Fabledom developed by Grenna Games released with early access yesterday on Steam for only $15.  It is a city builder game with a cartoonish bent set in a land of fairytales. You can pick to be a prince or a princess to govern a small. Throughout the game, you will have random events that add a little fairy tale flavor that ranges from additional quests that involve giving away some of your resources to enduring spells from evil witches. Keep in mind, the game is still unfinished but offers a bit of playthrough and I spent a solid 8 hours on it. It has a very relaxing feel to it that is similar to cities skylines and as you grow your settlement, you can annex neighboring aras.

You start out with 4 peasants and have a series of tutorial quests that involve building livnig quarters (homsteads), farms and workshops (laborers huts). These are used by the populace to live. Lumber camps and stone camps employ the populace and are used to gather resources which can be turned into buildings or higher tier resources.

The game has seasonal and weather cycles which add a nice twist to the game. Crops take time to grow and there are boom and busts cycles of resource gathering which must be taken advantage of in spring and summer so that you may last through the winter. It's a nice refreshing take on a well established genre.

The set up screen has a random seed generator that is well appreciated in this style of game where you are dependant on map resources.

The game has diplomacy as well as combat however the combat system does not appear to be implemented yet, and the diplomacy focuses mainly on fairytale romance at the moment. However the backbone of the game is in place for what appears to be a rich environment for NPC interaction.

I am a huge fan of Masters of Orion and Civilization even Sins of a Solar empire. I even played the original Galactic Civilizations on OS2/Warp back in the day but I had lost touch with this game even if it was later available in Windows and on Steam. So when this game became available for early access, I jumped at the chance to play it. Now, completely a newbie I am truly enjoying this 4x game.

The most exciting thing about this game is the new chatgpt inspired AI that helps generate new custom races that you can play with or against. You can start out as the humans (Terans) and slowly go to conquer the galaxy and wni the game through several win-conditions: Prestige (which is like a total score), economic, conquest, research, alliances, ascension, end of turns.

According to the dev notes entry #9, the map has been reworked to allow for sectors of tiles within the galaxy and subspace streams to warp between them.

The idea of the game is you start out on your home world with a few ships, a probe, a colony ship and a fighter ship. You slowly expand and explore until you find some suitable areas to colonize until you meet your neighbors (friend or foe). Rinse and repeat until you win the game. Pretty standard formula for most of these types of games. Besides of where the game takes place (space, the mideval period of europe, earth) what makes them all different is the nuances of how you expand and succeed.

Galactic Civilizations 4 (Galciv4) toys with the idea of a completely randomly made universe that has a lot of surprises via anomolies which are discoverable objects that can give you resources, money, ship enhancements or unleash monsters, ships or pirates. These anomalies can be discovered by a flag ship and every civilization is supposed to get only one. This flag ship becomes more powerful as it discovers more and gains more experience.