Patron
Patron is a survival city builder with a unique social dynamics system. Gather and produce resources, build your fledgling village into a prosperous city and navigate the intricate social tensions before they reach boiling point.
Patron is a city builder, colony sim and strategy game
developed and published by Overseer Games.
Released on August 10th 2021 is available only on Windows
in 13 languages: English, German, Russian, French, Polish, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese - Brazil, Spanish - Spain, Turkish, Italian, Hungarian and Korean.
It has received 2,895 reviews of which 2,127 were positive and 768 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.1 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 3.99€ on Steam and has a 80% discount.
The Steam community has classified Patron into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows® 10 (64-bit)
- Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-3470 or AMD Ryzen™ 3 1200
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: GeForce GTX 1050 3 GB or AMD Radeonâ„¢ RX 560 4 GB
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 10 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX compatible sound card
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Patron is a decent Banished-like. It isn’t as charming as Banished, but there’s enough here to be worth a purchase. Patron is notable for its tech tree, vertical improvements, and the limited social class system, as well as the poor UI. As with Banished, starting out in Patron means you can work very little. You are limited to gathering simple roots and chopping down trees for firewood. You progress through a technology tree which unlocks the ability to build new buildings and manufacture different items. For instance, you research a tech which unlocks iron and coal mine which leads to a tech that unlocks the tool smithing. Eventually, research allows your tool smiths to make oil lamps instead of tools. Digging for clay requires a tech upgrade, and you need clay in your storage to research brick making. Some subsequent techs require bricks to begin research, and so on. The fact that a lot of the production options are locked behind the tech tree helps keep you focused on your immediate situation, and you’ll always have the opportunity to get production chains up and running in anticipation of the next technology unlock. You unlock growing sunflowers before you unlock mills to turn them into oil, and you can choose to begin making oil before being able to make oil lamps. Patron cities do not sprawl as much as those in Banished because most Patron buildings feature production efficiency and upkeep upgrades. These upgrades are usually (1) allowing more workers at a single building, (2) lowering the upkeep of a building (such as a carpenter using less wood to produce the same amount of goods) and (3) raising the overall productive output of a single worker in a building. Going from one worker in a building at base stats to four workers with half upkeep and doubled production can lead to massive amounts of output in a much smaller land and population footprint than you would find in Banished. Patron features a rudimentary social class system where each of your citizens belong to one of four classes which have different quality of life expectations. Basically, as you gain more citizens of varying classes, they will expect you to build more expensive housing, luxury goods, and schooling options. Peasants and laborers will be satisfied with simple wood or stone houses and will expect simple luxury goods such as leather clothing and beer. As you gain merchants and gentry, they will demand brick houses and luxuries such as fine garments, jewelry, and wine. They will expect both simple schools and the option to attend a nearby university. Failing to provide certain goods leads to unhappiness which can cause members of that class to leave the city. On the negatives, the user interface in Patron is noticeably poor. The job allocation board where you allot workers to the various professions is absolutely massive, taking up around six times the size as the one in Banished. The building selection menu has a picture of the building instead of icons for the building. Since a lot of the buildings look like wooden shacks, you will consistently have to mouse over each building one at a time until you find the building you are looking for or until you memorize where in the menu each building is. It would have been much more straightforward to have the tool smith be represented in the menu as a graphic of a hammer and anvil and the forester’s lodge as a grove of trees rather than just a small picture of the building. The game also does not seem to have production line graphs for you to monitor which means you will have to guess your production numbers based on the number of workers assigned unless you go to each building and check their expected production quotas. I found myself checking the number of goods available for export as a way to gauge whether production is high enough which works well enough but it’s probably not the optimal way to provide that information to the player. If I scroll down to zero goods in storage and see wheat there, I need to either grow more wheat or lower the number of workers using wheat in production. Overall, Patron is pretty good. There are some UI issues to deal with, but past that there is a lot of fun to be had working through the tech tree and slowly upgrading your production to enable bigger and better cities while the demands of your population (and the optional story quest) keep you pointed in the right direction. It’s not exactly the most challenging or inventive game in the world, but it is fun.
