The union of the systems with the setting is striking; your struggles to overcome scarcity in the face of a persistent natural disaster immediately create fear and urgency. That was enough to carry me through one session of the main campaign, but I don't see myself getting much from a harder difficulty or a different scenario. Because the fundamental elements of the simulation are ultimately fairly simple, most of the events meant to heighten entropy (i.e. the flavor) instead have predictable outcomes, and there's little reward in deviating from what works to explore the fairly robust tech trees. A decent introduction to city-building sims, but even as a relative novice to the genre, I needed more.