Vodos posted:

I can't recommend it. The trade aspect is fine, it's Patrician/Port Royale but with land trade routes instead of ships. You can build new cities pretty much anywhere on the map, the location decides what resources you have access to for production. City growth is strictly tied to the number of businesses you have, which is a bit weird. As the city population grows, its influence area grows and your influence is what progresses you through the trader ranks instead of wealth/cargo space. Each rank increases your unit limit and gives you 3 points to spend in the tech tree. Tech is used to unlock new or improved production, infrastructure and units.
And that brings us to the horrible piece of poo poo that is the combat system in this game. Units automatically engage enemy units around them, however one units can only be engaged by a couple of units and all units are way too durable. If you engage 100 bandits with your main army of 2000 men it takes minutes at speed *10 (holding space down) to kill them because most of the army just stands around looking at the 2-3 units fighting. Besieging a city is a massive pain in the rear end, in theory your units should set up siege camps around the city and slowly reduce its "siege points" or whatever, but the city keeps spitting out units and every time they do, your units start moving around, breaking the siege and more often than not get stuck doing nothing at all. I literally spent over half an hour at speed *10 trying to take a single neutral city. Bandit camps are almost worse because if you don't engage them soon after they spawn, they grow and then they spawn units so quickly that you never even get to siege the camp.

TL,DR: The trading part is similar to the Patrician games but the land combat is lovely and frustrating and you can't really just build a peaceful trading empire.