Took me 3 tries to understand the whole thing, it should take just one for people that doesnt distracts so easily.it will take you 3 times too, dont lie to yourselfcheck steam guides with more images than text

Its awesome, you get a group of mentally challenged gnomes and you have to guide them to victory and keep them away from dangers (those dangers include themselves in most of the cases).

You can mine, build, fight, farm, yell at your idle gnomes(this will become your usual activity), laugh at occasional catastrophes involving your own stupid gnomes getting trapped in walls or floor and trade one alpaca for 500 strawberry seeds with near kingdoms!

Theres some weird mechanics thing that havent tried yet but looks awesome some kind of electric stuff with power and traps.

And you can customize almost everything. Dont like that the woodchoppers go around picking dirt from the floor and stocking it elsewhere? Well then just uncheck hauling from their job list. Need someone to go around picking the stuff all your stupid gnomes left on the floor? Create a Janitor job!



I stopped playing Dota 2 for 2 whole days for this, my friends hate me and this game now

Recommended 10/10

The first hundred hours of gameplay was spent mostly trying to determine if I really loved this game or not.

The second hundred hours was spent mostly trying to figure out the most extream form of combat goblins were capable of (my personal favorite was watching them pick up fallen limbs/heads and using them as weapons... although that goblin who brained three of my gnomes after picking up a door was also quite amusing... and somewhat sad).

At 600+ hours I still find those 'whoa' moments. That alone should say something.

This game, like many others have said, is a dwarf fortress clone. But unlike that game you don't need to feel like you are looking at the matrix to be able to play it. The developer has taken the time to create simple yet fairly good graphics (considering the fact he's basically doing this by himself) that quickly gives you an idea of the state of the world as it exsists. No two games are really alike due to random happenstance, layout of the world, invasions by annoying goblins and mants, etc. Difficulty can be changed at the start, so toying with the options will quickly create either amazingly simple worlds you can craft to your hearts content... to war torn worlds where your gnomes will likely be missing body parts in a matter of days.

There are some physics in this game, mostly dealing with water. There are alot of worries in this game, mostly dealing with food and safety.

Standard pros and cons:

Pros:
You get to build a gnome city/village/fortress/slave labor camp
Said gnomes are independant but will take ques from you
Combat is entertaining to read, especially when limbs start flying
Swords and guns. Steampunk at it's best
You can build epic wonderlike structures
Your gnomes can starve if you are overzealous with expansion
You have to actually care about placement of structures
You can make pet rocks
Diplomacy was added recently to add some options to irritate your neighbors
Is somewhat modable, mostly just graphically at the time being

Cons
Not as advanced as dwarf fortress
No sickness/diseases to combat
No magic system
No cannibalism
No annoying elves to get to chop up
No vehicles
No animations (once again, one man show here so give him a break)
No moral system as of yet

Basically if you like the idea of Dwarf Fortress but can't stand looking at ascii all day, gnomoria is definitely the way to go. It's easy on the eyes, easy to figure out (if nothing else go on the web page and look up a basic tutorial, lots of them exsist and all you really need to know is the standard build order to get you going, the rest is there just for you to learn on your own and die alot. Alot.)

This is the kind of game I wish exsisted back in the 80s-90s when I was in school. Me and my friends used to imagine building forts/castles with various creatures and defending them from hordes of annoying goblins and the like. In this case, it's not on paper, it's a living breathing world where you hope that your gnomes armor isn't going to break when that ogre swings at him, seeing as he's your best builder.

Pros:
- Dwarf Fortress for humans
- Works on real computers

Cons:
- Dwarf Fortress isn't supposed to be for humans. Lacks the depth of a game that spent more than seven years on alpha (and hasn't gone beta yet)

By all means get it. Updates and improvements are always on the way, great community and losing is as fun.

It's a great game lots of hours of fun.

This game is a simplified version of Dwarf Fortress. As a DF fan, I decided to give it a try, and I was not disappointed. It's far more streamlined than DF, such as having fewer animals to herd, fewer types of soil, fewer types of stone, etc, yet there is beauty in this simplification, as it significantly decreases the learning curve. Gnomes are also much easier to manage, and can be done without a third party application (i.e. Dwarf Therapist). Some skills have been combined into one skill (such as masonry and stone crafting), which helps to make the game easier to play. No longer does every aspect of a job need be managed (such as which particular type of material does the dwarf haul), but with Gnomoria gnomes can simply be told to haul. You are also given several professions to start with, which work well. The game also relies far less on the keyboard, and more on a mouse, which is a great feature. It's also easier to decide which material is used to create an item.

