My 2 cents after 50 hours
First of all, props to the devs, loving the game. It scratches that itch that I haven't really had scratched ever since Knights and Merchants. Manor Lords got close, but SoS does it better, at least for now.
TL:DR: I am enjoying my time fumbling about and learning, but when I began my journey, I was expecting my chosen race and region to shape my gameplay experience far more than it seems to. I have so far failed to find a way to meaningfully engage with the world map, and so every settlement of mine grows as an entirely self-reliant town where meanigful trade is a far off dream and job satisfaction does not matter. With what seems like a lot of depth going into the trade system of the game, I had expected to be able to leverage for at least moderate gains from the outset, but have so far utterly and completely failed at doing so. According to how I understand the UI, each of my neighbours seems to produce everything and at a surplus and I find it impossible to understand what I can trade to who and in what quantity. This hurts my soul. Experience in detail follows below.
I have so far managed a number of failures too high to count, and as of now I am contemplating yet another fresh start from a city of over 2000. I did finally manage to make that one self-sustaining and successfully conquered 2 of my neighbours for the first time, simply to get a taste for what war and conquest is gonna be like. Which is was sort of my goal there, and as I improve, there's a lot of things that I find I have done wrong about the city and I'd rather restart than tear it all out. On that note, is it advisable to resettle, or do I just re-roll?
I have so far played cities almost exclusively built around Dondorians, as I am a huge fan of the whole city under a mountain, liked the idea of the industry and military bonuses and figured not having to deal with birth and death and having a lawful population is going to make things easier for me. I realize now that in some ways I am shooting myself in the foot massively, but in other ways, I think this has actually been a significant boon to my learning experience.
My greatest hurdle to overcome was unsurprisingly food. Hell, it took me circa 3 failed cities just to realize how important hunters actually are in the early game. For which I blame the tutorial, which specifically teaches map hunting, but does not mention hunter jobs at all. So for a while I thought that's what all hunting was. I tried managing forage and map hunting, but forage, I find, simply does not get done unless micro-managed and it's yields are really only good enough to kickstart your own farms, while manual hunting dries up extremely quickly the second your population reaches triple digits. Meanwhile 15 hunters with a couple tech boosts from the free tech can sustain a village of several hundreds, which I honestly found a little OP once I figured that out. Their output has been key to my food supply until I could put at least a hundred people into fields and pastures. And so began the Great War on Food that has so far posed the great insurmountable challenge for my fledgling empires.
Now, being Dondorian, and being a hard-headed roleplaying dumbass, I attempt my best at actually supplying the prefered foods. At the start, this is now easy, I employ 15-20 hunters at the start and can now grow to 300 people with a finger up my nose. It's after that where food supply becomes the real pod racing. My first naive notions were that I am good at manufacture, so I will build this Big Beatiful Fortress(tm) under the mountain that my people will never have to stick their noses out of and trade everything that neeeds direct sunlight in exchange for my manufacturing output. BOY was i wrong. To be fair I'd still call my understanding of the trading system minimal, but that isn't helped by the fact how difficult it is to actually deduce the information useful to me out of UI. I want to know primarily how much a day someone will buy of something before the price crashes and how much daily profit on average can I expect for selling x amount of goods. The former I have simply not been able to find out at all and the latter depends on my own manual and wildly inaccurate calculations. I understand tarrifs, and I understand tolls, but there's all this info about supply and demand, and the targets's domestic production, and how much they traded and I don't know what else. And it might as well be hieroglyphs. It tells me no useful information my chicken brain can understand. Whatever those runes mean, the result is that with my merchant prowess I simply could not even manage the simple task of buying wood from a neighbour and selling said wood back as furniture whilst turning at least a small profit. Is such a thing even possible? Not for me it seems. Later on, in my most successfull city yet, I had a variety of produced surplus goods to trade, but even if I had pooled the combined surplus of every single athuri forsaken thing I made and distributed it among my 3 colleagues and 1 trading partner, I still could not gather enough of a revenue stream to reliably sustain a daily trade of 200 fish. This was disheartening to say the least and gave ceiling beams and a length of rope a certain special appeal. Was this because I was trading the wrong goods? Or was I trading them to the wrong people? Were the relations not good enough? How do I even look for good markets? Is sustained trade for food simply not an option at that stage of the game? Is it ever? All these are questions I had and none of them had any answers I was able to find anywhere within the game itself.
Inevitably, my eyes turned inward. I dug under the mountain for years for plots to set up my mushroom farms, I bought livestock and started raising onx. I don't think I did too bad, as it stands now, my agriculture employes a 170 farmers, 2 nobles and 30 unfortunate souls on the pumps, feeding a city of 2000 and supplying a comfortable surplus of fibre for the industry. I was a little worried about huge hits I take to job satisfaction as I push my people into the raw resource industries they are supposed to hate doing, but that actually turned out to not have any tangible impact whatsoever. Anyhow, with the city being in the cold wasteland Dondorians favour and with me not giving a damn about local fertility and moisture on the assumption that I won't have to, I have run out of all the best soil simply by pastures alone, and feeding the city nothing but mushrooms feels plain wrong, even if they do like them. It also comes with it's own problems. I have no more high fertility areas left to grow grain, herbs or opium. I had not expected to ever need grain, as Dondorians seem to not want to touch bread with a 10 foot pole, but it turns out it is the most accessible way of securing rations, unless you want to inlude herbs, which I suck at growing too and combine them with meat a meaningful surplus of which is a faraway dream for my onx pastures, the 400 hundred meat a day they make is devoured by the city almost entirely. Trading for enough of any of these goods is prohibitively expensive and so my 2 conquest campaigns had been fed on purchased rations, paid for with money looted by from defeated raiders. Very clearly, this is not a sustainable long term policy. Do I care too much about soil fertility or is my assumption correct that worse quality soils are simply not worth growing on? Do I cause myself too much of a headache by caring about the preference of my pops to begin with? And why do I have this sense of dread when I think about the fact that all this takes into account I am currently feeding my people the absolute lowest amount possible?
But to repeat myself, I am so far genuinely enjoying my time with the game and I am looking forward to finding answers to the questions I write here, I just hope those answers exist.