Recent reviews by Warkrunner

Played for the first time, beat the forest first try.
Played for the second time, started stacking instruments because "why not?"
A hydra kicked my ass in the swamp. Instruments are great against 1 thing, not back-to-back fights.
Friend got interested, saw me streaming on Discord, bought a copy.
Thought Kingmaker meant we can play together.
Turns out, you fight random builds from others.
Became a king first try, got a really OP build with a ton of armor and 22 stacks of thorns.
Saw "challenge undefeated," thought "sure, why not?"
First turn, saw he had rings that triggered rings.
Thought "ah, he just has to hit me."
Didn't even attack.
Rings sucked my armor and health dry without doing anything on the first turn.
Learned that if you want to beat someone with rings using thorns,
you need negative speed and more gear unlocks.

I'm writing this for encouragement to the developers, and because I know the amount of time and effort that goes into testing and developing a complex game. The hours spent loading models, checking animations, assigning values to object data, creating and coding the event triggers, creating test scenarios to observe how it runs in-game for every single scenario. All of it takes years.

I wanted to let the devs know that I salute their perseverance to keep at it for so long, since I only lasted 2 years doing such with feedback from fans.

I got this game in 2023, and from a fan's perspective: at first it's OK.
But then: THE SHIP DESIGN.

This game goes deep into structural integrity, mixed armament synergy, layout, and how it pans out against other ship loadouts. For example, high-flying bombers (grenades or bomb-bays) counter forward cannons, upward munitions (aerial charges, turrets, flak) counter bombers etc. Boarding's strong, but can be countered by internal ship design if you plan it right (multiple cockpits or bridges, guard points before them, sickbays). Open decks are useful for quickly moving sailors between points and reducing forward drag, meaning faster map movement and maneuvering. All that is balanced by weight, cost and upkeep for the ship.

The 4X part of the game is the sidedish to the true main course: design, planning and crew ergonomics in modular Lego form. All from a 1-man dev team. The 1 thing it's missing is naval combat and possible coastal bombardment (split land/sea battle maps). But, I get the feeling this dev's listening, watching, and planning.

I was skeptical at first when a friend recommended this to me.
I tried the demo since a week ago from this post. The graphics are not polished at all, and it appears to be rigged to have performance issues on purpose to stress-test the game in all aspects.

I am glad I tried the demo version.
The real gem of this game is the gameplay and story (to a lesser degree). If you want graphics, go play Black Desert. If you want a railroaded but nice story, go play FF14.
If you want an open story with excellent gameplay, get this.
After one week of playing for 50 hours, I bought the game and am a fan.

The main part of the game is its complexity and slow grind. I love the theorycrafting. Not for people who are impatient, like to keep things simple, or get into high-end aspects of a game immediately.

A step up from the classic version, it still has all the charm.
Definitely a must-have game for lovers of RPG or turn-based strategy genres.

This is my first review ever on Steam, and I have to say:
This game is worth buying at full price.

Why?
1) It's one of the first games in years that I actually want to buy for my friends so they can play with me.
2) If you, like me, are new to the genre and like difficult action games, it's got a decent learning curve.
3) It focuses on gameplay for building up gear.
Sure, there are some "RNG" factors, but the majority of crafted stuff can be used to make any myriad of builds and setups that are just as good.
4) All of the builds and setups: tons of variety.
5) It releases regular content updates for free.