I try to avoid Early Access whenever possible, but I was so tempted by this formula I had to take a peek. It's a delightful mix of the resource/tech scramble of an RTS like Age of Empires, smashed together with the cyclical and timed survival elements of Frostpunk, as well as the logistics and planning of a more traditional city builder. The roguelite system is an excellent fit here and encourages a less nitpicky style of play than I usually fall into with strategy games, while also encouraging experimentation with each session. I love the visual style, there's a well-tuned difficulty curve, and the core loop is rock solid. The unpolished bits (as of November 2022) are in the UI, long-term progression, and strategic depth.

The UI will benefit a lot from some quality of life updates. Many actions get to be repetitive - removing / assigning workers especially, since you're doing it almost all the time. A lot of sound effects are quite similar and it isn't always clear what triggered that obviously important sound you just heard. notifications can get noisy and there's no way to quickly clear them out. Many buildings look very similar and I often found myself hunting for the right building to do the work (the ALT/CTRL modifiers did help with this, though). The icons can be difficult to distinguish between each other, which adds to the initial learning curve.

The roguelite / progression aspect appears to be padded to slow down players before they burn through all the content. There also isn't a lot to be excited about in the tech tree once you get through the "essential" upgrades. It can feel kinda bad because those upgrades seem truly necessary to play the game as it was meant to be experienced (housing and trade in particular), but it can be 10-20 hours before those are all available.

Lastly, I hope there will be some more strategic options available, in terms of how to reach victory in each session. More variety in the map generation or map types could help here too. right now you can choose between generating points through high morale vs. collecting points from events. While in theory you can specialize within these paths - focusing on satisfying a certain race or solving dangerous events vs. treasures - there's no reason not to do everything. If you don't invest in decent morale, your workers will leave during the storm. If you don't collect treasures, you won't win fast enough. On the flip side, the early game is also uniform. The first 10-15 minutes of each session are often the same, because you need the same 3 resources for all tier 2 and 3 structures. As is, the system is still great and it was satisfying to learn all the recipes and affinities. but I see the potential - if they can figure it out, it'll be awesome.

I recommend waiting for the full release since it's only getting better over time, but it's already a blast to play.