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!

Pros:

So many things to do and craft
Micromanaging can be challenging and fun at the same time
Creativity level can go nuts as if you're creating your own Mayan civilization!

Cons:

Put you right then and there and leave you to do whatever until you get them right
Better tutorial please?
It would be nice to have more units to manage?
Game can be though at times specially when you don't know what you're doing and some might get discourage playing the game on.

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.''

This is a tricky one. It needs a Neutral review. If you are going to rate this, at least read it first-Thanx

If you know what Dwarf Fortress is, and liked it, you will love this game. The learning curve is more of a cliff face, it's a long, hard slog to figure out what everything does, what order you should craft in, learning how to use the dwarf professions, Military, Stocks tabs, and how to use Priorities to create effective farms. I suggest that 6-10h of play time will get you to a point where you are proficient enough to be able to enjoy this game. Be aware of that going into it, and you shouldn't be dissapointed.

Being Early Access, one needs to remember that bugs that I mention here, will likely be fixed by the time you read the review.

So the screenshots that you see of vast fortresses? don't expect to get that far in the game for a long, long, long time. What you are looking at there, is beautiful, but it takes a lot to get there. I'm sure I'll persist with it one day, I will manage it myself, but not today.

There is one particular thing in this game that I dislike above everything else I want to say about it, good or bad; Mining isn't as intuitive as it needs to be to make this game align with more casual players, such as myself (I'm not really a casual gamer, but I play this game with a Casual mentality). This game is not ready for casual players. Read the reviews, and you will see they are filled with fanboi's. This is fine, as it can be a great game, and it deserves it's positive following. All I am saying is, prepare for something hardcore, or look elsewhere ATM.

Mostly, I'm gettting OK with this game, and the more I persist with it, the better I get at not having my Gnomes Derp out. It's the ONLY realy frustration that I have right now, otherwise I would say it's an OK game.

Controls
You dont control Gnomes directly. you give sets of instructions, and they prioritise their tasks. So if a Gnome is hungry, he will go off and eat from the Food Stockpile, before he will pick up that strawberry off the ground. (its just a bug that needs to be looked at.) mostly they manage their own sleep/food/drink needs and you ensure they have enough supplies. I actually like this idea.
The UI is clunky and slow. it uses the same system as Win95 where you have to track your mouse across several dropdowns to get what you want. you have to double click lots of things that should be single click. you have to click - move click to select, rather than click drag. I keep hearing from fanbois "it's better than DF (Dwarf Fortress)" That may be true, but it doesn't make it OK. You can't pause if you have a menu or context box up. you can only pull up the context menu if you click on a blank area of the map.This is understandable, as designated areas/ objects/enemies are interactive via said rclick. but still annoying.

Graphics.
Although I get it, i do - it's a throwback nod to the 8bit era of DF, it's not right. I feel the art style is archaic and unclean. tiles have a lot going on in each one and it can actually make it hard for less experienced players to 'read' the layout of the land, especially as we are talking about a mining type game with multiple layers of rock face and myriads of tunnels. I feel that this game would benefit from a clean, crisp tile set. I just looked at the gmae Project Zomboid, and it's graphics are simple, but clean, allowing you to focus on the gameplay. I feel this title here would benefit from such a make over.

Sound.
Turn it down, turn it off. Play your own. It gets tired quickly.

Gameplay.
Back to the brutal. I think this game is meant to be fun, but I'm not having any. I think that once I figure out how to mine without getting my miners trapped with no way out every 5 mins, I will like this game more.
-->Pathing: gnomes getting stuck is because it's possible to work them into a corner. If, say you were to ask them to dig a pond by selecting an area that is wide, they will potentially dig themselves into a 1 tile island. because they have done this, the dirt that they need is down below their reach, so they can not build themselves a bridge out... you have to get another gnome to come resue them, and this may mean retasking a farmer to become a miner for a little while, etc etc. The pathfinding itself seems not too bad, but it pays to dig / mine in small areas/strips..

