Fabledom

No it’s not short for “domination”.

It is a simpler city builder game, and while the ads want make you to believe it’s themed around the european fairy tales — it’s not. There are 3,5 cameos, 3,5 instances of generic fantasy things, the rest 97 is just a generic cartoony medieval city sim.

The mechanics are very simple but are very poorly conveyed. And aren’t always working. There’s very little space for your big buildings. And since it’s a city builder game you take direct control of everything and have to babysit the citizens. They demand tons of stuff, but there is no space to provide all the necessary things in range. Each tier 1 house can generate its own food lowering the load on the system. But the game doesn’t explain it properly, and by default puts decorations into the allowed slots. The home decorations work only for one house and still cost resources. Instead you can put a global decoration in that plot of land which has a decent AoE. You personally assign a worker for every job, and the workers are not good. They suck at their jobs and are very slow and inefficient. The game is built around commuting, at least that’s what i think, because every workplace shows how far away the worker lives. But it never explains what that influences. And well, in real life a worker commutes for two hours, but spends the work day on the same spot, so it shouldn’t influence anything but happiness. You can have months worth of food, but your dummies can still die of starvation. There’s no automatic surplus trading deals, you have to sell // buy by hand every time.

The game has negative pacing. Everything is already very slow at the fastest, and your goals only increase in scale. First you enlarge your city and buy neighbouring squares. Next you go to the global map. Then you do questing in foreign lands. Lastly you pick a neighbouring character to marry, you complete several bigger quests, build a giant palace and win.

The GUI is pretty bad for this genre and the tutorial is not good either. There are no graphs, no list of problems, no income outcome balance sheets. And it’s not because this is a simple game with no those issues. You have all the issues and none of the feedback. Everything you can do or see is tied to each individual asset with no way to see the bigger picture or diagnose the problem. For example, to optimize the commuting, you literally have to write down everything on paper, and draw crazy-board graphs. All menus are cramped into a tiny window with miniscule FoV — barely a couple of rows fit there. And even that is unlocked only after you reach a way higher level. Even if it’s not your first city.

You have 1000 wood in stock, 10 coal producers, and 0 coal, and no way to know why. How does the storage building work? In proper city-builders storage is mandatory and when you run out of storage you are notified with the place where it happened. Here you build one because the unskippable tutorial demands it, and forget about them. How do granaries work? In normal games they are tied to food distribution and are mandatory too. Here you can have tons of food and not care for granaries. How does decor work? It has AoE indicator, does that mean it’s not stacking even when it’s all different?

You look at a damn magic black box, you scream numbers into it, and get an echo of other random numbers with absolutely no understanding of the math, and no way to disassemble the box and see how it works. This stupid iphone generation of devs doesn’t know how to make interfaces, because they think that users are stupid and everything works fine and automagically.
In 4//3 half the global map is out of bounds.

Ungreatful

It starts alright and it would be an alright simple and easy game, even with the terrible interfaces if they didn’t matter. I started off liking it, but then everything start to matter for no reason. The easy difficulty keeps you in purgatory allowing to ignore most of the problems until they go away. But under the hood everything is falling apart unrepairably, spiralling into abyss.

The game punishes you for playing it. Even on the easiest difficulty citizens generate barely enough tax to go over the spendings. And then the game increases the developer tax — the money taken from you for nothing, for literally existing. And that reaches insane values.

That terribleness is complemented by another terribleness. The combat is the worst. It literally doesn’t work. You invest into defensive structures, waste money for magic ammo, and then your towers deal no damage at all and can’t hit anything at all. I mean literally. Your forces are being annihilated by everything, and just like in real life not-dictatorial states each soldier is a citizen that required giant investment to be lured into the sexless kingdom, conscripted and trained. The hero gains levels once per 20 hours and those add nothing. The items barely exist and there’s no real choice. The hero dies from 1 hit and it can’t be healed. The regeneration takes hours of real time. To revive the hero you need absolute tons of gold.

Most the random events just want to screw you over. And all the enemies lower the happiness. If a dragon spawns and you have 10 guns, they will waste all 600 stockpiled ammo (a giant number in the scale of this game) and will miss most of the shots.

To offset the developer tax you build the gold generating cave, and in exchange for you finally getting 3 coins of income, it starts spawning trolls. The trolls are immune to all the cannons you have and they eat your conscripts with their gaze alone. They regenerate and kill the hero. In time it takes to wipe just one troll camp, two new appear.

Now your happiness drops so much no one wants to migrate into your country, your citizen die, anyone you send into the army dies, tax was already bad but now it drops even more. There’s no GUI to see empty streets and shut down unnecessary buildings. You have no way out, even if you disable the gold cave, the present trolls will not go away.

The additional problem is that no one plays this game. In popular broken games like AoE 2HD, KD:R etc, you can stumble upon a written or a video guide that has solved the game, and explains why and how these mechanics are busted and how you can play against them. But the only thing few people who are in the Steam forums say, is that to get cash you need to get happiness; to get happiness build inns; to build inns get peasants and more cash. Umadbruh? My initial problem is the lack of cash and peasants.

The combat quests make you lose several thousands of gold investment into the troops, and you get 200 gold in return.

And, well, for the quests and event quests you need to get X amount of a resource. But there’s no option to stockpile it. I sold all the things and bought some bread for the main quest. Despite me having a lot of veggies and fish, the citizens literally ate all of the bread in less than a minute. The only way i beat this crap is by kamikazying it. Each next step of the main wedding quest requires you to stockpile X. I was pressing pause, selling everything, then buying, while still on pause, the needed resource and finishing the quest. To fulfil the wedding requirements i had to sell absolutely everything i had and buy from everyone everything they had to finally finish this nonsense.

Steamworld Build is literally everything this game is not. Literally launch Steamworld Build and see the resources balance tab, the working combat, the trading of surplus. And even a better story and stronger adherence to the advertised theme.