I enjoy the building and management but my issue is the fact that you can play for several hundred game years and nothing really ever changes beyond scale; you start with a small village and end with that and several other satellite villages scattered around it. In all that time you achieve no new tech, no government, no new buildings and no new threats present themselves; you start with starvation, fire, disease, cold and that's it for the duration. It would have been far more interesting if you could see progress through the years beyond adding yet another 0 horse town adjacent to the last; more buildings, economics, government, law and order, and all the other systems that come into play once a reliable food source is present. At any rate I'm sure that the mods will go a long way toward enhancing some things.
This is very true. Its more of a survival sim with building parts than it is a real city builder. Your town will always be small, it will never really grow to large population numbers but your foot print on the land does grow. You still manage what you build and how much but you don't gain any tech there really isn't any advancement. Assuming you have the materials you can build anything right from the start.
Game essentially comes down to micro managing what your population does and building stuff to suit that. There is no tech tree or advancement to say except that your townspeople are still alive and you have enough wood / sweaters / food / etc to survive the winter. There is trading which allows you to trade goods you have for goods you need or would like to start using (different seeds as an example) to but that really isn't the same as a tech tree.
Overall its fairly basic if still fun for $20. I'm guessing more stuff will get added over time.