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Dawn of Man

Started by Settler, March 05, 2019, 05:54:16 PM

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Settler

This game was released just a few days ago. I actually got an email with some offers, including money off this game. I'd never heard of it, but once I did a little research, I decided to treat myself.

The game is an ancient city, well really village, builder. You start your settlement in the early Stone Age and take it right the way up to the Iron Age. It features hunting (including mammoths!), raids (people attack your settlement), and a tech tree, through which you progress by acquiring/producing resources and passing milestones. There is a farming system that allows your people to grow grains, pulses (peas, bitter vetch, etc.), and fruit trees. Stock raising is also included, and the two systems have a limited interaction with each other.

Strong points:
* It's easy to get into. The tutorial covers the most important aspects, and anyone who plays this kind of game will pick the rest up pretty fast.
* The graphics are nice. You can spend a long time just watching your settlement. The maps are large and look cool.
* Gameplay is fun, if not massively challenging (though I have only played the easiest level so far), and the progression keeps things interesting.
* A couple of cool features: work areas that can be defined to collect diverse resources and end automatically once the resource is exhausted; and, primal view, which allows you see edible plants, animals and resources more easily on the map.
* Resources decay – no more bread hanging around for five years waiting for someone to eat it!

Weak points:
* Two things in particular, hunting and defence, require a fair bit of micromanagement to work well.
* Considering the length of time the game covers, the amount of content is rather underwhelming. There are relatively few buildings, crops, etc., even compared to vanilla Banished. The tech tree is likewise sparse.
* The scope for modding appears to be limited, although the developers have said they are working on it.
* The AI sometimes leaves something to be desired. Your villagers will neglect to do basic things, like eat or drink or get warm, before heading out on a long mission, and then die of starvation or hypothermia.
* It can be hard to control resource distribution optimally. Similarly, since there are no fixed jobs for villagers, keeping control of what they do is a challenge.

Overall, I'd say it's a fun game with a lot of potential. It's similar enough to Banish to be familiar but different enough to be fresh. I think it will at least keep me busy until Ancient Cities is finally released.

Link: https://madrugaworks.com/dawnofman/

It's available on Steam and GOG.

A few random screenshots.




Nilla

It looks like a nice game. I looked at it a few days ago but it seems like you can only play it on Steam. At least Humble Store, where I looked only offers a Steam key. I refuse Steam!

brads3

THE game has potential but a long ways from now. Banished gives players more control and freedoms out of the gate,before we even consider the great modders. the controls are glicthy.game will pause and unpause sporadically.the menus seem to be so you can read 1 at a time,you can't place several buildings at once.you click thru like 3 buttons to place 1 house,then do 3 clicks again to build the next house. the return key to center on the village jumps you around the map without going to the village.focusing on a character moves the map when you click back to normal.so after leaviung the charafcter,you now have to recenter and reset the whole map.you have no map icon. this is ok fror a small village but after a while it will become an issue.

     the game has a ton of work in the graphics.i think this may be adding to the glitchynessof the controls.as the comp is busy with the graphics, it slows down on other functions. still doesn't explain all of them. the ability to zoo to a character or even building perspective is super cool.if banished had that, we could make super pics.you can zoom down and become a dog and the camera will follow it around.the game also gives you a button to change the map view so you can see resources better.this helps see thru the trees to find berry bushes,animals,or even the characters.

       one of the big drawbacks to me is the game is set backwards from Banished.we set workplaces like gathering huts and assign wokrers to it. the Dawn of Man game, you set workplaces and the characters do what they want ,when they want. you set a hunting area and how many should hunt that zone.a zone to gather twigs and another for stones. the game sends the characters around to do all of them.this self managing concept has potential but not the way the game implements it.

       the player has no control or info windows to keep track of progress in each zone.so you get popup warning that you are out of such and such even though you sent workers to find those items. the gathered food does function with the weather. so if you set a spot to gather food,the characters run around to it but can't collect the food un til certain times of the year. this means insteadof worrying about farmers being on fields like banished,we have to micro manage everyone. or else,the character is trying to gather food at the wrong time and then gather sticks when food is ripe.

