Sometime during the 10th century, the Song dynasty has taken power in China. The emperor wished to spread their influence across the land and sent administrators to plan out new settlements. With just a few peasants at their side, these officials will turn empty lands into bustling metropolitans.

Thriving City: Song is White Star Studio’s first released game in Western territories. The developer has previously made Yuanduan Zhi Yue, a mobile/PC cyberpunk RPG specifically aimed at Eastern regions, particularly Mainland China and Hong Kong. Thriving City: Song was further supported and funded via Kickstarter overseen by IndieArk.

The most striking element of Thriving City: Song is the classic Chinese art style. All of the homes, characters, and scenery look like hand-drawn paintings out of a storybook. Unlike other city-building games, players may be tempted to zoom in and closely look at all the detailed action. Still, one will be taking a more macro view to plan out the layout and function or everything.

The game can either be played in story mode or as open world “adventure” mode. The story consists of five chapters taking place from years 960 to around 1068. Each chapter must be played in order and has a set difficulty and time limit to meet all of the goals. These mostly serve as a tutorial, introducing each concept slowly to establish a healthy city. In fact, the first three chapters are so easy that it can often feel tedious to get through. However, the lessons are very important to avoid missteps during the more open adventure games.

Adventure mode adds in a lot of freedom and is the real core of Thriving City: Song. Players select from 18 premade maps of various sizes and resource yield. They can also pick an official town seal, which imparts permanent bonuses and penalties on the land. For example, the seal of wisdom increases money gained from taxes but also the crime rate and military cost. Players can also choose to disable enemies or increase their frequency, though the latter is unlocked by playing a previous match until gaining at least 800 population size.

Once arriving in the region, players are free to place their administrative center building anywhere to establish the initial territory. At first, construction can only occur a short distance from the city center, but creating roads will increase the range in a given direction. The land is divided into three types: barren, standard, and fertile which determines what can grow. This makes it important to place houses and businesses in barren areas and farms or gardens where they will quickly grow.

New buildings are unlocked through two different methods. Typically the first is by growing the population in tiers like 50, 150, or 200 people. The second is by constructing a set amount of one building. These typically tend to be variants like a different-looking house that has the exact same attributes. Other times the newly unlocked structure is the next portion in a supply chain, like a coal mine to burn wood gained from a lumber camp.

The Townsfolk are not individually assigned jobs; instead, they take on what is needed in the city. Players can granularly assign the number of positions in certain occupations - like miners, shop owners, or firemen. They can then sort each job by a priority list of what to fill first. However, more general labor-intensive jobs like the builder, grain farmer, and fisher cannot be individually set - only toggled on and off completely. This can lead to an awkward situation where 30 or more people suddenly abandon their normal posts and start constructing a wall or school, then return to their ordinary lives once done.

While it is nice that people can automatically take on a heavy task, it leads to two major problems. First, it can greatly interrupt a resource supply chain and cripple goods for years. Second, several jobs are just not needed daily and are instead simply for disasters and fringe cases - like bad weather, crime sprees, or sudden invasions. This can often lead to players constantly micromanaging jobs to avoid automation making poor choices.

A successful city needs to balance its upkeep of raw materials, food, and coin. Often times each new building will start costing more and more money that taxes alone cannot easily cover. Thriving City: Song even warns against not building excess houses or industry, as unnecessary buildings can lead to economic downfall. For instance, players are presented early with the option of building hospitals and gravesites, but if the population is already in good health, then these wind up being a giant waste of time and money.

One’s own town will never truly be self-sufficient with income. Instead, traveler coin is how the city will be the shining example of the empire. The tourism industry is the backbone of the economy, starting first with lodges that shuttle outsiders around on ox drawn carriages. Once arriving, temporary guests will want to peruse businesses like bazaars, spice shops, brothels, and inns. If these buildings are not made, foreigners will simply leave without making any purchases.

While these establishments are a great means of earning money, they are also a hotbed for crime and heated brawls. Players can counteract this by creating prisons and sending constables out into the streets. In time they will eventually apprehend and even execute the thieves and miscreants.

The other major hostility is enemy armies that arrive to ransack and murder civilians. There seems to be no time limit or goal to their attack - they will ravage the land for years or even decades until quelled. Players have some defensive options like walls and gatehouses to funnel enemy troop movement and archery towers that have a limited range to shoot. Players can also train basic militiamen swordsmen or more seasoned soldiers wielding forged weapons.

Controls for combat are rather limited. There doesn’t seem to be a way to attack specific enemies, instead, players set the patrol range of a unit to allow the AI to take it from there. This can often turn things into an annoying chase if the invaders are heading to a target away from where an allied soldier is stationed. Additionally, fights tend to be a numbers game, with one militiaman being able to easily kill one archer band.

Having a large standing army winds up being a huge burden. This is because each team has a yearly cost, even if they are not actively fighting. Soldiers also do not quickly heal, making them more of a liability if weakened. Additionally, the military and police have zero overlap - constables cannot fight invaders, and soldiers will do nothing about city crime. This leads to being better to disband most squads and keep a bare minimum of fighters to defend the city.

The technology tree is not not directly acessible at the start – instead, players need to construct schools and academies to employ scholars. The tree also does not yield any new buildings but instead changes an attribute. This could be the original build cost, the yearly upkeep, or its potential yield. Branches of the tech tree aren’t always closely related, and one may be powering up an unused structure just to unlock something they really want.

Deeper into the tech tree are also city policies. These create major changes like tax welfare to increase happiness, withholding military back pay, or bringing in more tourists. However, a policy usually has a commitment of one or more years, making it hard to rectify an issue that results during its ongoing term.

Thriving City: Song was originally written entirely in Mandarin Chinese and patched into an English localization. The translation is serviceable to get through menus and understand concepts. However, a few story beats and popups either have English errors or are still completely untranslated. Also, every character still has their name rendered in Chinese Hanzi, which can make it difficult to remember who is who if one can’t read Mandarin.

All voice acting was also done in Mandarin, now with English subtitles. This includes the tutorials and introductions to the story chapters. Townsfolk will also speak in Mandarin but will have no subtitles. While it is typically random ambient chatter, there could be important clues and mood notifications that non-Mandarin speakers might not pick up on.

Thriving City: Song is filled with an overabundance of icons and warnings, but without text prompts or hover-overs highlighting what they mean. Like there could be an overflowing rice bowl suddenly showing over a warehouse despite it containing no food. To know what many of these mean, players will have to dive into the in-game encyclopedia. In fact, the game is very good about showcasing lots of statistics and facts, but typically in a new window or crowded menus.

Despite how simplistic the art style is, load times in Thriving City: Song can be suspiciously long. White Star Studio even recommends having up to 32 GB of ram to run the game. It leads to the question if something important is going under the hood to process the game or if it is just poor optimization.

Thriving City: Song is very fun to play but can be a bit rigid rather than creative. Players are going to be maximizing land use, money, and production. This can possibly mean tearing down buildings and changing industries as the city explodes in population. Those that prefer a more relaxed city builder may find Thriving City: Song’s mechanics to be cumbersome. Still, it is a joy to look at and super engaging even when clicking through menus and large lists.       

Kurtis Seid, NoobFeed
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