When it comes to early RTS games, you can keep your Age of Empires, your Strongholds and your Warcrafts. I’ll take The Settlers, each and every time. I couldn’t entirely tell you why this is the series that’s crawled under my skin like so many woodlice under a rock, ranged against a wealth of other inarguably top-notch outpost-building, material-mining choices, but here we are. So, you can imagine the intense excitement when I discovered Pioneers of Pagonia, an upcoming town-building RTS that’s being developed by original The Settlers designer Volker Wertich. Fortunately, I was instantly able to check it out, via the brand new demo that’s just launched on Steam!
The demo gives you access to three maps to tinker with – the Rich Forest, Wet Grassland and Dry Rocks – each of which brings its own unique biome to bear. You arrive in The Venturer, a ship that’s all set to unload its bevy of settlers onto the shore, each of which will give you a leg-up in this untamed landscape. First, though, you’re going to need roads. It’s as easy as selecting the road option and laying some down, easily snapping them together as you go. Building these unlocks plot locations alongside them, allowing you to then truly start on your outpost.
Placing your buildings down is just as clear and intuitive, locking into place against the roadside, and allowing you to easily rotate them before finalising their placement. As expected, it’s all about infrastructure to begin with, and in time-honoured fashion, it’s best to start chopping those trees down and turning the nearby stone into something more useful shapes and sizes. There’s a handy list of objectives for you to work towards, helping you to make sure your settlement will thrive, but that’s about the limit of the handholding, barring a few tutorial hints. It’s nice just to sit down and take things easy, and at least at the outset of the demo, there’s very little here to worry about other than enjoying crafting a village.
Each building requires a set number of workers, and if it’s producing multiple items you can tailor it to meet the needs of your settlement, rather than simply going ahead and making a hundred bows when you don’t have that many hunters. You still have to keep a close eye on your resources, as the materials you need to construct each building as things can easily run away from you. I hit a roadblock when I discovered that I’d run out of wooden cogs, and in order to finish the Wood Workshop that makes them I needed some cut stone, but my stone mason had been focusing on making border stones instead. For fans of micromanagement this will delight them, but thankfully many of the systems that underpin Pioneers of Pagonia take care of themselves unless you want to put your oar in.
Once you’ve got the basics up and running you’re onto the next stage: preparing your settlement for conflict. Here’s where you have to create Guard Towers and a Military Academy, and then an Armoursmith and Weaponsmith to outfit them. By this time, my village was swiftly becoming a town, and even at this early stage with the demo everything was running smoothly and efficiently.
Pioneers of Pagonia doesn’t quite have the same visual appeal as The Settlers, as it’s slightly less whimsical. However, there’s still a chunky robustness to the buildings, and some cute details that are fun to zoom in on from time to time, in between your hectic project management schedule. There’s still a number of buildings that haven’t made their way into this demo build, so I’m looking forward to seeing what else you can add to your township in the Steam Early Access release.
That release will include the likes of procedural map generation, a trade system, enemy camps and different enemy types – including wolfmen! – a selection of forty buildings and seventy different goods, with more coming features like co-op play and new production chains in the following six months as they head towards the full 1.0 release at some point in 2024.
Pioneers of Pagonia is the epitome of cosy RTS gaming, with a reassuring and thoroughly enjoyable set of tools, townsfolk and town titivation. I can’t wait to settle in to play some more when Early Access arrives on 13th December 2023.
