Settling down hasn’t always been about making do with a partner because there’s ‘not too much wrong with them’. It used to be about pioneer spirit, exploration and adventure. As someone who knows settling very well, Volker Wertich – the creator of the original Settlers series – has spent so much time with those diminutive discoverers that he’s decided to forge his own path into the digital landscape, with new city-builder Pioneers of Pagonia the delightful result.
In the Early Access release you’ve got a selection of predefined maps to choose from, starting with the tutorial Guidance Map which guides you through your first few hours, and teaches you how to lay down the foundations of your first homestead. Arriving here in the Venturer, you’ve travelled to this new land with a bevy of builders and artisans, and a healthy stock of materials to get started with.
If you’ve played any city builder, RTS or Settlers titles, the setup of Pioneers of Pagonia will be immediately familiar. Start off with the basics, woodcutters, mines, etc. to start bringing in the resources. From there, it’s all about steady improvement and expansion, growing your budding civilisation from a couple of huts into a thriving city, packed with industry.
I love how straightforward building your town is, and it all starts with the roads. Put a road down, and along each side of it you’ll see building plots. This tells you whether you can squeeze that Guild Hall in there, or whether you’ve saved yourself a tiny spot for a well, and it makes building a breeze.
There’s a great sense of granularity to how your township functions, and many of your buildings can be focused upon a particular job type or production. You can task your Forester with only planting softwood trees if you’re running low, or make your Sawmill stop making hardwood planks. Workshops produce various items that are made to order, so they’re not just mindlessly making items for the sake of it. If needs be, you can set them to produce things indefinitely too, so if you’re in the midst of a huge expansion push you’re not constantly having to drop back into the menus to keep everything flowing.
That granularity extends to the training of new workers. A guard will need at the very minimum a wooden spear, so you have to craft their weapon before you can recruit them. It took me a while to understand why a Forester building was unmanned, before I realised that I had no shovels for them to dig holes to plant trees in. This might be too much for some people, but I loved not only the feeling of control, but also how much of a living, thriving city this helped it to feel like.
While the first couple of maps forgo combat and enemy camps, you’ll start to come across a variety of foes to plague your township as you delve further into Pioneers of Pagonia. This is not a game where you’re going to be commanding huge armies – you should look elsewhere if that’s the only thing that you find enjoyable in life – but your soldiers will protect your city, and you can send them out to perform sorties and raids against any ne’er-do-wells that happen to pop up.
What you might not see coming is the supernatural elements of the game that start to appear the further along you progress. The current top tier of the development system is sees the arrival of magical swords and armour, wizards joining your ranks, and alongside the thieves and bandits you encounter, there’s werewolves and ghosts lurking in the woods as well. I really hope that Pioneers of Pagonia leans even further into this aspect, as it really lends the game its own flavour and identity beyond its peers.
Pioneers of Pagonia is incredibly peaceful. There’s some light incidental music, the chirps of birds, and then the subdued sounds of your citizens going about their business. I’d like it if these increased in volume when you zoomed in, mainly for my own amusement, but the restful atmosphere is utterly beguiling.
Little tweaks are all that Pioneers of Pagonia needs to really shine, and the Early Access release is already a fantastic starting point for the game. Some quality-of-life improvements, like being able to click on an objective to take you directly to the building it wants you to put down would save a lot of searching through menus, though the more you play the clearer it becomes. It feels as though these things will be well in hand, There’s a long list of things on the early access roadmap, and I can’t wait to see this idyllic settlement continue to grow.
