I picked it up. It's fun, but its a REALLY slow burn. I find myself playing at x14 a lot. I like the city building, but there's some aspects that could use improving. Building more than one residential area can be hard because you level houses you need to meet criteria like 2 food market stalls within range. While you have control on where matters go, you don't have control on where they will put their stall. More than once I had vendors building stalls across town rather than the one next to their business to supply the houses over there. Stuff like that gets frustrating.
The solution to that one is small markets. Forget the 25 stall market: create small markets with a dozen stalls only, and add new markets only when it starts getting full.
For the remote stall workers, there's no solution except temporarily removing the family from their work place (if they're not artisans) so that someone else takes over their stall.
It's missing features currently, one of them is smell. I assume it will impact how residents cope with the smells of their area? I dunno, sounds like it will be annoying lol.
It's going to drag down your satisfaction levels, I'm guessing. Probably hard, so it becomes harder to attract new families.
Farming with crop rotations is okay as well, but in more than a few games the areas I'm in have shit fertility. You can get help with that with skill perks, but you don't get many of those and you usually need to spend them on something else.
Spoiler alert: Fertility is the "sixth" resource; you can only have two rich resources in an area: berries, wild game, stone, iron, clay, and fertility. If you see two crowns over deposits on your starting area, you don't need to check with the construction overlays: you'll have shit fertility.
Also, for now, if you have a crown over stone - reroll. That's a wasted "rich", since you need relatively stone.
I'm not upset I spent $30 on it, but I hope they add more to it.
I'm guessing a 4th tier of housing at one point, and presumably "luxuries". My guess is that you'll be able to raise one large town to "burgh" or similar (but only one per map), to make it some kind of capital. There's room for more tech, so I'm assuming those will deal with that (almost certainly the "trade tree"). The 4th tier could preclude some family activities (maybe it locks you into specific works - families in a 4th tier home can't go work the field, hunt or gather berries. Or your home can have an orchard, but not goats).
I wouldn't be surprised to see scenario maps, where you have a fixed start, and slightly different objectives. There's at least one area where I've spotted "destroyed" ruins, so something like "After the black plague" where you arrive in a devastated map, with fallow fields, ruins, and ready-made but abandoned buildings like that. And less starting resources, so you have to actively pick which ruins you destroy to salvage the resources and which you keep for later.
The manor part seems a bit primitive, so I assume it will be a focus for additions.