Banished is about as good as a city builder gets. Engaging and deep, interesting survival mechanics. Individual citizens with personalities and needs. It's hard. But rarely unfair. If you can make it past your first winter you should be able to muddle through anything else the game tries to hit you with.
It's a frequent pitfall of city builder style management games to try and go the Dwarf Fortress route of simulating everything to the point where the game becomes a grandfather clock, a huge daunting complex thing you dare not stick your hands in and try to play with yourself. This is not in itself a bad thing, but it has created a very intimidating image of the genre.
Banished is so honed in on what it wants to simulate that it is actually pretty hard to get sidetracked - there's not diplomacy systems, there's not military systems, there's not intricate settler relations, it simply gives you a bunch of tools with the goal of "don't go extinct immediately" and lets you work it out. The game can be punishing, but its very restrained scope ensures that most of the factors of survival are things that you can very quickly learn to control.
Really the only downside to such an approach is that the lack of objectives and complex "projects" means that once you get a stable settlement going there's not much driving you to keep on going.
Banished is so honed in on what it wants to simulate that it is actually pretty hard to get sidetracked - there's not diplomacy systems, there's not military systems, there's not intricate settler relations, it simply gives you a bunch of tools with the goal of "don't go extinct immediately" and lets you work it out. The game can be punishing, but its very restrained scope ensures that most of the factors of survival are things that you can very quickly learn to control.
Really the only downside to such an approach is that the lack of objectives and complex "projects" means that once you get a stable settlement going there's not much driving you to keep on going.