Patron brings "social in/justice" into the Banished template of colony building games

The occasional Banished-like city-builder comes along, but not nearly enough, in my honest opinion. So, thank you, Patron, for going to bat for this underrepresented branch of the strategy genre. Patron, however, isn't satisfied with being just a gather-wood-build-house city-builder. It's also a society-builder. Yes, you have to construct and upgrade. You have to adapt to weather and seasons. You have to research and develop an extensive research tree.

But you've also got to balance sensitive social issues. Mo' city, mo' problems. As your village grows into a town, and town grows into city, so grows the social dimensions of putting a bunch of people together in one place. Class tensions, social in/justice, immigration, religious strife, protests, and even civilian uprisings. These things aren't necessarily brand new to city-builders, but some games lean heavily one way or the other. Even the aforementioned Banished is more interested in resource management than human issues.

As opposed to city-builders like SimCity or Cities: Skylines that have you lay down blocks' worth of building zones, Patron stresses over each individual building's placement—right down to facing and whether individual citizens can reach building entry/exit points from a nearby road. Accessibility is so crucial that you probably can't even build the thing if it's facing the wrong direction. I love it. That's the excruciating level of micromanagement that I look for in games like this.

Patron is coming to PC sometime in Q3 2021.