Foundation on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Foundation is a grid-less, laidback medieval city-building game with a focus on organic development, monument construction and resource management.
Foundation is a city builder, simulation and medieval game
developed and published by Polymorph Games.
Released on January 31st 2025 is available only on Windows
in 17 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish - Spain, Russian, Portuguese - Brazil, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Czech, Thai and Ukrainian.
It has received 19,777 reviews of which 16,904 were positive and 2,873 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.4 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 33.99€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Foundation 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
- Processor: Intel Core i5-4460
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: GTX 960 / R9 290 - 3 GB Video Memory
- Additional Notes: OpenGL 4.3
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
I've grown up with city builders, I've basically played Settlers, Anno and their siblings all my life. This one is my favorite so and by far. Will it be yours? That depends on what you like about city builders. Did you play Settlers for the combat? Then no, this one probably isn't for you - there is none. It is perfect for me because I love and live for slow, visible progression. For me, whether or not a city builder feels good depends on the balance of direct action taken by the player and the resulting NPC activity to be observed. Player action should never have instant results but should trigger a process. That's why Settlers always felt better than Anno to me because I didn't just drop a house there, I told my settlers where to build a house and then I watched them get the materials and build it over a couple of minutes. Settlers 3 and 4 gave us organic dirt path formation outside of player control and Foundation took that idea and perfected it by making the roads "magnetic": You don't have a hundred paths fanning out from a church door. People use existing paths and only branch off from those once it would be too big of a detour for their destination. Build a house on top of a road and watch them trample a new path around it. Demolish a building and watch the grass slowly reclaim the ground where it stood. Every decision the devs made seems to have been with one goal in mind: make it feel organic and alive. There is no grid. Houses and roads don't just exist in sterile 90° angles to eachother. Unless you are a complete neat freak and want to micro-manage everything your villagers do, the streets and houses of your towns will be crooked and imperfect. While you have direct control over all trade buildings, churches, manor houses and taverns, you don't directly build residential buildings but you assign residential building *areas* and the villagers decide how and where they build their huts there. You provide better living conditions and then watch villagers upgrade their houses on their own. You don't need flat ground to build a house, you can build entire towns on a slope. Combined with the modular building system for most non-residential houses, no two towns look the same. I've played this game in early access for years and enjoyed it a lot while still waiting for something even better. I was looking forward to Manor Lords because of its realistic and atmospheric look but when it came out, I was disappointed by the instant road mechanic for roads that try so hard to look organic. I realized that early-access-Foundation was better at scratching my itch for visual progression. And when it came out of early access with a bang - overhauled graphics and mechanics - I fell in love with it all over again and stopped waiting for the better city builder to come. Foundation is giving me all I ever wanted out of this genre. If there were something I would add if I could, dynamic weather and maybe even seasons would be cool. The cosmetic lighting changes and rain/fog are nice but I'd love for them to just happen instead of what is basically a photo mode switch. And imagine how cool it would look for the grass to slowly start peeking through the snow at the end of winter or the leaves turning golden in the fall. But I realize that these are tall orders, especially for a game that is already ticking all of my hyper-focus boxes. It's my go-to comfort game to relax after a long day at work or to play during phone calls with my dad or while listening to podcasts and audiobooks. You can see at the top how many hours I played Foundation over the past 5 years and with the full release improvements, I don't see myself stopping for another 5.
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At the time of writing this review, I have 500 hours+ in early access, I have played the full release demo and I a few hours in the full release game. I absolutely recommend this game! It is a fantastic medieval city builder, with very intuitive building, decoration, expanding, resource gathering, trading, upgrading tree, progression with both buildings and higher tiers of citizens, quests and challenging achievements. The way you can basically generate entirely your own maps and change the ruleset for your games for it to suit you, gives you the abilitiy to play the game almost exactly like you want. I also like the military system of the game, where your military is necessary as passive bonuses for your cities, such as patrols. You can also send them on missions “off-screen”, where they can return with amazing loot if successful. The only thing this game is lacking when you compare it to other games, is fighting. There is no fighting on-screen in this game - which I like! (think Manor Lords on “peaceful”). The art style is cozy but less realistic, the design of the buildings and the freedom to create whatever city you want is amazing. The game is also easily mod-able if you want to add even more options! I would say this game beats out any other city builder in this format, including Manor Lords, Ostriv, Banished, Farthest Frontiers or Dawn of Man, just to mention a few. NB! READ THIS! The only thing I dislike about this game is its poor optimization. The game will simply eat your hardware in its current state. Currently, the game will take my GPU to literally 100% utility, like it’s running a benchmark. The game will do the same with your CPU, if that’s your bottleneck for more frames. My CPU at one point actually got hotter running this game than running a Cinebench benchmark. The game luckily has implemented a FPS/Framerate limit. Use this, and set it to 10-20 below what you can run, and it will save your hardware. There isn't a brightness slider in the video options either, and since the game doesn't support HDR, I have to manually increase brightness in the HDR settings when playing this game, then back when playing something else. I hope the devs this year spend most of their time tuning the performance and adding additional options in the graphics menu, as the game itself is a fantastic and complete game (finally)!
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GRIDLESS BUILDING Not many gridless village builders. This one is one of the best especially with the new customization options and sandbox settings. Generate your own maps as well. TRY IT BEFORE YOU BUY IT Oh and there is a demo. Devs who include demos for their games deserve extra kudos IMO. 8 thumbs up.
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I've been playing this game for some time now, and what's so fantastic to this game, is that it is relaxing. I have a busy life. But this game takes the edge of, and doesn't interfere with my busy life. I have it on during saturdays and sundays and can occasionally walk away from the PC to do something else, and come back to find my wealth has risen or my construction project is finished. Love the game! Can't wait for the Full release to go live!
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This is the kind of game where I'll go and sit down and think I might game for an hour but somehow now it's been 3! To me, it's great. I've been playing for several years and enjoying the new learning curve each time there is a big update. I love the anti-grid style of building and letting the villagers make their own paths. I'm having fun with the demo now, can't wait for the full release!
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Foundation is currently priced at 33.99€ on Steam.
Foundation is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 33.99€ on Steam.
Foundation received 16,904 positive votes out of a total of 19,777 achieving a rating of 8.37.
😎
Foundation was developed and published by Polymorph Games.
Foundation is playable and fully supported on Windows.
Foundation is not playable on MacOS.
Foundation is not playable on Linux.
Foundation is a single-player game.
There is a DLC available for Foundation. Explore additional content available for Foundation on Steam.
Foundation does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
Foundation does not support Steam Remote Play.
Foundation is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for Foundation.
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 | 25 April 2025 12:14 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 28 April 2025 07:56 |
| Steam price | 30 April 2025 04:43 |
| Steam reviews | 28 April 2025 20:05 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Foundation, 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 Foundation
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Foundation concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Foundation compatibility
Game modes
Features
Online players
1,006
Developer
Polymorph Games
Publisher
Polymorph Games
Release
31 Jan 2025
Platforms