The simplification, however, does go a bit too far sometimes. Many skills are simply taken out, such as fishing and hunting. This makes it so that meat must be acquired through ranching, by killing the occasional animal that appears with military troops, or by butchering goblins. Also pets have been taken out of the game. Apart from animals, trading has also been too simplified. Gnomes may now only trade with other gnomes, and the player is initially only able to trade with one other settlement. Others may be unlocked, but it takes years to do so. The other gnome settlements are given types, such as agricultural, which makes some variety, but it still feels lackluster in comparison to the difference between dwarves, humans, and elves in DF. Also, biomes are gone. Instead of being able to choose which type of area you settle in (which can lead to big differences in DF playthroughs), gnomoria has the player settle in the same type of area every time, which has the exact same plant and animal life. Water also needs serious overhaul, and the developers need to decide to make its physics easier to manipulate and give it more purpose, or be simply used as a potential hazard. Lastly, there is still a learning curve in this game, as the developers give no form of tutorial. Players must instead watch Let's Play videos to learn how to play the game.

While the game does have drawbacks (most notably DF is free to play while this isn't) it is still a great game. The game is still not in it's final version, and some problems may be addressed before it's released. The difficulty is still here, a player should expect to fail totally several times before they begin to understand what they're doing, but it's a much, much easier game to learn to play than DF, while still offering the enjoyment. Anybody who likes city builders, particularly the Dwarf Fortress-like sub-genre, should add this game to their library.

Fun indie game. If you love the concept of Dwarf Fortress but find that game too complex and the ascii graphics too off-putting, give this game a try.

If you like dwarf fortress, and always said to yourself "gee, this sure is fun, but I'd rather suffer a tantrum spiral than deal with this interface," buy this. Also, if you have a weird fascination with decorating things EXACTLY how you like and "no I want the chairs blue and wooden and the table stone and red in my room shaped like a cactus," buy this game. Unfortunately, it's just not as deep or ambitious as dwarf fortress, so there is potential for dissapointment there.

If only we could get the developer of gnomoria and the developer of dwarf fortress trapped in an elavator, or force them to work together at gunpoint, they could make the perfect DF-thingy.

It took me a while to get into it, but i've become slightly addicted. I enjoy the ability to set my Gnomes to whichever tasks i wish, their skills increase over time and they work pretty well. The game is addictive and fun, relatively easy to learn, although there is no 'tutorial' to speak of, you soon pick up on what it is you need to do. Weather system makes it realistic and you can adjust the level of the 'enemies' when you're first learning to play. Would i recomend the game? Yes, yes i would.

The game is still in it's 'early access' stage and it is improving. I look forward to seeing the final product :)

God do I love this game... it is so incredibly addictive to play, but if you decide to pick it up you'd best prepare yourself for some unforgiving failures. A burgeoning kingdom you've meticulously built up and spent tens of hours or more on could easily fall simply because you weren't prepared for a goblin invasion or a beetle infestation... oh, and don't even get me started on the zombie plagues...

But seriously, don't let that scare you. The developer constantly adds new features, and the game finds itself with a lot of them and as a result a lot for you to do and ways to run your kingdom the way you want. If you aren't a fan of the frustrastion of the intense difficulty of this game as you progress on, it has variable difficulty that you can specifically choose how hard what aspects of the game are and even what kind of enemies are allowed to spawn. Of course, it can be played in peaceful mode, but wheres the fun in that?

I've owned this game for 3 days and I already have 22 hours on it, truly addictive and absolutely worth £6. Only found 2 bugs, neither stopped my gameplay in any way. I managed to learn most of the game within a few hours, although there is a wiki if you want to get right into it. Music is catchy, visuals fit the setting perfectly but the UI can be a little fiddly if you're using the right click menu. Massive amounts of detail, furniture will be a different tint based on the materials used to build it, items have different quality levels which means that you want a gnome with high jewel smithing to make good jewelry to sell for a higher price.

Gnomoria is a phenomenal game, It has its ups and downs like most good games however the positives cancel out the negatives by an extreme degree. When I first purchased Gnomoria and tried it, it made no sense to me at all, so I just quit time and time again I would try, to no avail. Something kept drawing me back though, was it the games gameplay? its mechanics? its charm? I dont know. I stuck at it, as a firm believer in persistence is key. After eventually learning how to play the game, I did, for hours on end. I was so addicted. I tried and failed multiple times to prosper in the game, But i continued to fail, to be defeated. So I can successfully tell anyone who purchases this game, CONGRADULATIONS money well spent!

Very, I mean, very fun and interesting sandbox/kingdom management game, plus the Developer is really nice and sincere guy, who's hardworking and cooperative with the whole community.

After playing this game on different stage of this Early access, I can safetly say that this game feel rather complete.
Not too many bugs and almost no breaking game bug (CTD, BSOD...).

For anyone looking at this game, it is a ''more'' friendly dwarf fortress style game.

Pros :
- good graphic
- very good menu, a mix of the right click menu and a set of Hotkeys
- provide a good challenge without being unfair
- each game can be customize from peaceful to Impossible Hardcore Hellsish mode.
- A lot, and i mean A lot, of support from the developper, many patches and many more feature to be add
- a complex priority system for all the task in your kingdom


Cons :
- No tutorial, you have to rely on some steam guide and let's play on youtube
- Sometime even if everything is set correctly your Gnome just idle for a couple of in-game hours (maybe their personality)
- underground game with not a lot of visibility

In conclusion, a solid kingdom builder with survival at its core, can be very challenging in the beginning, but overall all these type of game have a big learning curve.
It is still a solid one to start with.

