Builders of Greece

Review

Welcome to Ancient Greece! You and a group of settlers with minimal resources have reached a beautiful new land. As you slowly pivot 360 degrees, discovering plains, forests, hills, mountains, and shorelines, you conclude that it is the perfect spot to start your Polis. "This is it, ancient fellows", speaking to the settler at the top of your lungs, "We will build the agora right here where I am standing"! It is time for you to be part of the Builders of Greece.

Builders of Greece is a city-builder game developed by Blum Entertainment and published by CreativeForge Game on the Steam platform on February 28, 2024. The game has been released as an early access and, therefore, is under development, and the gameplay might change with updated versions until it reaches version 1.0.

As I am writing this review, the game consists of two modes of play: a campaign and a sandbox mode. Right now, you have access to one of the eight campaign missions and one of eight maps if you decide to play in the sandbox mode. 

After selecting the mode you wish to play, you'll be prompted to choose whether you'd like your adviser to give you fewer or more hints while playing. If it is your first playthrough, I recommend selecting more to understand how the game works. After that, you probably won't need much help.

At the start of the game, you'll have a certain number of drachmas, woods, stones and lower citizen class. After choosing where you want to build the agora, you'll start erecting houses and resource buildings, such as woodcutter and hunting houses, fisherman huts, quarries and clay pits. The first thing that I noticed is that only the quarries have resources that deplete over time. However, when the woodcutters cut down trees, we don’t see the forest diminish. I think having an unlimited supply of fish and animals for food is fair, along with clay for pottery.  And, of course, you have to build more fisherman’s huts, hunting lodges and clay pits to generate more supply of these resources. Whatever building you erect always needs drachmas (coins) and two or three other resources. The resources will vary with new buildings as you progress through the technology tree.

There are three phases on the technology tree. Each has around 15 or so new technologies to unlock. Some will unlock new buildings, while others will improve efficiency for acquired technologies. But to access all stages of the technology tree, you must build a specific building to access each stage. The sophist house will give you access to stage one, for example.

The economy has two aspects: taxes and exporting goods through maritime trade from the harbour. Any extra resources can be sold from the harbour to oncoming trade ships. Yes, you can buy goods too, but I would recommend trying to sell instead of buy. What I like about the trading port interface is that you can set when to buy or sell items based on quantity. So, you might have 80 units of wood in your warehouses, but you want to make sure you have a minimum of 40 units for your local spending. You can set, for example, that anything beyond 40 units can be sold at the port. But, if you have fewer than 40 units, no transaction will be made when ships arrive.  You can do the same for purchasing goods. Ultimately, it would be best to keep your people happy by having low taxes, plenty of resources to access (marketplace if too far away from the agora), rest places, healers and entertainment across the three classes of citizens. One thing that strikes me is that there are no religious buildings that you can construct in this game. I believe that in ancient Greece, there were many gods, and people would cherish them with offerings or take time to reflect on the gods. I think it would be essential to implement a building such as a temple to contribute to the happiness of your people, but this is not the case here. It is an oversight, in my opinion.

Most importantly, you must have a positive income regardless of the port's help. After restarting the game a few times, I followed the same process, building a new farm or any other essential buildings as a first step. Then, I added three to four new houses of the lower class and upgraded three to four houses to the medium class and a few to the higher class (when available) to keep my cash flow positive at any given time.

Military-wise, you can build a barracks and create basic swordsmen at first; then, as you unlock new technologies, you have access to more units, including archers. There is a cavalry icon at the barracks, but unfortunately, this unit is currently unavailable on the current version of the game. After creating these units, you can position them around the map and wait for an invading force to arrive on your shore.

A few events will occur during your gameplay, and they will always be the same, which is a bit of a shame. Firstly, a treasure will be found at one of your quarries, and you can either keep it, adding 300 drachmas to your finances, or give it to the people, which will make them happier. The second event will be the wrap of Poseidon in the sea, which could affect your fish resources. All you have to do is decide whether or not to send the fisherman's boats to sea during these events. The third event is an attack by an invading force. That only happened once in all my gameplays. The last two events are illness and a group of immigrants arriving in your city.

The game has several bugs, one of which is that it hangs for several seconds after auto-saving, which is annoying. Another bug is that even though I only experienced one attack in each of my playthroughs, I still received the Great General achievement, which is supposed to be awarded when you win three battles in a single playthrough. Nope, that never happened. In addition to these two bugs, there are other little hiccups that are to be expected in a game released as early access.

The graphics are nice, and the camera feature is fine.  I haven't experienced any crashes to the desktop, which is always a bonus. It's a solid early-access game with a good foundation to become a great game. I guess we have to wait and see in which direction the developers will take this game. So far, so good, but please include religious/spiritual buildings as soon as possible.

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com

Builders of Greece Steam Store Page