After adjusting my expectation, I've really come to enjoy this game. So far, it's not really a civ-type game because there is no way to create a long-term, sustainable civilization. Instead, your focus is on completing the goals of each scenario before your population's discontent causes the colony to fail. As you reach milestones, you get more leaders, building types, etc. to help you succeed. I had pretty much maxed out the game before the last update added some additional steps in the scenarios. Since I wanted to start from scratch to see how the updated version plays, I had to uninstall and reinstall the game. It could use a reset option so you could wipe out your progress and start fresh. The other quibble I have with the game is that the buildings (projects) you can build are randomly picked each turn. There's no way to set your research so that you, for example, get more terraforming choices or more luxury/happiness choices. As a result, you can end up really needing some new housing so you can expand a city to mine surrounding resources but end up going several turns before any housing becomes available. Consequently, your strategy is limited.
While I overall like this game, there are some issues that make it too frustrating to keep playing. 1. People starve to death while food is sitting in storage. 2. The priority tool clearly doesn't work. I'll raise the priority of a building's construction only to watch workers carrying resources it needs walk right past it and commit the resources to a lower priority project. To be clear, all the resources the project needs are in storage, but the workers will often wait a few seasons or even a year or more before they'll carry the resources to the project so that it can be built. 3. Theoretically, you can do advance planning by putting down a building footprint and then pausing it. In reality, laborers will ignore the pause and again put resources into that project instead of the one they're supposed to be giving the priority. 4. If a tornado hits your town, it will stay there for a considerable time (weeks? months?) slowly chewing up your buildings. Despite it's slow place, your population will walk right into the tornado and get killed. The hang time also means it could be a season or longer before you can start work on replacement buildings. All in all, there's too much luck and not enough skill involved for a game that takes hours to play.
I liked the first two web versions and like this version as well. I miss being able to reinforce malls and wish I could build warehouses. I mean, I can build a functioning hospital but not a large storage structure? Still, I enjoy it with the exception of the story mode. It's too long and, in terms of the best ending, too dependent on luck.
