Pioneers of Pagonia Review — Steel and Inkquills

It would seem like city-building games are becoming more and more complicated as time goes on. While in any other genre that might be something of a criticism, the general consensus for fans of this particular genre is that the more complicated a game is, the better. I am sort of in this camp myself. As these games evolve, they offer players more and more industries to create from the ground up within their virtual cities. More work for the player to do, in this specific genre that attracts us freaks who actually want to micromanage a little society, directly translates into more fun.

You can imagine my joy, then, when I discovered Pioneers of Pagonia, a newly released and positively trending city builder that tasks players with building a city and managing its production, exploration, defense, and trade with neighbors. Each branch of a successful little society in Pioneers of Pagonia intersects with the others, requiring input from a huge assortment of production buildings to create one massive, self-sufficient machine of a city.

What can be an initially daunting city builder becomes much easier to approach as you play the game’s campaign. For first-timers, this is definitely the best way to introduce yourself to the game’s many supply and production chains, as well as their order of necessity, as the campaign gives you a narrative introduction to founding and growing your first city, starting from a few huts and expanding to trading with others and even defending your lands with military units.

I really, really enjoyed the overall economy system present in Pioneers of Pagonia. The game’s specific method of supply and demand makes your town feel entirely alive and dependent on its industry. For example, say you want to supply a guard house with the necessary five guards required to man it. Doing so would require gatherers to collect stone and sticks, bring those materials to a workshop, where the workshop would create five spears, which can then be used at a town hall to manually train five guards. This is just one example of a single, small production chain in action and says nothing of the actual building of the guard tower itself.

What I find particularly interesting about the added complexity of Pioneers of Pagonia’s production cycle is that it is not simply thrown on top of other, similarly complex starvation or population mechanics. Rather, Pioneers of Pagonia makes room for its complex production systems by simplifying things in other areas, particularly population management.

In other city-building games, you have to feed your population and manage their loyalty and happiness to prevent them from revolting or outright dying. This can make managing a workforce difficult, as your entire workforce is tied to food production. The more workers you have producing non-food resources, the more food you need. You want workers who can do more than simply produce food, but you also do not want your population to starve and lose those workers altogether.

Workforce is never really a problem in Pioneers of Pagonia; however, due in part to the fact that your workers cannot starve, or at least this did not seem to happen in any of my games.

To briefly explain, your population in Pioneers of Pagonia is tied to how much housing and food you have. When you build houses and provide your population with food, it will continue to grow until you run out of houses, at which point you simply need to build more. Furthermore, your entire population by default operates as transporters of goods, carrying resources from one area to another, with specific jobs converting workers from this large pool at a generously small rate.

This is close to how the population mechanics work in the Anno series, but I would argue that Pioneers of Pagonia’s system is even more forgiving.

What this essentially means is that population size, at its most pressing, is something you hardly have to focus on in Pioneers of Pagonia. Chances are, you will always have a sizable pool of workers available to train for specific jobs, and getting more is as simple as placing additional houses. Food-producing buildings often also provide trade goods needed in production chains, so you will often grow your population and supply them with food naturally and without much conscious effort.

For some, this might make Pioneers of Pagonia feel a little too easy. There are hardly ever crippling consequences for how you pace your city building, at least in my playthroughs of both the campaign and sandbox modes. For others, this more forgiving approach allows you to take your time and learn the game’s far more intensive economy systems, balancing them alongside exploration and combat. Personally, I feel that the game’s forgiving population mechanics are a good counterbalance to the rest of its complexity.

Though I can see some making the argument that the game feels a bit too easy compared to other city-building titles, I personally think that Pioneers of Pagonia is a fantastic new entry in the genre that even hardcore players can enjoy. Where some areas feel simplified, others feel more in-depth and advanced for the genre, and I think it all comes together well to create a city builder with a unique approach and a strong identity of its own.

Pioneers of Pagonia was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Pioneers of Pagonia is available on Steam.