-->Mining;
It's hard work. not from the perspective of it's a grind... it's actually very accessible, and you can get pretty deep, pretty quickly... just remember that depth = harder monsters. Monsters Spawn anywhere that is dug that is within about 12 tiles of a gnome that is not lit by a torch. Pro tip, right there. Anyway, what I find hard, is the pathing. building stairs up/down isn't always easy. gnomes get stuck/freeze. they can remove their only way out, and then they don't build stars back up afterwards. Maybe I found a glitch, maybe I'm doing it wrong. It's annoying. There is a key (E) to make all uncovered tiles invisible, so it's supposed to make deep mining easier, and in some ways it does, but it's still really easy to lose track of where your little minions are. Then there is the whole stock piling and stacking mechanic, which is currently broken. EG. Dirt can be stockpiled, and can be stacked to 64... but gnomes will not stack dirt on a stockpile. you have to make a stockpile, get them to fill it, then destroy your pile, and the game will then stack your dirt for you. I hope this is addressed in the future.

Survival.
It's meant to be a Rogue-lite Procedurally Generated Crafting Survival Game With Permadeath. this is achieved with map generation at the start of the game, and a Save feature, but no Load... so youcan't go back to previous Save games. really it just feels like it's missing the load feature. I think it's because the game talks about saving so much that it becomes a thing, something that you think about, rather than just lettign it happen so that you can focus on gameplay.
On enemies; figure out how to craft a bone needle, and make yourself some bandages. Minor cuts during combat will have your gnomes bleed to death if not treated. Enough Said.

Crafting.
I like the crafting in this game. You can see what the prerequisites are for items, you can even order an item, and your gnomes will make all the prereq's for it... if you have created/farmed all the needed Craft stations / ingredients for those (wood, stone, bone, cotton, etc) you can see what can be created and what's needed. I Prefer this to the Terraria / MindCrap style of play where items only become available to craft (aka you know of their exsistence) once you already have all the items needed to create it.



The Negative Reccomend is mostly because I feel that this game is not yet ready for the Casual gamer, even though I will likely persist with it for now.

Casual: well, it's Don't Starve again, but with a steeper learning curve at the start - a science machine in DS wll get you through winter if your an OK player... so, one crafting table, basically. In Gnomoria, you craft 1 table specifically so that you can craft the next 6 that you will need for winter / food / drink / stone / wood / butcher etc etc. And i pretty well need them all. Then once I have them I need to use those tables to build a loom and a tailor, just so that I can make bandages for when my guys get injured in battle. That's 8 crafting tables in the first 6-10 days, pretty much. I've learned this with about 10h of play time, so it takes about 10h before you can start to learn the game well enough to begin to enjoy it... Thus - not for casual gamers - those who want to pick up a game and know how to play it in 5 mins. If a tutorial is good enough, even if it is really long, a player can feel like they have freedom in the game, and yet still be taught as they go. hints that pop up on events, like yak @ 50% hunger... start the "build a trough" tutorial... etc

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

This game, as I'm sure is well advertised, is a more approachable take on the Dwarf Fortress formula. Think Minecraft meets the Sims, but instead of a house, you build a small settlement (or a huge sprawling, multi-level fortress that goes 40 stories below the earth).

+Begin with a small group of workers with various skills.
+Assign them tasks, giving priority or preference to those you deem more vital.
+Watch them execute the tasks and make logical adjustments, altering terrain and tasks to meet needs.
+Harvest resources, build structures, and defend your settlement until new immigrants arrive.
+Defend against enemies, both natural and fantastical, preparing your workers through acquisition of resources, trading, and training their skills.
+Workers get better at tasks the more often they do them, with each having their own hunger, thirst, and stats. Can change occupations or create your own custom classes using a system of priorities for each task (Agriculture, Smithing, Mining, etc).

It's one of those games you begin at 1800 and take a break, check the clock, and curse the fact that somehow it's now 0600 the next day and you only get 2 hours to prep for work. Strongly recommended for weekend play only!

Developer is regularly updating this game, putting it beyond the immediate competition in that regard. Given time, it could rival the Hallowed DF in terms of content, but for now it merely noses past by a slight margin due to graphical and interface simplicity that make it a joy instead of a chore (sorry, DF, but you are a bit on the exclusive side).

Strongly recommended to fans of simulations, creative world-builders, and hoarders.

This game is fun enough, but the learning curve is super steep. There's no tutorial, so expect to dig into Youtube and/or the Steam community for how-to videos if you want to do even the most basic of tasks, like making a farm or building a wall. Once you have a handle on things, it's entertaining, but if you want something you can jump right in and play, this is not the game for you.

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.

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.