Recent reviews by fannyekdahl

The flavor this DLC adds is nice, although it gets a little samey after a while. The main reason to dissuade people from getting FoI is the struggle mechanic, which unfortunately is the core of the whole thing.

I wanted to like the struggle, because there definitely were unique forces at work in medieval Iberia that merit their own mechanics in the game. But the requirements to end the struggle are too strict, arbitrary, and ahistorical. I get that the devs wanted to encourage a different kind of gameplay compared to the usual map painting, but telling a player who owned the entire peninsula and has achieved cultural and religious unity that they can't end the struggle is a bit rich, because that's not how history works.

I'm still playing it so I can get the achievements, but doing so just shows how artificial your gameplay has to be in order to actually end the struggle. Once I get the achievements I'm uninstalling though, and hopefully mods like EPE and CFP will give me enough flavor that I won't miss that aspect of this DLC either. What a wasted opportunity this was.

In addition to the rightful complaints about how it should be free, this DLC literally doesn't work as intended. I'm actually kind of glad it wasn't free because it would have broken literally everyone's games if it had been.

It breaks in-game events on a pretty fundamental level, so you get spymasters telling on themselves, AI kids launching schemes that are off limits to player characters at the same age, and a royal couple bowing before their own empty thrones to demand satisfaction because one of them is trying to seduce the other. Just go take a look at the CK subreddit and you'll see new examples of this sort of thing posted every day.

It's comically broken only I can't laugh because this is the kind of elementary stuff that Paradox should be ashamed of themselves for. I'm going to have to completely uninstall this to make the game playable again.

Can you recommend something you didn't enjoy?

The ambulance system is clunky and should be more automated, unless you really like micromanaging. The screen you open to dispatch vehicles doesn't zoom properly, so you can't see the details of certain emergencies when you click on them. The pathing to get to ambulances is a mess, and they bug out regularly. At best, the ambulances felt incidental and I kept forgetting about them, because there are no notifications or anything else to draw your attention to emergencies. Depending on your settings you'll be inundated with notifications that your staff are ready for training, but not for things that are supposed to be emergencies.

The 2nd of the 3 levels was particularly weak and felt like a massive slog. It forces you to do research at the beginning, which undermines the whole emergency aspect of it. Soon I ended up with so many walk in patients that I didn't even need to send out ambulances, which at least feels more "emergency" like, but there was still no sense of urgency. Two of the three new diseases introduced are so visually over the top that eventually it feels like the only things on your screen are beehives and yellow raincoats and it becomes unpleasant to look at.

These were the first three hospitals in this series that I didn't try to three-star and probably won't try again. That said, I have to agree with everyone else who says that this adds a good amount of new content and mechanics to the game, which is what every DLC should do. Maybe the changes just aren't for me, but this DLC was a sour note in a series I've had so much fun with, which is a bummer. But if the mechanics sound interesting to you, wait to buy it on sale.

Update: I'm changing my review to a positive one because the developers are doing such a great job with listening to what users want. The game updates have all been great!

***Original review follows***

I wish there was an option between yes and no for whether I would recommend this game because I'm really torn.

There's a lot to like about it, but there's a lot that doesn't work. For example:

- This probably will strike most people as pedantic, but anyone who has any basic knowledge about farming knows that straw is inedible and that hay and straw aren't the same things. I didn't know this either until I got a farming-adjacent job so it's not a thing most people think about, but it's still jarring to be told that I'm out of "straw" to feed the animals. It's entirely possible the developers made a choice to conflate the two in-game to streamline things so it's not the end of the world, but it's a distraction.

- Domestication robs the game of a lot of the fun to be had because things are mechanically off. You can have 300+ grain in storage, but bread production is so slow (even when set to "high priority") that the game is always saying you're low on food. Bread was a staple in the early days of agriculture, and the idea that a settlement wouldn't be producing and consuming massive quantities of bread (and beer for that matter) is ridiculous.

- The above also goes for domestic animals. Some animals reproduce so quickly that you either need an implausible number of barns or you have to play whack-a-mole but with like, goats. The wool production is OP as well. Pigs and cattle reproduce slower, but almost don't seem worth the trouble. This is especially true for cattle. Speaking of which, you don't get much milk from either cows or goats, it disappears from your inventory almost immediately, and there are no products you can make with it for trade (cheese and yogurt were not far behind animal domestication in human history). It's almost not worth having any other livestock except for sheep.

- Speaking of trade: it's also not especially useful. As the game goes on, what the traders bring is less and less useful to you or in too small of quantities to matter. Also you can buy livestock from them but you can't trade any of your livestock? A lot of the time, that's why people would invest the resources to fatten up a cow or a pig in the first place.

- The morale system is too harsh. There ought to be other ways to boost morale, like defeating a raiding party, having a good hunt, and in times of plenty (which you can't help but have later in the game), you should be able to have a festival or something.

- Now it's time to talk about dogs because you know what else would be great for morale? Being able to interact with the dogs! It blows my mind that in the year 2019 a developer would put dogs in a game that can't be interacted with, that's an easy crowd pleaser. It could be an easy way for the people to gain a small morale bump. Even better would be if the dogs could accompany people on hunts.

It's a good game, and I don't regret buying it, but I do regret the missed opportunities. Maybe the developers have plans to make changes like this as time goes on.

It's fine. Shorter than I wanted it to be. Don't let the Katamari comparisons fool you.

Constant crashes on Mac. People have been having these problems for years and yet the Devs aren't interested in fixing them. Guess CA just likes to take our money and run.

Has stopped opening on Mac.

Tropico 5 feels like a step back from 4.