Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown is a medieval kingdom city builder where you manage your main kingdom and build settlements. Keeping the citizens happy while maintaining defense and expanding forward.

The main map you fight on is called Nysamor. You get to pick from one of a few different starting providence locations. There are a few more areas in the game than this, but these all start with the basic materials you get to farm.

I ended up going with Dranoth as I rather liked the name, and I was wondering what was going on with the center of the map not having any starting locations in it. It turns out the enemies tend to collect there. There are also other areas you get to claim later that have different needed resources.

The game gives you the option to have the tutorial enabled or not. I rather liked that you don’t play a smaller, more basic game as the tutorial, and then are left having to start over. It’s also nice when there is the option to skip tutorials in-game if you don’t care for them or have already done them.

I found it to be a decent helping point. With many things broken down into a few steps. Along with the game highlighting key UI elements to help guide you through things. There is even a questing system to help remind you what your next goal is to obtain.

Depending on whether you are playing on the standard speed or a much quicker game. The tutorial lasted for the first couple of hours of gameplay. Going over most things, from starting the basics of what to build, all the way up to combat.

A big thing that you spend a lot of time trying to balance is the happiness of your citizens. There is a feudal system where different working types within your kingdom demand different goods and services.

The last thing you want is everyone causing trouble or deciding to leave. While there are threats like fires, disease, and other issues. A declining population from unhappiness tends to be quite a game killer in these sorts of games. So, I made sure to put in a decent effort to ensure the needs of my people were met most of the time.

As your kingdom expands and you attract more individuals to your kingdom. This game is quite a bit different than most. Instead of having the same requirements to keep your citizens happy. They start demanding more goods. It’s no longer about having a house and food. Even among the lowest class, which is the farmers.

This game also puts in a few restraints to try and force you to expand out. I kind of found the limitation a bit odd once I realized what was going on. In each location, you can only have one of each resource building from the logistics building tab.

That restriction applies to things like logger camp, miners camp, and quarry camp. It took a couple of hours of gameplay to realize I was no longer able to keep up with my kingdom's demands. Along with the fact you can't have more the one of these types of buildings per area.

These types of resources, like lumber, do deplete over time as well. I would expect that at some point after moving the logging camp around my starting area. I’d simply run out of trees to cut down. Where I then become increasingly reliant on other settlements I have set up for the basics.

At least the good news is that things like fields for growing different things are not limited to one. The area you get to start in, however, won’t have the ability to grow everything. As it’s clear, the game wants you to expand out.

Performing research, which this game calls Tome of Knowledge, is also a bit different in this game. Outside of the couple of extra buildings you can unlock from research. A lot of the research is built around weighing the pros or cons of an upgrade and deciding what is best for your kingdom.

For instance, you might want to make a change to how you go about building farmer housing, as you tend to make a lot of them. You have the option of making them cheaper, but have a 50% increase chance of catching fire. The other option doubles the construction cost but increases happiness.

I’m kind of shocked that more games don’t have a research system more in place like this. You must decide the pros and cons of picking a different upgrade for a building over another. It just makes sense if you are constructing a building with 85% reduced materials, it’s going to have issues with catching fire. After all, the townspeople use a lot of firewood to keep themselves warm during the nights.

You also have a council of annoying people who like to bug you a lot. As they saw it as advising you. They each give you their side of how they would go about dealing with different situations. Sometimes I'd just ignore going through the next step of things, as it seemed every game day there was something they wanted doing.

It would have been nice if this feature, along with how often random events occur that usually end badly, had occurred. When these people are not bugging you. The surge meter is usually about to max out. Meaning you are about to have fires, disease, or other disasters as an outcome most of the time.

After a while, you start to outgrow your starting town. They start needing things you can’t acquire or not enough of. As such, you form a caravan and set off to claim your next providence. Where you set up a much smaller settlement.

Also, I feel the game starts to fall apart. At the time of writing this, I could not find a quick way to switch between my towns. I had to use the mouse wheel to scroll out of one map. Then, mouse over the global map to the town I wanted to manage. I then had to scroll in and pan my view onto wherever I built that town on the other map. It’s annoying and very ineffective.

This issue then further compounds as you are trying to micromanage multiple towns. The pop-up warning system flashes by quickly on the screen. While there is an events tab, if you click on an event, it won’t take you to where it is happening. So, you find yourself quickly falling behind in keeping up with managing anything that needs your attention to the point that you must keep pausing the game. It takes forever to switch from one town to the next.

The second area I took gave me access to wheat, iron ore, and fish. While early on, my main town was able to keep up with its demands, so I could focus on the new resources. After a while, I had to build up that second town to support itself. Sending back whatever they could afford to give up to my main town.

Early on, you can set up trade routes between your towns or even the NPC if you become on good terms with them. After a while, however, those trade routes end up having issues with getting attacked. Bringing another thing I'm not a fan of in this game.

The combat system is less than ideal. I’ll get attacked, but there's no way to just instantly go where I'm getting attacked to see what's going on. I must hunt around on the screen to find it. With multiple towns and caravans, that becomes a nightmare.

You can move troops and other units around from the global map. It’s like the troops are drunk. They are slow to respond. They just let attackers wander past them and loot the place, even sometimes.

I find myself just better off having to enter a town's map. Then I tried to micromanage the troops myself. As they just behave strangely. It’s almost like they want the attackers to get away or something.

As you can see, I have one unit that went off charging after the fleeing attackers. I went to send off the remaining units, and they decided to go all the way down to use the road instead of just cutting off the enemy. As a result, the main army is way out of position to do anything about the attack that they just let walk right into my main town.

While I could build a giant wall and have a front gate. I would need to set up multiple towns just for farming enough resources to be able to afford to do so. As my main town is getting so massive, it would be quite the undertaking of resources.

Final Thoughts

I rather enjoyed the town-building experience of a single town. While I like the idea of going out and claiming other areas to build on and manage as well. There seems to be some quality-of-life changes that need to be made to make that an enjoyable experience as well.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown.

Disclosure. A review copy of the game was received for free.