Dawn of Man

It's a solid game, in which things work more or less as you'd expect. You hunt, you fish, you farm, you raise animals for food and materials, you build better houses, and a few towers for defense. Now you observe that the food situation is stable, population growth is steady, raiders are not much menace, and either restart a new scenario, or settle into a long slog to watch the population count rise slowly. Having binged on this game for a few days, I'll say the game is binge-able, for a few days. Then you've seen all it has to offer, and you'll move on, forgetting it exists, just like ... um ... other village / colony sims whose names I've forgotten but liked while playing. There are dozens.

Dawn of Man blends elements of a city-builder, sim, survival game, and RTS with a tech tree that spans the Stone Age to the Iron Age. Like many games with similar elements, it's easy to get lost in it for hours; I certainly can't complain about the value. Despite my initial fears over the complexity, the tutorial makes it easy to get into the game, and managing your prehistoric village is fairly intuitive despite what feels like a large number of systems interacting at once. Every resident of your village is individually simulated, and it's your job to make sure they have food to eat, time to rest, season-appropriate clothing, tools to perform work around the village, weapons to fend off raiders, and an assortment of graves, totems, and giant stones to worship. Not to worry, the AI will take care of the minutiae... mostly. Instead, you direct your villagers where you want them to build, gather, and so on. You also control economic activity at a high level by setting limits for food, materials, and final goods. If you do it right, the villagers will usually take care of themselves. In fact, a lot of the game is spent at 8x speed waiting for things to happen. However, the game stands out most to me for how much it leaves on the table. It's a nice village simulator, but with a title like Dawn of Man and a tech tree that covers actual historical periods, one might have expected some historical authenticity. Instead, it's a generic take on history with an entirely European aesthetic played on procedurally generated maps that don't actually represent anywhere in particular. A number of natural disasters such as floods, drought, fires, and earthquakes that provide challenge for advanced players are AWOL. All in all, it feels like a demo to waiting to be fleshed out. Unfortunately, the developer has moved on from the game, so beyond player mods, what we have is all there is. Dawn of Man has a solid foundation that could have supported considerably more.

It's a fun little city builder similar to Banished. There is only one dev/game designer, so the list of features is not very large, but it's core loop works well. Just don't expenct the content of a AAA game. I've played it for 37 hours now. There is nothing new to learn or see, so I'm done with the game. It was worth the money and kept me entertained for a few days. Things to improve upon, in no particular order: - Add a minimap - Rework the economy so that outdated resources keep their relevance later. For example flint in mid-game or bronze in late-game. - Add more challenges than the occasional raid. - Rework the tutorial. - Add more content: New buildings, new production chains, something to focus and specialise in.

Interesting settlement builder. Its kinda like Banished, but in stone age. Pros: - nice visuals - good amount of buildings, techs... - map is really big Cons: - no minimap! (you can get lost with camera, or need to scroll for a while to get from point A to point B) - AI is flawed (moving or creating another settlement is nightmare) - there is no control over defense when settlement is attacked by raiders (there are some weird tricks, read below) - ores are finite (once exhausted, you need to relocate) Now I would like to provide examples for some cons: # Minimap You can get lost if you don't know your map eg. if you click some notification (like huter being attacked by wolf) it can get your camera to some (for you) unknown place, and since you don't have minimap you may spend some time trying to find your settlement. # AI If your settlement population increased from 30 to 50 people, and you runout of tools (eg. forgot to increase production) you will probably end up with people being unable to finish harvest before season is over, which leads to starvation and rapid decrease of population to 10. Another issue is if you create more jobs than people can manage them. Then they end up not finishing anything, which results again to starvation and massive decrease in population. If you somehow manage to create another settlement, you will have lot of problems with AI moving between settlements instead of using local workforce or resources. # Raiders Again here you can run into AI issues if you have multiple settlements. It takes lot of time to people gather around simply because they are far away from their settlement, so they end up dying 1 by 1. Tip: don't close the gates! Raiders will destroy them if you keep them closed and then start fighting with people. But if you keep them open, your people will fight with them immediatelly. Difference in casualties is negligable. I would write more, but GOG has limit of 2000 characters for review.

Good Game, very beautiful the ancient enviroment and the pseudo-historical technical progress. The only, but very big problem, is the lack of a proper task manager. The people starved to death even with the fields plenty of cereals, the river plenty of fish and so on, only because they didn't harvest or fish... I've tried to reduce the work charge, shutting off the reconstruction of damaged buildings and so on... nothing, my people refuse to work on the very fundamental tasks, they prefer cut trees than harvest crop... and they starve to death. I mean, in that situation they deserve that, but for me the game become very frustrating and so in the end I shut it up. It's very sad, because I love the prehistoric theme, and all the other features of the game.