Medieval Dynasty

new update is great with players now able to have babies with each other. My girlfriend now is with child but chooses to fight bears, drink beer n wine and is the town blacksmith our child will be pretty hardcore

I have been playing video games in one form or another for almost 40 years and this is so close to my ideal game that I could cry! It is a survival/crafting/management with optional combat. I have been building up my settlement and improving my skills for 35 hours and haven't even touched the quests yet. I don't have anyone else in my village either cos I want to have a go at everything myself and build up a really good supply of resources before recruiting new villagers. I have chickens and pigs, a farm and an orchard. I am not very good at the hunting or fighting mainly because I am old and have terrible reflexes but the options allow you to reduce the hp of animals and bandits whilst also reducing the damage they do so I at least have a chance of beating them (I still die a lot). I have seen a few people play optimising money making and recruiting early etc but the really great thing is you can play however you want and at your own pace, there are no deadlines to building your settlement (except that you age and can die of old age but if you have married and have an heir aged 18 + the game carries on as the heir!). I am loving playing slowly and I don't care if I'm "doing it wrong" it really doesn't matter so keep your disparaging remarks to yourselves! xxx

Great city building and management game. Lot's of room for creativity and a lot of game customisation options meaning you can make it completely peaceful. Although there is combat, it isn't a heavy focus of the game as of writing this so manage your expectations if that's what you're looking for.

You'll probably like this if you enjoy:
The Sims - Designing + Decorating
Red Dead - Being out surviving in the wilderness + Hunting
Minecraft - Designing towns + Creativity + Decorating
Kingdom Come: Deliverance - Time period + Map
Mount & Blade - Time period + Visually
Going Medieval - Town Builder + Town Management + Time Period
Stardew Valley - Town Management + Decorating

You won't like this if you're not a fan of:
The grind
Running back and forth missions (although you can pretty much play without doing any missions)
Games with no 'ending' i.e. no final boss or end credit mission. The years just keep rolling on.
Games with no main objective i.e. there's no end goal, you just keep on managing/building your town
Being creative, the most enjoyment I've had out of it is the designing of my towns.

I started as a character who had escaped from a life of slavery when bandits attacked the caravan.
Five years in, I sit back and look at the town that I have built entirely on my own. Every house that my villagers complain isn't fancy enough, every farm field the I plowed myself where my villagers complain that they have to sit in a chair and watch over, every piece of furniture that my villagers complain isn't good enough, every gravel path the my villagers ignore, and half the food in the storehouse that I went out and hunted myself so that they can complain that there isn't enough variety and whine that I haven't cooked it all for them myself.
I look upon all that I have accomplished. My applause is yet more villagers complaining about how none of it is good enough and why haven't I solved this problem the same way I solved all their previous problems after literally chopping down an entire forest of trees and building the very homes that they live in.
It is only then do I realize... I never truly escaped from slavery.
I then spent the rest my avatar's life just hunting down bandits. They had to pay for what they did. I was better off before when I only had one ungrateful master to torment me.

Definitely one of the better sandboxy village managers. It is especially good for people that don't really mind "progressing" and just enjoy building up your village and decorating it a little.
BUT. Even though I recommend it, I do have one huge gripe with the game - the dynasty thing just doesn't work. There is not enough content in the game and reaching playing as you heir simply takes too long. On default settings you won't play an heir until you've played at least 108 hours! By this time you will be either bored, or done with everything the game has to offer.
Even if you change the length of seasons to 1 day, it will still be 32h+ at least. Not counting the initial gameplay and how long it will take you to even get a wife.
So yeah, just keep in mind the whole Dynasty thing doesn't exist unless you plan to play incredibly long.

Love this game, but I have to say that the writing is absolutely cringe-worthy. The dialogue options funnel you into roleplaying as an obnoxious, disagreeable, fedora-wearing jerk at every turn.

Sometimes you're provided several dialogue options that you must choose from, but all of them force you to adopt a particular opinion - presumably, the opinions held by the game dev. For example, you're forced to agree that taxation is unfair robbery, and to be condescending to a random woman who says that being a mother is the best job (take your pick of responses from: 'nonsense', 'whatever you say', or 'there are better jobs than that'). The man that collects taxes is also cartoonishly villainous.

In summary, it's a great roleplay game, as long as you're happy to roleplay as the game dev's alter ago.

This game is basically what I modded Skyrim to try to be years ago. Low or arguably no magic medieval survival sim, with a fairly heavy focus on recruiting villagers to do things for you even though they suck compared to you because you don't have enough time to do everything yourself.
Do yourself a favor and turn down animal damage, because otherwise the wolves will kill you effortlessly in like 2-3 bites and they are absurdly aggressive. I think I ended up with it at 30% before the ratio between how many bites it took them to kill me and how many spear stabs it took me to kill them (since the wolves won't run away) felt reasonable.
One or more of the devs heard about the Beast of Gévaudan and decided that must have been every day in the medieval period, never mind that wolf packs (like every other predator) have been learning to avoid human sight on pain of severe injury since we started throwing spears (let alone firing arrows) at things that threatened our children, pets, or livestock. Leopards, lions, and tigers, the most notorious man-eaters, aren't even this aggressive to people.