Pioneers of Pagonia Early Access Review – Settle in with this magical city-builder

14.12.2023 - 15:31 / thesixthaxis.com

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