Ian's Rocket

An interesting, 'lite' take on empire building and trading that is more than meets the eye.

There's plenty of influences here and light touches from games like Patrician/Port Royale, older empire building games, and the Civilization is mostly just format and looks.

This is a pretty cozy and fun game to grab and just build a little empire, but it has more problem solving and logistics than you would expect.
The combat is the more simplistic side of it, but also has a bit more detail than first meets the eye. It's definitely the simplest and weakest point though.

I'm still at the start of the Classical Era, but I can see where this is going: building Wonders, defending against attackers, doing quests for your neighbors, exploring to find one more resource node.
There's a super fun loop in place, with sometimes multiple venues of possibilities being available, causing ADHD moments of "what was I doing, again?" if you decide to tackle everything at once.

I also really like the additional consumption mechanic: your populace will buy your Sellable goods (like Pottery, or Stone Sculptures). As you pay the populace for labor, and you can see how much money a city's populace holds overall, this is a way to "tax" them back for their production. If you control supply, you control the prices of goods - while this seems to have little influence overall, it is such a neat detail.
This kind of awesome feature and production-consumption loop is seen on games like Ratopia and Distant Worlds - vastly different games - which are among my favorite.
Of course, you can also offload excess production to any neighbors that will trade with you instead of wanting to kill you.

The tech tree will have you go to stone age into modern times, all while being directly involved in the action by controlling a Hero's party (Ian), so the scale of the game feels very personal, which isn't exactly common for any games like this - except for the likes of Hazeron or few others, which I would really like to see more of.

This is a super underground game holding 2 reviews after over a whole month being released, with clear details that indicate that whoever worked on it, enjoyed doing so.
Definitely worth a check if the features seem interesting!

PS: Zero bugs or issues in straight 4 hours of play. Only thing that felt that could be improved is being able to queue 9 military units at once, and some of the UI button positionings can feel confusing at the first 30 minutes.

After the first little while, everything is automated, which is awesome. Also, love the in-game jokes and storylines! The music's great too! Lastly, the game is totally addictive!

I've played a handful of resource management, sim/civ style games like this, but none made me smile quite like this one. Everything is just so full of charm. From the dialogue, the music, and (my favorite) the animations, everything just feels fun and inviting. I've not played a ton of hours, but i can't wait to lose dozens more as i explore the world and build that rocket! Definitely recommend.