If you’re a simulation or strategy fan, chances are you have been disappointed with the lack of decent entries to the franchise in recent times. The simulation genre has been extremely stagnant for quite some time with few influential titles releasing in the past year. 2019 has a range of diverse city-building games all of which try to add something unique to the genre. Foundation is one such game. Releasing in Q1 2019, the game plans to “reinvent” the genre with some new mechanics.
Foundation is essentially a simulation. You start off with nothing, and you have to build up and expand from there. The interesting part is that you do not drop readily constructed buildings on the map and expect to solve problems instantly. The concept of zoning is retained, which helps segregate workplaces, gathering and extracting areas, and residential buildings. When you are too full of buildings in your existing area, you can branch out and buy another piece of land to expand on, which is essentially another portion of a large grid on the map. Each section of the map has a different concentration of resources.
The game enjoys some decent amount of micromanagement. You need to assign builders for construction, else buildings won’t be constructed. You need to assign workers for each workplace, otherwise they won’t function. You can monitor production, maintenance costs, villagers and their status, and much more directly, which helps identify vulnerabilities in the chain of production. Micromanagement also means the game punishes instant gratification pretty severely. For example, let’s say you need more food produced and your population is starving. In most games you can drop a building and ramp up production immediately, while in Foundation, you need to wait for construction is done and work to start and before it starts production, by which your population would probably be dead.
The classic mechanics of a simulation are also there, meaning that you can observe your citizens going about doing their jobs while you’re managing your settlements. Workflows from gathering buildings to storehouses to buildings using them as resources, as so on. Citizen needs are an important thing, and they can be individually monitored.
Folk interested in buying Foundation can purchase the game on Steam. It’s in Early Access, so purchase only if you’re interested to support the game while it grows. The game does have some bugs at the moment, but it looks very promising.