These city builder games are right up my street. This particular game is still a bit rough around the edges. CTD happens around once an hour ; had a weird crash in year 2 where happiness for one of my households fell to -1.2 million or so and a save and reload did not help. Best to save regularly and often to avoid disappointment. More mouse-over hints would be useful as would some sort of programmable automatic trading interface. "Construction Priority" could actually mean construction priority, although the manual does give fair warning that nothing in this game happens instantly. Make haste, but do it slowly. Maybe charge extra for those "urgent" jobs. Once past year five your city will be well established and even though random events can still hit hard the game gets easier as you go on. An occasional heavy earthquake might shake things up a bit. Overall Patron is a good game, even if the code needs much more.work. Keeping all of the households happy all of the time is difficult but easier with replay. Maybe Patron will end up as something like Rimworld,, a game to keep parked on the computer and to play from time to time. Three patches already since I bought this game, so the developers are definitely paying attention and I wish them every success. I can recommend Patron almost without reservation--it *will* get better.
TTD/Transport Fever/Railroad Tycoon successor. Good solid game model which will give you a good run for your money. Low key slow and easy start but the end game is far away and traffic/pollution/economic problems get much worse .Good solid economic model. Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance!. Level of attention paid by development team to their customers is exemplary and the quality of the gameplay is greatly improved over the last few months. Still the odd niggling issue. Occasionally factories suddenly freeze and need to be rebuilt. Editing transport routes results in pandmonium on the roads, discouraging the experimental approach to network design and reinforcing the importance of planning ahead. This is a design decision which I do not completely agree with. A stock market model with player and AI both able to trade shares and bonds would be nice. Game comes out of early access in a few weeks and devs are pushing out constant updates. Many AAA games are released with more gameplay problems than ROI has now. Overall--if you like this type of game then don't hesitate. Your money is well spent and there is still final polishing to come
Beautiful graphics. Good economy and stock market models which remind me of Railroad Tycoon 3. AI takes no prisoners but can be beaten on the stock market. Plenty of challenge and plenty of subtlety in the scenarios offered. Maps only for the USA at present---European/British DLC urgently please!. The drop down Train info menu becomes unwieldy when dozens of trains are in play, better search and sorting options would help but my preferred option would be to replace the train menu with a drop down Transport Line menu and with the trains grouped under the transport line on which they run. It would be nice if the transport lines and the trains could be separately named. No problems for me with the rest of the interface the financial information in particular is detailed and easily accessible. Overall this game is a keeper. I have thirty or so hours on the clock with it and I do not regret spending the money. I am, however, a sucker for these simulation games.
Best sound of any game of its time. Use good headphones. Play late at night. Turn the lights down and the sound up. Extra bonus; even after all this time SS2 is still one of the best of all games. Carries on where SS1 left off. GOG needs to get SS1 as well. Please?.
