When it comes to the more grand style of simulations, my tendency is to think more along the lines of the likes of Civilization, looking at the world as my battleground and trying to dominate all others through a mix of military might, technology, and culture. That said, pulling things back a level or two, there’s absolutely something to be said for being focused more on a regional level, whether that’s managing a sprawling modern metropolis like in SimCity, or a budding empire in more classical times like in Citadelum. Following the old saying, Rome was not built in a day and your empire won’t be either, but if you make enough mistakes you may learn the lesser-known resolution to that quote, that it could still burn in one.

For people who take some level of joy in careful and meticulous planning and execution, once you get the hang of how you’ll need to arrange your construction efforts this should be a good challenge. While most of the time in these sorts of titles you’ll tend to think of placing your major structures like housing, businesses, or public works, in order to keep your people happy and thriving here you’ll need to actually be more focused on infrastructure. What’s the use of fields to produce agriculture without a granary nearby to help store things, and then a market also within reach to allow your people to purchase it, but then also housing in the vicinity to keep everything efficient. In order to get the most out of your civic planning you’ll really need to be on top of how best to organize everything to keep your city growing and in balance.

Then, once you’ve established your foundation to work from, you’ll need to continue to figure out how to manage new concerns like exploration, your military, trade, entertainment, and other factors that will keep your people happy, and that’s not always an easy task. Where the game starts to run into some troubles is as you move into these more challenging phases, in part because the interface and menus begin to struggle to remain sensible and intuitive, and also because the in-game instructions and cues don’t always do a great job of helping you understand what you need to do. For the most part the communication that there are problems tends to be on point, but more than once I found myself unsure of what I would actually need to do to resolve the issue. It was in those moments where I’d begin digging further into the menus, and then begin to feel a bit lost with an abundance of information being available to me, but not nearly enough guidance or insight to make effective use of it… kind of defeating the point in the process.

In the end this feels like a strategy simulation that gets off to a reasonably strong start, but then begins to struggle under the weight of its growing complexity to help the player grasp it all. Granted, games like this always tend to have hidden complexities that you’ll simply need to learn through some failures and trial and error. That said, even as someone who has played quite a lot of these titles over the years, the game still managed to lose me periodically, with new resources or commands at my disposal that I ended up feeling ill-equipped to make use of effectively.