The game is fun, and has helped me waste a lot of time. Mainly village management, but you have to set up a tower defense system for nightly attacks. The game is a challenge, and has a lot of depth. It's by an indie developer, and so it's not too flashy. There is no formal tutorial, but there are tooltips. I think you might need to go the guides that are available at a very large competing game store. (Note: the game changed mechanics since the earliest builds, so some guides are out of date.) Another issue is that it is not built for "winning," you just survive as long as you can on a map, before sending your population to settle other maps. (If you can survive a year in each region, you win, but that would take a long time to accomplish.) The game punishes mistakes hard. (The worst issue is that you can accidentally delete buildings, and there's no undo.)
This is an excellent trading game, although obviously dated. The issue with it is the problems with the video settings. There is a lot of information available to deal with this on the Steam Store. However, my experience seems to match that of some other people: some modern laptops cannot support the 800x600 video mode that the game initialises into (before going to the chosen setting), and it crashes, and there does not seem to be a fix. Conversely, my desktop ran the game without any issues (and I played it a lot). Just being more profitable than the AI is not that hard. The trick is setting up a trading/political empire in all the cities. Although you can attempt to micro-manage by manual control, that is too painful. You need to master the automated control systems within the game. Getting those systems running takes a long time to master. There are plenty of resources for the game, especially if you can read German.
I mainly played the base game against AI. The game experience apparently changes if you add a lot of the expansions, as well as playing multiplayer. I got the base game on sale for $2, so even if I do not play a lot more than I already have, cannot complain about value. It's an adaptation of a board game, which means that the core gameplay has been tested, although it is obviously not as flashy as a computer-only game, which can add more mechanics easily. This is what I wanted, but tastes will be different. The game design takes a bit of getting used to. Each turn comes down to a few die rolls. The strategy revolves around which part of the board to concentrate on, and when to take a run at the Crown of Command (at the end of the map, which is behind strong barriers). The longer you wait, the more powerful you get. The key to enjoying the game is realising that you should not wait forever, you need to try to make a run at the Crown when there is still a chance of failing. The strategy comes from trying to judge the odds of outcomes, and adapting to the strengths of your character. For the base game, when you set up the game, you should set the "No More Lives" option in the house rules (third tab of the game setup). This prevents healing once a player reaches the Crown. Human players would probably force a quicker ending, but the AI can go into a loop where it heals itself almost as fast as you can damage them. This can make the game drag on too long. Most of the DLC packs offer alternate endings that force a faster end. The developers open up one expansion each week, so you can try it out. There is no need to rush out and buy a lot of DLC on first purchase, since they would make the game complexity overwhelming for a new player.
