The game has some interesting gimmicks for the different civilizations. I played as China for my first match and they have some movable buildings, which was kind of cool to play around with. Unfortunately, this feature is lost when advancing to WW1 which felt like a waste. Every unit, building and upgrade is resource intensive and gathering is SLOW! On a small map with many settlers and barely any military focus, advancing to WW2 took over an hour. Granaries have only so much room and the other resource nodes can have about 5-6 settlers on it before settlers start waiting for the others to complete their gathering run until they start their own. I initally put 8 settlers each on 3 gold nodes which led to a constant ping of 5 inactive settlers. Ranged combat feels clunky and the unique units with powers (in this case, Taoist monks that can heal and spawn volcanoes) took very long to build sufficient mana to use their powers. The special powers are interesting and feel sort of like the god powers from Age of Mythology. Zap a unit or building, spawn a meteor etc. Impactful to a certain degree. The issue is that these limited powers feel like a lesson in min/maxing impact (i.e. only use the lightning power on town centres) since your other units are less effective at damage to buildings. Now, I could just train war elephants etc. but that would mean less resources for other buildings and upgrades, and as aforementioned resource gathering is so slow that it wouldn't make such an investment worth the cost. Additionally, advancing to WW1 does not upgrade your existing imperial age units to equivalent units from this age, so you start "anew" after a considerable time investment. I find alternatives (Rise of Nations, Empire Earth 2, C&C etc.) more intuitive and smoother to play with fewer arbitrary constrictions on gathering speed and unit control and would honestly recommend opting for those instead of Empires: Dawn of the Modern World.
I bought Travellers Rest because it seemingly looked like a Stardew Valley clone, and I loved Stardew Valley. However, I was met with a tech demo that sorely lacks several important features. I will attempt to elaborate, hopefully without too much comparison to Stardew Valley (despite my initial motivations): - There are no distinct NPC's or dialogue in the game. The charm in Stardew Valley was in the story and dialogue. This game has none. No introduction aside from appearing in your tavern and reading dialogue boxes as your character apparently communicates only with the creator of the universe. - Every other NPC you see in the game are seemingly randomly generated. They will either enter when you open your tavern and leave when you close it, or walk by it on the street outside with no particular purpose (at all hours of the day!) - There is nothing to work towards aside from higher payouts for newer foods/drinks. The only things you can use that money for are decorations and things you don't feel like crafting. - Crafting is a pain! You may only craft one item at one crafting station at a time. For example, a blacksmith's table requires planks, poles and iron plates. You need to craft planks at the sawmill, wait, craft poles at the sawmill, craft iron bars at your forge, wait, craft more iron bars at your forge, go back to the sawmill, craft planks. How many poles did I need? You can't check while you're crafting. Wait. Open the menu, check, craft either poles or planks, go back to the forge, craft another iron bar, fetch your poles, craft planks ..... So tedious! To emphasize, you can NOT queue several crafting orders at a time. Meaning, you have 30 logs of wood, you may only use a minute amout to craft one bundle of planks. - There is no reason to keep your tavern open. To get money, the fastest way is to open, serve your customers, close, have them leave, open, get new customers, serve, close. The list goes on for about 9 more points, but character limit...
