Foundation Review: A Rich, Rewarding Medieval City Builder

Foundation is one of the most compelling and unique city builders I’ve played in a fair while. Behind its whimsical exterior is something pretty damn impressive. Gridless building. Organic city growth. Modular structures. Fully simulated citizens that live, work, relax, trade, pray and party. It gives you the means to build intricate medieval cities complete with castles, monasteries, farms, districts and everything in between. 

At the heart of it is a formidable tailormade engine. You aren’t placing houses, or even building roads. You designate areas, and your citizens do the legwork - creating paths in the most travelled areas. This takes some of the control from the player, but lets you approach things in a whole new light. Your citizens take one step, and you adjust around them.

A Kingdom in Motion: Progress and Prosperity

You’ll start from humble beginnings in a world generated to your liking. Your tools are limited initially, but work with what you’ve got, provide food and housing for your citizens, and more will flock to your land. 

As you grow, you’ll expand your territory - and increase your prosperity. This introduces new tiers of buildings to unlock - and as your prospects increase, so do your opportunities. 

There’s 3 factions in the world. The Clergy, The Kingdom, and Labour - and each have their own progression paths. As you move down the tracks - more advanced systems are unlocked, and a well thought out logistics network is needed to bring it all together. You’ll need to expand your markets, and stock them with complex food and goods for your citizens to purchase. Your serfs are great for spending days on end doing back breaking labour - but they struggle with anything that requires a little finesse - so you’ll promote them. 

As they become more important, their demands increase, so you’ll have to scale up to meet them. More resources to turn into advanced materials and more industrial buildings to fill those quotas. More complex food requires more farming area, and an expectation for services and entertainment means taverns, wine production, fields and breweries turning out beer. 

And that’s the loop. Expand. Get comfortable. Promote citizens to increase efficiency. Expand to meet their new needs. Get comfortable again, promote more citizens, rinse and repeat. All the while you’ll have some grand project in the background ticking away, a castle to build, a monastery to run, or a lavish lord's manor for you to pour all your citizen’s taxes into. 

The Beating Heart of Your Kingdom: Industry, Economy & Logistics

Given the heights you can reach and the extensive progression tree, it’s no surprise that there are a hefty number of resources to get your head around. These get introduced little by little, and only when you choose to unlock them. Even adding things in incrementally, it’s a lot to juggle - but you can reduce the pressure of producing every little trinket and titbit by trading with neighbouring towns.

This isn’t a complex system, but it forms the backbone of the game’s economy. There are a few towns off map aligned with the different factions - upon meeting certain conditions and paying a fee, you can unlock trade routes with them - and they’ll periodically send traders your way.

However, acquiring the goods your citizens are clamouring for is only the first step. Your people can’t access your stockpiles. Warehouse workers must deliver goods to workplaces or drop them off at markets. Market sellers will man their stalls and peddle their goods. There’s a logistics chain that can unravel if you’re not thinking a few steps ahead. I do enjoy these systems in games, and it feels well implemented here. Though there were times when that logistics chain broke, and goods were owned but not going to the right places. In those instances, I struggled to identify the problem and solve it, as the game does tend to present information in general terms.

All that trade will either cost or net you gold - and money makes the world go round. You can bring in a bit of gold through trading, but your most consistent source will be one of life's only certainties. Taxes. That’s right, your serfs who spend their entire existence toiling in the field - they have to pay you for the privilege. What a life.

The higher the tax rate, the lower their happiness. The slower your population growth. There’s a balancing act involved - and it goes hand in hand with trying to manage your industry.

Trying to maintain a population of working, happy, fed and housed residents does become tricky when your town swells. Every step forward, something new is expected. Advanced goods at market requiring a new chain of production buildings. Fortifications to increase the density of houses, and patrols keeping the peace. Big building projects like taverns and churches will need to be consistently undertaken to appease an ever expanding population. There’s a lot of gears turning, but thankfully the game is quite forgiving. If you drop focus for a while, or even forget the game is running when you're alt-tabbed, you aren’t going to return to a hot mess or an abandoned city. The problems stack up, but the consequences can be dealt with in your own time.

Forging Your Legacy: Trade, Faith, or War?

As I mentioned before - there’s a lot to unlock in the game. There’s the default track with all your essential production buildings and other gubbins - along with 3 additional paths to follow. Build a bustling trade kingdom by focusing on Labour. Raise a castle, command troops and send them off to distant lands by prioritising the Kingdom, or be a pious ruler with the Clergy - building a monastery and gardens for monks and nuns to do monk and nun things. 

You can go all in on one of these tracks, or dabble a little in each. The game has different scenarios with objectives pushing you towards a certain faction - though you’re free to do a freeplay scenario and plot your own path.

Whichever route you go, it does affect the way you plan your city. It changes up your progression route and your end goals. Each track gives you a big building project to dive into, one that becomes more grand as you progress further.

I really like this approach. It provides freedom to the player, and it creates separations between different playthroughs. There’s also absolutely loads to unlock. At a glance, it’s a decent number of unlockables, but most of these nodes will unlock several different buildings at once.

