I finally picked it up, and played more than a few hours of it.  It's a fun city builder, but somewhat slow-going and leaves you with wanting more after you get most of your buildings established.

I like it though, and need to put more time in.  I just hope the developer puts some more time into this.

In unrelated news, the release of the GalCiv 3 alpha has been delayed ...

Yeah my time is severely Banished as well.  I like it, I really do ... its challenging, and every time my master plan fails and my every last villager dies, I feel compelled to try again.  Banished has been consuming most of what little time off I have had lately.

I am very tempted to try this game.  Sounds like i will like it.  I am a masochistic gamer.

From what I understand this game is still WIP though.

It feels very polished, I think. The balance is hair-fine. I just wish it had a more fleshed out mid- and late-game with a couple of new mechanics to pile on. Had a couple of crashes pre-patch but not any now.

And yes, I have been playing the game despite my post above. The game does suck you back in.

I ended up getting the game.  Just finished the tutorial and started my first town.

Its tough.  I have played several games, got good, but then I've had  trouble again with several massive population collapses.  Managing resources is such a pain when you can be swimming in food one minute, then suddenly the next its all gone and my population plummets from 150 to 40.

Get a Town Hall, it includes numbers about how much food is consumed and produced each season.

I was doing pretty good with my first town.  Worker pop around 40, but then I ran into some kind of bug.

My people start massively walking in big number toward one corner of the map and they starve or freeze to death. They just all seemingly go there and they loop back. If they are lucky they come back before dying of starvation.

That is a serious bummer

I've seen some weird problems similar to that, but for me they occurred after they started starving/freezing to death, not before. I remember one particularly well because it was kind of haunting. The whole gang was starving to death. They all just ran to the closest stockpile and spread out its contents around the area. Then they died.

In my case everything seemed fine just before. I thought that maybe i had accidentally selected ''gather ressources'' to some random unreachable place. The folks start walking and if I click on them it says ` working or Fetching ressource `Even the freaking Teacher is doing it.

Then they seem to get stuck in a loop when they reach the corner of the map and only come back to the town if they are cold or hungry, and usually die before reaching town. 

I tried clicking ''Cancel gathering ressources''  on the whole map, to no avail. Interestingly I think this started right after I asked them to build a bridge.

Edit: I think I found the problem. It was indeed a rock set to be removed , on the other side of the river just beside my town but there was no bridge so the folks try to get aroun the river, which they can actually do at the corner of the map. LoL

I'm 50/50 on buying this game. I've read this discussion and the reviews on steam. The main con for me is that the game is described as a lot of sitting around staring at the screen; things happen very slowly. A lot of down time for the player. Have you experienced this? Not to imply I want things to happen fast, just that I do not want to wait and wait and wait for something to happen or a reason for me to interact with the game.

This is not really a concern I would say, there is a speed slider, set it to 10x and things will happen faster than you can manage them. I find myself constantly adjusting it. This is indeed a game that can sink a lot of time but i do not feel like I am ever idling or just staring at the screen. When I am not doing something directly I am thinking about what I want to build next and monitoring citizens and ressources to nail problems before they happen. 

Order: Distribute Kool-Aid.

I have to agree so far about this game being remarkably addictive considering how apparently simple it is.

It also runs very smoothly on my computer, is rather free of bug and overall very polished. I really like the UI for the most part. Very impressive for a lone man's work. My hat's off to him.

So, what is the current record for population on this forum?  My town currently have about 150 people. I would say I am doing pretty good so far, maxed out health and happiness, big reserves of everything. I am still waiting for that big disaster that will ruin everything.  So far I had an Orchard infestation and a case of tuberculosis, but nothing else on the disaster department.

I wouldn't call it slow.  As the other person said, you can control the time and even in "slower" periods I use it to carefully plan out upgrades.  Not rushing is key to building a successful town.

My max so far is around 60.  I've been taking it slow, but I haven't played in a few days.