see in a specific menu (hotkey '8' without the F). Try to make at least one of every produceable and buildable thing, and hunt everything you have not hunted before.
- ...this means hunting Megafauna early in the game before it gets all extinct when you progress to next eras!
- MOVEMENT SPEED gets affected by people's age and status (if any bars go into yellow or red), that's the reason why random pack of hunters will inevitably split a bit
- SPRINT! double click on the ground or item laying on the ground (not the natural resources tho) will make your lads sprint. VERY useful when you want to micro a bit to save stragglers from freezing during blizzards or getting resource-carrying, hungry and thirsty people back into the settlement faster
- the ALARM button (for raider attacks) is VERY useful. Your people will know from which are the attack is coming and man only these gates, towers and wall platforms
- while towers provide more protection and fit more people per area, wall platforms aren't strictly worse! The platforms NEVER degrade and require repairs only after taking damage in battles. Huge save on workpower and resources
- place towers behind the platforms AND you can fit two more in the very gate itself. People will walk under them with no problem
- to get more people, raise your PRESTIGE quickly by spamming a lot of Skull Poles early game. They are very cheap for 1 prestige point and you can spam hundreds of them! Put the field of these a bit further from your village, so you can have space for farming later! Also get a few 'Spiritual' buildings inside the base, as people will go to these from time to time.
- put fields as close to your settlement as possible. the time for plowing, sowing and harvest is limited to the season and if the fields are not close enough your people won't make it D:
- children are the most useless people in your village, but will grow into the adults. They mostly do pick-up-stuff jobs, like picking sticks or harvested grains and wheat.
- I like to keep my axes and picks at 10 or 20 max. Most of the swords and shields I get are looted from riders. Though shields are produced in two (just like slingshots) so they are still nice to make and trade away.
- Items change in trade value as you progress through eras! At some point the stone price will triple and tools up to copper will drop to worth of '1'
- Haystacks look cool but any wheat you want to store for more than a year should go into the storage in buildings. Don't build too many haystacks :[

It's like Mount&Blade meeting XCOM, especially when playing on harder difficulty. You explore, struggle with wages, food and repair and slowly figure out the game mechanics on your own.

Each of the companions can (and should) also be a professional at some work. You will have to cook up competent squad of warriors who can also sustain and upgrade their camp and equipment - some will gather resources, others will smith, prepare oils and healing potions.
They will also befriend eachother, unless there's too much 'friendly' fire in your combats. Getting stronger together and creating positive events at the camp or... getting depressed when one of them is caught by the Guard or murdered by an overgrown mosquito.

There are some bugs, but afaik devs are working on them. I've managed to fix the 'unable to camp' bug by... attacking the first thing I could reach - Guards! - and running away. A shieldmaiden married to my main dps brute got captured, which required a jailbreak!
And in the meantime my cook became a master, realized that even if he stops being a mercenary he can still have a great job, and inspired the whole squad.
And all that time a faceless humanoid monster I captured in a pitch-dark tomb to keep as a 'working prisoner' in my camp escaped for a 5th time.
And I probably lost yet another new-hire alchemist in some unfortunate combat.
And for 60 hours I kept 'backpack accessories' IN the backpack, instead of attached to companions' backpacks...
Definitely going to try to 100% the achievements on this one

Pretty good, feels and plays like good ol' RTS with better hotkeys and really good artwork. Literally the ones YT playlist channels yoink for their "true viking beats to pillage to". Very cool and rarely explored settings, from various historical groups points of view.

I really wish they were more campaigns, but I got a solid 40h out of it and few achievements were really hard to get without figuring out a trick. Missions were very creative: sneaky ones, big battle ones, base-building ones, defending, even 'rushing' - usually to help defend something far away.

I also completely ignored the multiplayer for now lol

real gamer hours

Enjoyable and pretty slow RTS with well-done viking theme. Music, sound effects and graphics are fitting well together. Pace can be really slow, especially in the first few minutes, unless you build Brewery first. Combat is instead very fast and rewards some micro, but it's a bit difficult to click right things to retreat before they die.
Exploration of randomly generated map always feels good and might be my favorite part.

Most of the tribes/factions are paywalled which does look kind of bad, but I assume it wasn't a case when they were being released, and I just got this game a bit late

Awesome game. Definitely a bit overwhelming at first if you try to play in the most effective way without any guidance from an experienced player.
New players, play without worrying much about all the game's elements. Explore the galaxy, read into the short stories of events and gradually explore other fields of the game like planetary management, diplomacy, ship & fleet design.

Amount of mods is also overwhelming, never ending content PogChamp

If in-doubt what different strategies to try, hunting achievements is always there to get out of your fav strat comfort zone.

Huge step from the other games.

From the new, Battle for Zendikar update, game is looking really good. Only thing I wish for is optional upkeep phase for you to turn on in settings.

Quests got fixed. First Versus victory of the day gives you 20 gold. Play each 3 days, recycling 20g and 40g quests to get gold relatively easy. If you are one of these rich people, feel free (not really free, lol) to pay2win.

Strongest decks imho are: Mono red , red-green land destruction ramp, artifacts. I'd put black-white walker control high as well, but you need quite a luck with packs to assemble it.

Feel free with brewing. 2HG is really fun and amusing as well. You even can team up with your buddy to crush any opposing Giants. Just give the client few tries if it doesn't work for you two at first.