Bonus content : in game combat log

''HIT: John swings with her copper hand axe at the goblin, hitting the neck, slicing through the skin and slicing through the throat

STATUS: The goblin lost his head, his neck is bleeding, an artery has been struck, is suffocating and is blind

DEATH: The goblin has died.''

I ordered a gnome to dig a hole and die in it and he did.
most awesome game ever

I'm going to start off by saying this: Gnomoria has been one of maybe my top 5 purchases I've made that have been added to my library. Within the first couple hours I enjoyed myself much more than I'd expected.
That being said, I HIGHLY recommend Gnomoria for any fan of civilization/kingdom management games and other simulation-type games that similarly inspire creativity, planning, and fun.

The Pros:

• The devs are very active, which is a pleasant surprise considering my track record of getting suckered into early access traps where devs just plain quit or worse.
  
• Gameplay is very enjoyable, and will definitely put your micromanaging to the test if you aren’t one for using pause buttons frequently.
  
• Difficulty is easy to scale to your desire. Whether you want the hardest experience possible, or if you want to just cruise in a peaceful kingdom is up to you.
  
• Large variety of items, tasks, and things in general to learn about maximizing your kingdom’s productivity and prosperity. I would even call the game immersive, to some degree.

The Cons:

• A little buggy, but it’s early access. What’d you expect? The game is mostly pretty clean and well-functioning. The only real problems I seemed to have ran into are outfit/equipment management bugs. Nothing an exit-reload of the game and some fiddling with settings won’t fix.
  
• Some of the terrain-reconstructing options have poorly managed AI, but if it didn’t it would just mean you’d spend more time sitting and waiting than doing anything. So that isn’t really that bad either.

All in all, I absolutely recommend this game. Great aesthetics for the type of game it is, great music, great development history 10/10. One of my favorite games!

Also, I never played Dwarf Fortress. So I went into playing Gnomoria with zero similar experiences, it's not too hard to learn and if you experiment enough you will get the hang of things pretty easily. Some mistakes in the game aren't easily remedied, so you may want to expect to restart your playthrough in some cases.

One of the best games ever made. Still in alpha, but I'd say it's still worth buying now. Each new update, even the smallest, is crazy exciting. 10/10

Fun little affordable city builder. Very well put together, and has a nice (not really huge) amount of depth. It has a bit of a learning curve and takes at least 3 tries and a bunch of guides read to learn, but it's worth it.

Possibly one of the best games on steam Provides you with the tools to build your own Castle/city/village/hole in the ground and nothing more doesn't hold your hand through the hard times where you get bum rushed by 3 goblins when your defenses aren't built or when a Bear comes rampaging through your gnomish capital leaving you with 5-6 funerals on your hands but what it does do is provide you with Very satisfying gameplay managing your own kingdom you strive for the best but watch out because when you have built it you have to defend it and the better you get the harder it gets and the deeper you go the more dangerous it becomes A+ game worth the price tag i've played this game for hundreds of hours and its just as fun now as it was the first time.

Steep learning curve.
Brain melting addictivness.
Memory leaks and late game crashes. [These bugs will go away eventually, the game is still in development at the time of writing]

Gnomoria is a game in which you manipulate, rather than order directly, your colony of gnomes as they reshape the landscape into their kingdom. Farms, groves and pastures, workshops built underground or in buildings, forts and castles, crossbows and rifles, swords and hammers, armors and ... well other types of armors. Mines. Lots of mines. Dangerous mines full of skeletons, zombies, spiders, beetles and the occasional golem. Also gems, valuable metal ores but mostly less valuable dirt and rock. That you can bake/chisel into more valuable ceramic blocks, bricks or crafts for trade or showing off.

The essence of the game is manipulation. Each gnome can be assigned a profession which can be entirely customised by the player. Dedicated chefs, carpenters that double up as farmers, jewelers who also help tend the wounded or build things when there's no jewels to make or wounded to tend. Both the specefic jobs for a profession and their priorities can be customised and here is where the learning curve comes from.

Even though the game is still incomplete, there is much to discover and learn about how to best organise and grow your workforce. Giving orders is relatively easy, but seeing them carried out sensibly and efficiently is an entirely diffrent matter.

The game is difficult yet mostly peacefull at the same time. Expect lots of restarts but also expect your next kingdom to fare better than the last.

There is maybe little point past survival, or survival in the prettiest and most efficient kingdom you can build, but in that regard Gnomoria is similar to Lego bricks. You don't play much with what you create, you reach a point of satisfaction (or more likely late game instability) and start thinking about how to build another world.

Have loved ones on standby ready to hit you over the head with something sturdy but loving, preferably a hammer. The game is far more addictive than it seems.

You know how when you're a kid and your mom or dad gets you an ant farm? That's what this game is. A Modern ant farm. Except the ants, or gnomes in this case, have opposible thumbs. But the gnomes will still pick up a twig and try to pull it opposite directions.