In this beautiful strategy city builder from the creator of The Settlers series, 'You don't have to make your people happy, instead, your people have to make you happy'

pcgamer.com:

There are all sorts of city builders these days: survival, strategy, urban, medieval, sci-fi, fantasy, and even cozy. But all city builders roughly fall into one of two categories: the kind where if you mess up, your citizens move out of your city, and the kind where if you mess up, your citizens die horrible, agonizing deaths.

Or so I thought. While talking with Volker Wertich this week about his upcoming strategy city builder Pioneers of Pagonia, I asked what happens if things go wrong, such as not harvesting enough food for the city's population. Do citizens leave when their needs aren't met, or do they die?

«Neither,» Wertich told me. «In our game, You don't have to make your people happy, instead, your people have to make you happy. That's the general idea.»

Wertich was the designer and programmer of strategy city builder The Settlers back in 1993, as well as The Settlers 3 in 1998. Wertich was also involved with Ubisoft Blue Byte's more recent The Settlers: New Allies, but left the studio mid-development in 2020 after «the direction of the game was completely changed to a different vision,» he says.

Now Wertich and a team of 20 developers at Envision Entertainment are working on Pioneers of Pagonia, and today gave us our first look at the strategy city builder's gameplay, which you can see below:

Though the trailer is a brief one, a few things stand out: it's an utterly lovely looking game, the details and animations of the buildings and workers are mesmerizing to watch, and gosh—there are a heck of a lot of little citizens walking around.

«In a quite common situation it can happen that you have 500 units on screen,» Wertich says, and players will «definitely have multiple thousands of inhabitants in your overall