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Everything feels easy until my city suddenly falls apart in a glorious implosion of riots and deaths. It's fantastic, though, that the reason why things imploded is something I can clearly do better next game. Little to no reliance on "disasters," more that you bring on economic challenges as you push your science and services forward. In that respect, the game is comparable to Dwarf Fortress and Oxygen Not Included more than RimWorld and SimCity/Cities Skylines.
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Patron is a classic survival game with the following elements: 1. Survival is the primary goal: Every mistake you make comes with a serious penalty. 2. Production chains: These start simple but become more complex as you progress. 3. Citizen needs: You must fulfill various needs, including food and amenities. 4. Different needs for different people: Not everyone has the same requirements. 5. Logistics challenges: Managing logistics adds to the difficulty. However, as I mentioned earlier, the game feels incomplete. There is a lack of detail in production consumption data, offering only a basic "consumed this month/produced this month" overview. For instance, it's difficult to gauge if you'll have enough food for the year when you only see statistics for July, a month when you might have received a gift from the king. Understanding the needs of your people is also challenging. You might see something like, "Out of 104 peasants, the average happiness with luxury goods is 89." But why is it 89? What do they actually want more of? It's unclear whether the distance between a worker's home and their workplace affects productivity. On one hand, you see people running across the map; on the other hand, you wonder if this is just an animation. Increasing the number of carriers is difficult, as it seems to be influenced by some indirect value. But what exactly is that value? You can't designate specific resources for specific uses, like reserving wheat for beer production and ensuring people eat something else. There’s no trade statistics or detailed consumption breakdowns available. In the midgame, you’ll experience a population shortage (I had 88 adults, 23 youths, and 89 children). Immigration doesn’t help much, and eventually, you’ll have a lot of adults all needing housing. Some parameters remain unknown. For example, gatherers work more efficiently when there are trees around, but this efficiency drops significantly when buildings are nearby. This means that a "forester + gatherer" combo is less effective than a "gatherer + a small number of trees." So, in general, your journey will involve: 1. Making 1-4 attempts to start the game until you figure out how to gather resources more efficiently. 2. Using the technique of making fewer major changes and progressing step by step. 3. Reaching a point where you have plenty of money and resources but lack people, leaving you wondering what to do with your "Switzerland prototype."
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Patron is a fun wee city builder. A lot of people will compare it to Banished, which is a reasonable comparison, but the game distinguishes itself well enough to be its 'own' game. The research tree is a pretty nifty mechanic which helps keeping the game exciting during a normal play through. The campaign is pretty fun giving you various goals to work towards to, though, depending on how you build and manage your town, can be trivial via trading. That is fine since it's entirely up to you how to complete the various objectives. The little story and map that come with it are neat. The voice acting is adequate and fitting enough. I do like that the campaign map does change as you complete objectives too, definitely helps out making it a satisfying experience. The island selection is fairly broad, and you can customise the conditions pretty well, which gives it decent re-playability. I wouldn't mind seeing a random map generator or a map editor, but for it's worth, there's already ample choice. Love the free trading of goods and how that is managed. Makes resource management just that little bit more exciting. The upgrading mechanic for buildings is also great and definitely a major separation from similarly themed city builders. Visuals are all easy on the eye and look good. Music, while simple, fits the overall aesthetic well. The various grid modes are a huge quality of life feature helping with construction and planning a lot. There are a few criticisms I have though. Some buildings seem too large for their effective radius. In general some buildings should have slightly higher effective areas for their purposes. At certain instances I would love have a higher speed multiplier, because waiting on those new citizens to come in or children to become old enough to be used certainly becomes a little boring with time (this can be circumvented with 3rd party trainers/mods though I would love to have it added officially to the game). All in all it's great if you want just a simple, relaxing game to play. It's easy to spend a little bit of time and a number of sessions and watch your city grow to whatever level you'd like.
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Pretty cozy city builder. I like arranging the little houses and watching my people go about. I'm a simple fella.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 29 November 2024 00:51 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 17 January 2025 02:49 |
| Steam price | 22 January 2025 20:34 |
| Steam reviews | 22 January 2025 03:55 |
Online players
35
Developer
Overseer Games
Publisher
Overseer Games
Release
10 Aug 2021
Platforms
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