Foundation Review

City-Builders have always been ever-popular, from the first pioneers of SimCity, the Settlers, Caesar, and Anno, to the modern cornerstones of Cities Skylines, Surviving Mars, and many more. The sheer number of games that come out in this category each year sometimes feels pretty absurd. Of course, not all of them are great City-Builders.

One of the genre's rising stars is gridless city-builders. The likes of Manor Lords have really popularised the genre. At its core, gridless city builders satisfy the desire to have a city grow somewhat naturally, as many cities have winding streets instead of perfect grids and planning.

Foundation is a new gridless city builder that strives to do what many of these games do in its own way. Developed and published by Polymorph Games as their first game, Foundation does little to stand out in the genre, being very similar to other games. 

The whole medieval city-building simulation thing has been done time and time again, yet with a few somewhat unique mechanics and a striking style, the game manages to stake out a piece of itself, cementing itself as something future city builders will adapt to.

The game allows you to fine-tune the map, choosing between three main map types and then changing parameters such as lakes, hills, cliffs, and more. I lucked myself into a pretty flat seaside map with a nice island inside a lake. From there, I had to select objectives and game settings. Again, there are many of the usuals here. You can fine-tune the game systems, change how happiness functions, toggle instant build, and more.

Between the objectives, you can follow a semblance of a story, between basically building a city, a fortress town, and a clerical town, or you can choose to set your own path. This is important because, between the first three options, you'll be locked out of building certain structures and have different end-goal objectives.

I chose the last (or rather, first) option because I'd rather have options and potentially incorporate all three aspects in my town. After that, I went to customization, where, again, you have the usual options with a coat of arms, city name, and leader name.

Moving onto more exciting things, starting, you have to first pick one of many territories; you can't pick from all of them, but rather only some. Don't worry, though; you'll be able to get more later. Afterward, you place a temporary storage, which will also serve as a sort of town center, as your events and such will all pop up from here.

Foundation, like most other top-down city-building games, has you collecting from a finite set of resources, expanding your settlement from a small hamlet to a town and eventually to a sprawling city. You have to build a lumber camp, a builder's workshop, and a stonecutters camp. 

For the lumber, you'll need to assign, or rather paint, an area from where your woodcutters will harvest their wood. Almost all resources in the Foundation are finite, so you'll also have to place a forester's camp to replant the trees cut.

Naturally, all of these buildings need workers, so after assigning those, you'll figure out that all your citizens have levels based on their profession, so the more they do that profession, the better they get at it. You'll also notice that you have no houses to build; instead, you will designate a residential zone where your citizens will build their homes automatically.

Roads are also similar. People just sort of walk to places, and roads will form automatically there over time. These roads are always dirt pathways; however, later on, you'll get to create actual proper paved roads. 

You'll also get to build a market early on, which will be your main source of income. In the market, you can build individual stalls and decorate them. These stalls will sell goods that you either trade-in or produce. That is also how you primarily make money. 

In Foundation, the gameplay loop essentially revolves around this. You have to build production chains to primarily sell to your citizens, using the gold earned to expand. You'll often encounter different methods of optimization and general ways to make your life easier. 

This encourages either tearing down parts of your town or planning a lot. This is a great way to really immerse yourself in the game, but for many, especially in the first playthrough, it will probably become an annoyance more than anything.

Taking a step back for a minute, you'll see you have a lot of resources to tackle. Again, Foundation is not too different from other games here in that you'll have plenty of resources to work with; some are directly harvested, and others are produced goods that are processed and can themselves produce other goods. 

For example, one of the early lines of production you'll have is sheep to wool to cloth, with each requiring three different structures to produce. Several of these will have varying methods of production. For example, with sheep, you'll need to designate a sufficient pasture area based on workers, which also determines the amount produced.

You'll eventually get to the point where you have a lot of people producing common goods where you are comfortable enough to start expanding. To get to higher tiers of resources, you'll need to promote citizens. This creates a really well-designed economical aspect to the game that is very in-depth and isn't seen in many other games.

So, it works like this: You'll have a base of producers and lower-tier citizens, and to get higher-tier goods, you'll need to promote some of them. To do that, however, you'll need to increase your population by a wide margin and produce a lot of goods, some of which you'll need to trade to get, as, for now, you'll not be able to produce them.

A lot of these also mean you have a large upfront cost, so you need coins. For that, you'll need to trade more or pay more taxes. In the end, you basically have to constantly expand both your production and population. A lot of these expansions will remain lower tier, and later on, you'll get the means to rearrange them into higher tiers. 

That being said, the game remains very intuitive and simple, making it extremely cozy. It requires a lot of thought, but you can tackle it from one issue to another. You'll rarely get anything dire enough to warrant yourself going at it too hard. So, if you are a fan of Frostpunk 2 and its incredibly strong decision-making, you'll probably not find much in common here.

The game is incredibly long, and you'll probably spend dozens of hours, more than that if you look at getting thousands of citizens. There are a lot of layers here, and every ten hours, I find something new to work around or introduce to my city.

Resource management is a very important aspect of the game, with its collection only being a single part of it. You'll need to manage storage and eventually transporting goods as well. Since everything is sort of a range, you'll want things like food spread out, with multiple storage hubs and markets, especially at long distances.

I found myself creating smaller feeder farms and villages to fuel my main town. Eventually, there was even a small mining village there. Things like these really make you appreciate what the Foundation does.

This isn't even getting deep into the Royal Book, which contains all the stats, lets you commit to trade, enact edicts, adjust taxes, and more. The game can get incredibly complex, with different methods for different things. Really minute systems, such as gold needing a tax office to be collected and so on. Many mechanics need certain buildings that unlock them, so you'll not be overwhelmed by them from the start.

So overall, the game is very fun, if a bit repetitive. You'll come across problems and issues naturally and get to tackle them naturally as well. The issues themselves could use a bit more variation, though. And since transporting resources is an important part of things, more ways to do it would be great as well.

The tech tree is split into four parts. To research, you'll need to unlock a certain amount of prosperity, which is done by building certain buildings or through events. Speaking of which, events and objects pop up from time to time, giving you more to do. These are often very minor, with things such as 'store x amount of food' and so on.

Saving the best for last, the game has a build function where you have many different modules for certain buildings, such as markets, taverns, castles, and monasteries. This is not new, but by far, the best implementation of the system, as you get to create some really cool structures with this. 

The game has some performance issues, especially when you increase the scale or zoom out. With each citizen being simulated, you'll need to deal with some issues with lag when you grow your city. The game also eats at your hardware, so restricting the FPS is important. Overall, the game could really use some optimization.

As for the visuals, Foundation honestly looks fine. It's not the best-looking game out there, but it has its own style, and it almost feels like a diorama town. Even the citizens and buildings have this simplified art style that sells the vibe of the game. 

On the UI side, the game could use some work, as there's very little info shared, and something just feels missing. The music also adds to the atmosphere but doesn't do much differently or isn't very special otherwise. All in all, it is fine and just gets the job done.

Overall, Foundation is a game that takes a while to get the hang of. It is incredibly complex and requires a lot of thinking, but it manages to ease you into it in a neat way. That being said, it does leave you hanging afterward, leaving you on your own to figure out the exact specifications of most of the mechanics. There's a general issue with the lack of information given. Despite that, the game has solid foundations and does a remarkable job of containing all of the systems. It could use a lot of work, but for now, it is still worth it.