This Roman-era city builder wants to be the next Settlers, without the modern-city headache

A new indie game calledThe First Explorersis trying to muscle into one of PC gaming’s most crowded genres: city builders. Its hook is simple and smart, skip the modern traffic-engineering grind and drop players into the ancient world, where a thriving economy isn’t just about growth, it’s about survival.

DeveloperBuchwald &is pitching the game on Steam as a “Settlers-like” that blends organic city building with real-time strategy combat. You’ll choose between three factions,Romans, Carthaginians, and Gauls, and build up production chains strong enough to bankroll an army.

That hybrid promise comes with a big caveat: the game is headed toEarly Accesswithno release date announced. In other words, players who jump in early are signing up for a work in progress, one that will live or die on how quickly the studio can prove its core loop is fun, readable, and stable.

Steam lists Early Access, but no launch date

On Steam,The First Explorersis marked with a familiar placeholder: release date “to be announced.” That’s typical for Early Access projects, where studios ship an unfinished version, then iterate in public based on bug reports, balance complaints, and community feedback.

For players, that model can be a bargain, or a gamble. Early Access often means frequent patches and rapid changes, but it can also mean rough edges, missing systems, and mechanics that get reworked midstream. Steam’s own messaging around Early Access is blunt: if you don’t want an incomplete game, wait.

And waiting isn’t always a bad idea. Steam is littered with Early Access titles that linger for years, or never reach a “finished” 1.0 release. For Buchwald &, the immediate challenge is to show that the fundamentals, economy, interface clarity, progression, already work before piling on more units, buildings, or scenarios.

A global language push signals big ambitions

One concrete detail on the Steam page: a long list of supported languages for interface and subtitles, includingEnglish, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Japanese, Korean,andSimplified Chinese, among others.

That matters because city builders are a deeply international genre, with huge audiences in Germany, Eastern Europe, and across Asia. But translation alone won’t save a complex strategy game. If the UI is confusing or the systems are hard to read, players won’t stick around long enough to care how many languages it supports.

Three factions: Romans, Carthage, and Gaul, more than just a cosmetic choice

The faction lineup is designed to be instantly legible, even for players who haven’t touched a history book since high school: Rome’s expansion machine, Carthage’s Mediterranean rivalry, and the Gauls as the defiant local power.

In a strong city builder, factions can’t just be different flags. They need to change how you play, your economy, your production chains, your military options, and how you expand across the map. Buchwald & is promising that kind of strategic identity, but it’s the kind of promise that only holds up once players get their hands on the systems.

Why this isn’t trying to out-Skylines Cities: Skylines

The modern benchmark for the genre is stillCities: Skylines, the mega-popular city sim built around zoning, traffic flow, public services, and endless add-ons. It’s a tentpole that brings new players into city building, and sets punishing expectations for depth and stability.

At the same time, new projects keep trying to compete on realism and scale. One recent example highlighted by gaming outlets isCity Masterplan, which has touted massive24 x 24 kilometerenvironments, about15 x 15 miles, as part of its pitch. That’s the arms race: bigger maps, more systems, more detail, more complexity.

The First Explorersis taking a different lane. By focusing on antiquity and tying city growth directly to military pressure, it can avoid a head-to-head comparison with modern urban simulation. The risk is that “simpler” gets read as “shallower.” The game has to deliver depth through logistics, pacing, and meaningful strategic tradeoffs, not just a fresh coat of historical paint.

What Anno 1800 and Citystate reveal about the competition

Two other city-building touchstones show how wide the genre has become.Anno 1800is a historical economy powerhouse built around research, trade routes, and industrial-era complexity, proof that a period setting can drive escalating systems without feeling like busywork.

On the other end,Citystateleans into politics and social tension, class systems, unrest, slums, and ideology choices, more like a nation-builder with city-building bones. The franchise has also teasedCitystate: Metropolis, slated forearly 2026.

Those comparisons help frame what Buchwald & is aiming for: not a modern political simulator, and not an industrial supply-chain epic, but a middle path where a readable economy feeds territorial expansion and real-time conflict.

Organic city building plus real-time combat is a tough balancing act

“Organic” building usually means cities that grow in a more natural way, roads that follow terrain, neighborhoods that emerge from needs, less rigid grid planning. Done well, it feels alive. Done poorly, it feels messy, and players feel like they’re fighting the interface instead of solving problems.

Then there’s the RTS layer. Real-time combat demands clarity: unit readability, quick feedback, and controls that don’t collapse under pressure. Combining city management with real-time battles forces hard UI decisions, because players need to switch cleanly between macro concerns (production, storage, labor) and tactical ones (movement, defense, engagements).

That’s the make-or-break question forThe First Explorers: after 30 minutes, are you happily optimizing your economy, or scrambling through menus because a fight arrived before your city made sense? Early Access will give Buchwald & a chance to tune that pacing in public. It will also give players plenty of opportunities to decide whether this hybrid is the next great twist on the genre, or just another ambitious pitch in an overcrowded Steam marketplace.