From Dirt Paths to Cobbled Streets: A New Take on Urban Growth

So all that is very strong. Great progression. A sense of logistics and trade, and a boatload of different things to unlock and place. This gives Foundation a sense of identity, but it still shares similarities with other games. What really sets this apart and makes it feel entirely unique is its approach to building - and it really is impressive.

It’s gridless - which is always a bit hit or miss, but it’s done well here. The settlements you place feel organic and interesting, and that’s mostly down to how it handles roads. They form on their own. The routes your citizens take from their homes to their workplaces, the market, the church, the granary - anywhere they might go, that forms a path. Particularly dense traffic areas - for instance your town centre - those roads are more pronounced, and a little later you can upgrade them further by cobbling them. 

It blows my mind a little. Such an integral part of every city builder game - they’ve just done away with it. Instead creating this simulated, organic experience. And yes, sometimes it doesn’t go the way you want it - but it’s such an unorthodox way to do things, and I’m fully onboard with it.

But the novelties don’t end there. Buildings can be upgraded with attachments. Key structures are expanded piece by piece to create a modular design with multiple functions. And then there’s the houses. You don’t place them individually - you paint an area. Then, a resident will ask a builder to make them a home, and they’ll move in. If certain conditions are met, the house will upgrade, becoming denser or more fancy. 

This painting mechanic extends to several other systems. Designating trees for chopping or replanting, areas for hunting, routes for patrols - fields, grazing land, paving roads. As you progress your city is awash with different layers of painted sections - it seems messy - but you’re adding to it bit by bit, and reducing sections you don’t need. It’s an elegant solution that reduces a lot of potential micromanagement, and allows for easy and quick changes and rapid expansion.

A City That Grows With You

And the result is a bustling, organic town that is part your creation, part the handiwork of your townsfolk. You are ultimately in control of 95% of what’s going on - but it’s that 5% out of your hands creating something you can never fully anticipate. Villagers might go a route you’re not expecting, so a road gets built - and you have to adjust and improvise.

I found myself sitting back and just watching my pops go about their lives. Tracking which way they go to work. Which market they buy from. Which is their tavern of choice. Then you take that information, and improve something. 

The game feels very alive. People are always travelling, working, and living in your city. The building and order-by-painting mechanic makes designating this or that take a matter of seconds. It feels comfortable to play.

It’s approachable to start, but there’s a lot of depth hidden away tied to logistics and citizen management. There are pitfalls to fall down that’ll have you rerolling your town and starting again. But once you’ve come to terms with the mechanics, it’s easy to get things up and running and experiment in new lands. 

The engine and simulated aspects really are quite amazing, and provide you a nudge to build something that feels compelling. There are a lot of different gears turning, and when it works it’s great - though that isn’t all the time. 

Frustrations in the Details

With the computer handling roads and housing placement, it’s not uncommon for villagers to have their path blocked, or lose access to somewhere. In most cases, it’s not your fault. Just, they’ve got confused, or are following a bad path instead of creating a new one. It’s all very complex and I don’t fully understand it - meaning in most cases, I don’t know how to go about solving it. 

Everything can be fine, and then out of nowhere you can be hit with a huge stack of warnings. Trouble is, if you click on them, they don’t provide any information. There’s no feedback as to what’s wrong. You either have to guess at a solution, or ignore the warnings hoping they resolve themselves.

The lack of feedback does spill over into other areas. The logistics side of the game resorts to taking shots in the dark hoping something will get fixed, and there’s a ton of information available to you - but finding something that’s useful is difficult. 

For the information that is available, it’s hard to process it with the cumbersome book of records. Those same UX complaints can be applied to the building UI. You have this tiny little panel to navigate and find what you’re looking for, which becomes frustrating.

Some systems are great on paper, but not clear in game, like patrolling and fortifications. I mostly got on board and made them work - but I was never quite sure if I was doing it right.

Also, and this may be a me thing - but it seemed to be drawing a lot of resources from the GPU. Performance was never an issue, but I had to go in and manually tell my GPU to chill out each time I loaded into the game. Not too sure what was going on there.

Impressive, Yet Imperfect

Ultimately though, despite the issues with readability, clarity, and confusion caused by pop ups and unclear systems, this is a really great city builder that offers something unique. It’s got rough edges, but its core is compelling and interesting. I’m a huge fan of the visuals and the impressive attention to detail in buildings - and the sound design makes your city feel alive. 

Its difficulty curve allowed me to get into the swing of things quickly, yet there’s plenty of intricacies squirreled away that’ll reward mastery of the game's many systems. Its different factions allow for new ways to play, and the way your city forms around your townsfolk means no two settlements will ever be the same. 

I’ve played games that align with this in one aspect or another, but as a complete package this is a very novel game - and it has a legitimate claim to be the best medieval city builder on the market. If you can come to terms with some frustrating aspects, this should be on the radar of all fans of the genre.