          as i say, there are several concepts that have great potential if balanced and used better. i only played the tutorial and then a 2 year freeplay to get used to some functions. enough to clear a survival achievement.  the tech tree restricts what we could do.no start as a farmer and make bread. you have to earn that by jumping thru too many hoops.seemed that you had to do all techs to get the next level. no shortcut path. instead of concentrating on livestock and food seeds,you have to do all the techs on the way there.at that rate to build a mill would take a month of game play. and we still can't build a bakery. to me that restricts the player too far.Banished gives us such freedom in how we play and advance to higher tech buildings and processing.

        keep us updated. about 3 versions from now i think it would be a nicer game.hopefully by then it has modding and a more flexible free play.

Wuik

Hello !

like I always said my English need a big update .. :)

I was reading yours comments and be totally agree with you.

I got the game the first day because I was looking one sort of walktrought made by a frenchies et found the game very interresting .

But after began a simple game and be arrived at the age of cooper ...  I made this one in pause and try to simply make the achievement to get 100 people in the paleothilic first age !!
Too to try to understand the very basic mechanics of this management games...;

It was simply Impossible !!!! too much randomly evenements we can't manage..you may playing 24 hours et wasting your time..

You may put yours hunters to hunt by 5 .if a bear attack , he kill one and run far aways..

your people are always overbooked and when they are no ...your stock of food is falling to zero.

I got all achievements from Banished the first year if i remember but it was logical !! you know what you do! how to manage evenements and you learnt how to good playing little to little.
Instead of Banished , in this game you must always make micro management ...and it'is very boring at the end..
tha'ts all ..may be it was better in the future..

Hawk

Quote from: Nilla on March 06, 2019, 12:27:18 AM
It looks like a nice game. I looked at it a few days ago but it seems like you can only play it on Steam. At least Humble Store, where I looked only offers a Steam key. I refuse Steam!

It is available at GOG.

https://www.gog.com/game/dawn_of_man
[b][i]Hawk[/i][/b]

[color=#800000][i]Yes, I can multitask. I can listen, ignore and forget all at the same time.[/i][/color]

Nilla

Thank you! Then maybe I will take a look at some videos to see if it´s to my liking.

rkelly17

I've spent the last little while playing both Dawn of Man and Foundation. Both games could appeal to anyone who enjoys Banished and both have some disadvantages when compared to Banished. The primary disadvantage is in the work assignment system. In Dawn of Man you, the player, have no control over who does what when--with one exception. The game has a job queue and the next free villager is assigned to the next job in the queue. You can designate work areas and set upper limits for commodities, but after that it is up to the AI, and, as it has been noted, the AI is always artificial but not always intelligent. As a result, by the time you get to the ages where farming is increasingly important your people are often overloaded with work and everything slows down as they try to do what is necessary. After awhile it gets tedious to just watch them wander around doing this and that. The exception I mentioned is that you can select a group of people and tell them to do some task immediately. This is pretty much the only way to hunt effectively--especially of the dangerous animals. Otherwise one idiot goes out alone and tries to kill a rampaging woolly mammoth with a wooden spear and gets himself killed. This also seems to be the best way to manage fighting the occasional raiders who harass your village from time to time.

Foundation takes the opposite approach. Immigrants arrive in pairs and build a house in areas where you have zoned residential. You then assign them to a job--usually at whatever workplace you have most recently built that needs workers. They then keep that job forever, no matter how far it is from home, until you fire them. Every so often you have to fire everybody and then rehire workplace by workplace to get people working fairly near home. OR: You have to zone residential very carefully so that new arrivals move in close to where you want them to work. Builders can live anywhere, but they take forever to travel to your latest project.

All in all, I do enjoy both games even with the irritations, but both have made me really appreciate the work assignment system in Banished. Either game could do with a good look at how Banished assigns jobs.

The other area where Banished has both games beat is in the statistics provided. For example, neither game has a way of seeing how current food consumption compares to current food production.

I may stray from Banished as new games come out, but I always come back for just a few more towns along some wilderness river. Not sure whether that will happen with Dawn of Man and/or Foundation.

I am looking forward to Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. Maybe that will be a Cold War East Bloc version of Banished?