I've been looking for a game like Banished for a long time. Banished is a game where you control a band of villagers who have been exiled and need to build a new town. You need to gather resources and survive against the harsh environment. You need to manage the production of food, wool coats, tools, firewood, stone, coal, among other things. I loved that the game was unbelievably harsh. One mistake could cost you years down the line. I remember my villagers dying off in droves, and it was because I had an ageing population. Or I hadn't planned ahead enough to survive through Winter where crops didn't grow, and then took in too many refuges, so a few years later, I had a giant shortage of food and people were starving. I traded as much firewood as I could in exchange for food. Which meant that later, my people were freezing to death when I had a shortage.
Well, from the description, Northgard sounded like Banished as an RTS.
Note: At the time of writing, this game is still in EARLY ACCESS. If you're reading this months after, things might have changed by then.
At the start of the game, you have a few villagers who start gathering food (the default action). There are also only a few buildings you can build: house, scout camp, woodcutters lodge.
You can see the green zone which indicates the area controlled by my clan. I can only build 5 buildings in this zone, and I've already got two (my town hall, and the woodcutter's lodge that's currently being built). You can upgrade the zone once, which allows you to build an extra building. If you want to build more than that, then you need to colonise new areas. You do that by building a scout camp, and having a villager turn into a scout. Once they've changed jobs, they will automatically go around the map uncovering new areas. Scouts are considered civilians, so they don't take up a slot in your warband, and they are generally ignored by enemy military units (though they can get attacked while exploring new areas).
The scout has discovered a new defended area that I can colonise. It has two slots for fertile land (to build farms), it has a runestone (for extra lore resource gathering), and you it has 3 building slots. It costs 20 food, but because of my clan bonus, I can also use krowns if I want.
At the top right of the first screenshot, you can see all the resources you need to manage: food, wood, krowns ("gold"), stone and iron. There's also another thing you need to keep in mind: happiness, which is the overall happiness of your citizens.
The other resources are pretty straightforward, but happiness controls how often you get new villagers. The higher the happiness, the faster new people join your clan - which makes sense, if you think about it. If your happiness drops below zero, then new villagers stop joining.
The other interesting mechanic is the seasonal cycle.
The game starts in Summer, and progresses through the seasons as the year goes by. Summer allows for extra food to be gained from farming, but Winter needs to be planned around. In Winter, your army is 10% weaker in your own territories, and 30% weaker in other territories. Your villagers consume extra firewood, and food production is reduced. Winter is where bad stuff happens.
Unlike most RTS games, where the idea is to mass a large army as soon as you can, having too big a population can be a drawback in this game. Because people eat food, and you gather less food in the Winter, having too big a population can mean you'll starve if you haven't gathered enough food to prepare. Starving isn't as bad, except starving citizens produce less produce than normal, which can exacerbate the problem if those were the citizens that gather food. Same if you run out of firewood, resulting in freezing citizens.
Also unlike most RTS games, your military units are made up of your non-combat units. If you want a warrior, you need to take one of your civilians, pay some krowns, and turn them into a warrior. So you really need to balance maintaining an army vs having enough people around to gather resources. I've gotten tripped up a couple of times, with my army on a rampage throughout the area, spending food to colonise new areas. Then Winter hits, and my people are starving. I need to send my army back home, and turn them back into villagers so they can start gathering food. I try to build a silo to increase the food gathering rate. But now I'm out of wood! And they're freezing as well as starving. Somehow, I make it through Winter only losing a few people, but all those areas I just colonised are lost. Including that one that gives a bonus to happiness. My beer brewers are dead, and everyone is unhappy. So I'm not getting any new villagers to replace the ones that died. I remove the people gathering extra lore, and running the trade routes to get krowns, and set them all to gather food and wood. All because of a blizzard in Winter.
The first time I played, I thought the game was really slow. I think it's because I hadn't grasped all the intricacies of the game just yet, and I was just focused on winning. Now that I've played a couple more games, I don't think it's as slow as I initially thought, but I still feel like it's lacking something, thought I'm not quite sure what it is. redbeanpork, Pharmacist and I played a 3v3 game together, and that was kinda fun, but even after that, we were deciding whether to keep the game or get a refund while it was still within the 2-hour refund period. We decided to keep it in the end. My reason was because I think it shows promise, though maybe not as a multiplayer game. It definitely fills that niche that Banished left behind. But I've been looking for a game like those Wilderness survival custom maps in Warcraft 3. A bit like Don't Starve Together, except without all the weird stuff, I guess.
Anyway, there are some things about the game that annoy me. If you want to change class back to villager, you have to send your unit back to a house, which can be quite far away. Only villagers can repair buildings, so if you have a building burning in one district, and no villagers around, you need to send someone back, turn them into a villager, then have them go back to where the burning building is to repair it. Only villagers can build buildings. But they'll ignore buildings under constructions in other districts. So if you have a villager, you need to tell them to move to where you want the building built, then place the building up for construction. If you select a villager, and then put a building down, it doesn't seem to automatically send that villager to build it like it would in other RTS games. I've gotten caught by that quite a lot.
I do like that combat is almost a side thing in this game. There are a bunch of other victory conditions. Of course, there's the domination condition, where you crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women. Then there's the fame victory, where you gain enough fame, build an alter of the kings and conquer 15 territories. There's the lore victory, where you acquire enough lore to gain the blessing of the gods. There's a victory for controlling a certain portal for a year. And a trade victory for having produced a certain amount of krowns, have a certain amount in stock, and have 4 active merchants.
I will continue playing this game for a bit, and I really love the idea of it. It's not quite scratching that wilderness survival itch, but it's pretty damn close. I do like the visuals, and the interface is pretty good (minus a few niggly things). It can be a bit frustrating a times, wondering why your people are unhappy. It seems that they become unhappy if you have too many wounded units, so again, it's another thing that discourages long bouts of combat. But you do have healers who can heal your units from anywhere as long as they're in territory controlled by you or an ally. There is a bit of micromanagement in combat, to avoid losing units (as that means you effectively lose a potential worker), but it's not Starcraft levels of micro.
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