Against the Storm Review (Zerpad)
Overall, I really like the concepts that Eremite has shown off here, but I think the implementation and balancing of those concepts still needs some refinement to make an awesome game.
The big issue for me is that all my towns felt the same, so the game became repetitive. Every town that I played was won by earning reputation points from the same 3 sources - completing objectives, keeping villagers happy, and opening crates. I don't think I would have been successful if I only focused on one method of gaining reputation points. It's definitely not like the Civilization games where you benefit from picking one win condition and then optimizing around that. Because I'm working on gaining reputation points from all the available sources, Against the Storm pushed me towards creating towns that had a lot of breadth instead of depth to what they manufactured, and so every town seemed to have a significant overlap. The exact buildings and raw materials changed with every town (e.g. one town would have Lumber Mill and another would have a Carpenter), but every town needed some way of producing planks, flour, food, etc to be successful. When every town is trying to produce the same things to win the game, they all start to feel like the same town.
The other issue I had is that all the random buildings, resources, map modifiers, and other rogue-like features just seemed to create chaos rather than actual strategic challenges. I really like that the game is trying to make each town a different experience by adding random twists, so I don't want that aspect to be taken out of the game. However, with so many random things occurring it's hard to feel like you can develop and implement a detailed strategy that's unique to a specific town. Instead my strategy for every town is a vague notion of things I need to accomplish to fill up the reputation bar and keep villagers from revolting. I'm always using the same general motions to achieve victory, but I'm unable to make specific plans around the late game (i.e. service buildings). The late game just ends up being whatever coalesces out of the chaos and randomness of the resources I find on the map and the building selection that I draw.