Songs of Syx

I liked this game right until the refund window passed which feels deliberate. The more you play this game, the more you realize how poorly thought out the needs of your citizens are when it comes to how much is needed to keep your people happy and fed, as well as the economy and other annoying things/mechanics. Very quickly you realize that the game asks you to both produce and have an unrealistic amount of everything just for your citizens to be happy. You could have 100 people living in your village and if you're not producing 2,000 pounds of at least 3 different foods, have 50 toilets (because apparently so many people in your city need to crap at the same time), 20 people speaking, giving news about your village all at the same time, every house stocked to the brim with wood, furniture, fabric, etc, and much more, your people will be unhappy and leave and you lose, or a riot and you lose. It's so annoying and exhausting always feeling like you're playing catch up from the second you hit start on a new game. It's flat out unrealistic and poor game design. Getting to 500 people feels like a chore and the game genuinely stops being fun. I can never keep up the demand for food, entertainment, the insane amount of toilets required, and etc. You'll always bounce between two states when you play this game: never enough people for all the absurd amount of jobs needed to produce and maintain things, and never having happy people who will leave and riot and fight each other from being unhappy. If I have to place twenty wells for water in a big square just for the people to be happy with such a small population, that is bad game design. That is something I've had to do in every game by the way with such a small population. Another horrible aspect of this game is money. EVERYTING IS SO UNREALISTICALLY EXPENSIVE. Oh, you want to trade for 100 fruit from a neighbor? Cool. That will be TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS? WHY? Dev, do you not understand the simple concept of money? No one on Earth, in it's history, would pay that much for 100 fruit. Every damn thing in this game is so absurdly expensive that it makes trading basically useless. Want 10 furniture? TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. It's just stupid and flat out horrible game design. It also doesn't help that the game has Inflation and it is so horribly implemented. In this game, inflation just means you will always lose money no matter what at a rate that grows the more you play. At some point in your game, inflation turns on and say you have ten thousand dollars; once inflation turns on, you'll just always lose money for no reason. Literally. You just sit there and lose money at an egregious rate that continues to grow... just because. Just another horribly stupid and unfun game mechanic. Some other lowlights of this game: a lackluster tutorial. Playing the tutorial doesn't cover even half of the game and it feels like it was rushed out over the course of an afternoon. Just know you will be visiting google a lot as you play this game since the game does a poor job explaining things to you and not showing you how to do simple things like giving your army weapons or enable tools for your farmers. Production, and maintenance in this game is another bad joke. It feels like your workers are so bad at producing literally everything. If you don't shove like 50 people into a single job, production will be so incredibly slow. Everything you make always feels super inefficient and that it takes forever. Even the upgrades you get when you research better productivity feels like a joke that doesn't really help much. Workers are just so inefficient that causes the game loop to become this: force 50 people to produce something --> cause a massive worker shortage for other important jobs like farming, mining, soldiers, etc since you don't have enough people to do those jobs --> your people get mad --> you lose. It's exhausting. Why are our workers so slow and inefficient to do anything and everything? W