Patron on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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 2,937 reviews of which 2,149 were positive and 788 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.1 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 19.99€ on Steam, but you can find it for 3.76€ on Instant Gaming.
The Steam community has classified Patron into these genres:
System 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
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
If you are going to leave this page because of "mostly positive", you should know there is only one reason for this "mostly": the sucicidal tutorial. If you follow it, your people will starve or freeze to death. Probably they made a tutorial and then rebalanced the game to harder survivalism. With the current balance, instead of gatherers and forresters (recommended in the tutorial) you should quickly invent fishing, and then build and upgrade the fishing hut. And instead of tents (advised in the tutorial) you should build houses. This will stabilize your colony and give you more freedom in the further development of your village. Otherwise, it is a very good successor to Banished, fixing its weakest trait: aimlessness. When you stabilize the colony in Banished, further deveolpment becomes aimless and thus boring. In this game, the cure for aimlessness is borrowed from Against the storm: you are not only the lord of your village, but at the same time a vassal of your king/queen. The vice-roy it was called in Against the storm, and the patron is how they call it here. Expectedly, the king frequently annoys you with requests, creating heavy burden for your poor peasants and quite an animative challenge for you. For now, the downside of the game (besides the inexplicably sucidal tutorial) is an ufortunate balance, which leaves you with few alternatives on how to develop. For the early game, the only feeding option is fishing: for gatherers and hunters you will rarely find a spot on the map where they would be at least 70% efficient, and even if you will, this lucky spot will be so far in the forrest that the long road will make it logistically inefficient. In the mid game, again, despite seemingly diverse feeding options (from crop and animal farms to orchards), the only feasible one is the crop farm. Unfortunately, there is little hope that the developers will rebalance this in the future: they seem to have given up a few steps to "overwhelmigly positive".
Expand the review
It's like a finished version of Banished, with all the features that game should have had.
Expand the review
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.
Expand the review
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.
Expand the review
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."
Expand the review
Similar games
View all
United Penguin Kingdom
A city-building game where you build a penguin settlement and satisfy the various needs of your penguins while dealing with seals and killer whales. Enjoy the growth of your settlement, become the king, and lead the United Penguin Kingdom.
Norland
Lead your noble family in this medieval colony sim, facing off against class conflict, religious struggle, and political treachery. Tend to your people’s needs, uncover the lost knowledge of a fallen empire, and engage in nefarious plots against your enemies.
Foundation
Foundation is a grid-less, laidback medieval city-building game with a focus on organic development, monument construction and resource management.
Kingdoms and Castles
Kingdoms and Castles is a city-building simulation game about growing a kingdom from a tiny hamlet to a sprawling city and imposing castle. Make trade agreements, alliance, and war with neighboring AI controlled kingdoms. Each villager and resource is individually simulated.
Settlements Rising
Settlements Rising is a medieval city building and colony management game. It offers a lively colony experience with simulated villagers, dozens of professions and resources, natural disasters, and raids, while providing full control over the colony through trade, production chains and datas.
Settlement Survival
In this city-building game, you will lead a group of survivors in their search for a new home. Manipulate the landscape, manage limited supplies, plant crops, hunt wildlife, gather resources, and develop trade routes to build a bustling and unique town.
Kingdoms Reborn
A city builder with simulated citizens, set in a procedurally-generated world map. Grow your kingdom through the eras from a tiny medieval hamlet into a prosperous global empire! Cooperate or compete in real-time with your friends in multiplayer mode.
Banished
In this city-building strategy game, you control a group of exiled travelers who decide to restart their lives in a new land. They have only the clothes on their backs and a cart filled with supplies from their homeland. The townspeople of Banished are your primary resource.
Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic
Build a soviet republic from an impoverished country into a rich industrial superpower in a city builder with intricate production chains and a fully simulated global economy. Manage the lives of your citizens from education to work and party loyalty to criminal activity.
Empires of the Undergrowth
Command swarms of warriors at an unprecedented scale of warfare in this blend of RTS and base-building. Lead ant colonies against the many fearsome threats of the insect world, while building intricate nests, developing pheromone-based tactics, and evolving to meet growing dangers.
Ancient Cities
Ancient Cities is a realistic, survival city builder in an immersive procedural environment. Lead the fate of your tribe through ancient times!Data sources
The information presented on this page is sourced from reliable APIs to ensure accuracy and relevance. We utilize the Steam API to gather data on game details, including titles, descriptions, prices, and user reviews. This allows us to provide you with the most up-to-date information directly from the Steam platform.
Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 12 April 2025 23:10 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 06 April 2025 08:37 |
| Steam price | 12 April 2025 20:34 |
| Steam reviews | 10 April 2025 14:07 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Patron, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Patron
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Patron concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Patron compatibility
Online players
23
Developer
Overseer Games
Publisher
Overseer Games
Release
10 Aug 2021
Platforms
By clicking on any of the links on this page and making a purchase,
you may help us earn a commission that supports the maintenance of our services.