Reaching the upper tier of achievement is very underwhelming. It takes a lot of work to get to the point where you can install rooftop penthouses and business headquarters, but once you get them into your building nothing cool happens at all. The helicopter charter service that the CEOs demand doesn't make there be any helicopters for example. You work and work to get the top levels of everything and then nothing happens at all.
I skipped the tutorials and went straight in, and I made a lot of mistakes and had to restart several times, but I enjoyed learning how to play the game through trial and error. Eventually I reached a point where my population had grown enough that I needed a second temple, and then shortly thereafter, a second school, and then more houses and fields of crops. And then it sinks in very quickly that the game has essentially ended and that I'm starting again. That's the shortfall of this game. There's no tier after the first. You're able to build a decent town in just a few hours of gameplay and then after that there's nothing really new to unlock or discover and it becomes repetitive as you just expand by doing the same things over again. The other main issue I had was that once my population grew beyond 700 - 800 it became difficult to keep track of things because the UI is simple and doesn't cope well with the complexities of later game. A mine runs out of resources way on the other side of the map and I don't notice right away. The blacksmiths were depending on this resource. The blacksmiths quickly deplete stockpiles of this resource and then stops producing. Then the town quickly runs out of tools. Now everyone is running on half-efficiency and I can't get anything done. People can't quite harvest food or gather logs for firewood as quickly as they need to so now people are starving and freezing the death. Now I have fewer people and not enough to assign to the various important tasks. Now the town is doomed, trapped in a death spiral. All because a mine closed and I didn't notice for two minutes too many. I wish it were a little easier to keep ahead of things like this but the warning system in the game is just simple 'bong' noise that goes off so often for so many things that it gets tuned out.
