izigame.me

It's not a particularly bad game by any means. Kingdom and Castles feels like what happens when you try to mash up a game like City Skylines or Dwarf Fortress with a Civ style game, but unfortunately, the game's a little lacking overall.
When you make a world, you can choose to play on a single continent, or to break the map into islands. If you play on a single continent, there are essentially no real threats to you, period, it's just your own ability to protect and grow the fortress against two threats that come by every in game decade or so, neither of which will end your game. This might not be bad to get used to the game mechanics or to more freely build, but it also feels like there's not really a point to doing anything at all once you realize there's no actual conflict. I mistakenly chose this map for my first game not realizing there would be no other nations, and later realized I'd have to choose an Island generation instead.
If you pick islands, you are allowed to choose the island you wish to settle down, and you can also choose the number of opponent civilizations who will each take their own island, limited by the amount of islands generated, ie, there will never be four plays if there are only 3 islands. Most islands come generated with 1 - 2 Stone Ore and 1 - 2 Iron Ore, with the major differences being the size and shape of the island. However, these islands are constrained to the same size map that a single landmass would take, and even the largest map sizes feel a little small and look a little square ish at full generation.
Gameplay itself is also unfortunately pretty linear. Plop your castle down, start by building a road, and immediately realize you can't plan the areas like you want to because you have to concern yourself with soil fertility. So you work around that, and choose the Barren areas to place homes and important but not food based structures, and choose the fertile areas to use for farms and orchards. Wood is plentiful and used for roads and houses, but you'll need to mine stone from the particular ore spots on the map. Once you have that supply line, you plop down stockpiles to store your excess stone and wood, and slowly but surely expand, making sure to invest in the more expensive houses that will use up less overall resources, pay out more tax money, and use less of the inhabitants to run the location than the smaller houses do individually. Then once you have a lot of them, you'll find yourself needed to expand one industry or another a bit to cater to their needs, and shuffle between keeping them happy, keeping them fed, and realizing just how many of those workers won't go towards the projects you actually want to build, because you need workers for your libraries and churches just as much as you need them for your farms.
You can invest in some limited tech, either by befriending the witch if she is on your island, or by investing in a library, though a merchant ship may also sell some of the same upgrades that your library can make, and often at a much cheaper cost. But more than that though, you'll want to invest in your defense systems. The problem? Again, your ability to use them relies on having the manpower to put in them, and the ballista towers alone will end up being a couple dozen of your, again, very limited supply of useable people. You can futs around with this and prioritize one job over another for when you need it, but often by the time you actually need it, you need the citizens to be at the tower, present, and ready to shoot Vikings, a Dragon, or a competing island.
Now as for Diplomacy? You will probably be visited by another community. It has a temperment but will generally be neutral to positive with you. Some will demand you give them gold, and you will probably go to war with them first because you're not going to put up with paying the rising sums. Some will give you gifts, and you will accept graciously and keep the relationship positive, and they may ask for supplies back, but it will never be as much as they gave you in the first place, so it's usually fairly easy. Say the obvious thing, and you won't go to war unless you choose to. You don't really have anything to actually gain from going to war either, but once you do, your opponent will send their troops at you, and as long as you have your walls fairly boxed in and your ballistas manned, you'll take out most of them, with maybe the use of a few archers or swordsmen to handle the stragglers. The war will be a pretty brutal drain of your resources, namely gold, and you'll probably be making that gold back by selling to the neutral party merchant ships, as trading with your allies is hardly lucrative, so best for just keeping things amicable. Why would I try to trade my most precious resources with my ally for like 15 gold when I can sell my 50 ish of my excess coal in a single merchant visit for 150 gold?
Taking on an opponent is definitely a lot harder in theory, but archers in your ships will shoot from afar to kill any oncoming enemy troops, which usually means that your only real choke point is finding the least defended place to land foot troops and ballistas. The ballistas take out the archery towers, the foot troops burn down homes and churches so you can make the war more costly for your opponent, and you're usually able to follow this approach to take down most enemy towers while realizing that the enemy has chosen the most disgusting grid pattern to try and fill the land up as inefficiently as possible. Either way, you continue this assault on and they'll refuse to end the war without you paying tribute, which you wont, and eventually, you'll tear down every ballista and revenue making location until you find your way to their keep. It will be the most heavily defended, and you'll be draining troops left and right just knocking out the towers around it first. Eventually, you'll have to knock out the Keep itself, which will be less of a challenge and more of a math equation of how many ballistas and foot soldiers you need. The foot soldiers will tank the hits and die slowly, the ballistas will chip away at the high castle defenses, and I wanna say 6 - 9 ballistas or 2-3 transport ships worth will do the trick, but maybe more on higher difficulties. Congrats. You now have a whole second island under your control. You'll then be spending the next hundred or so in game years balancing out your mainland's budget from the war while tearing down every single structure on the opposing island because the land is so inefficient and the perfect grids are an eyesore. But then you'll have two of a possible four island's worth of resources, gold, and troops at your disposal, so how much of a challenge will the other two islands actually be? heck, if one opposing island isn't doing so well ( usually the smallest one ) and you're in the best relationship with them, they might just give your their island, their trouble, and all those resources, to the point where the last island really isn't a threat.
I think the game would be a lot more worth buying if it built upon itself a bit more. The amount of resources feels a little lacking in general, the world generation feel's a bit stiff, the opposing AI is honestly easy to deal with, the vikings and dragons are less of a threat than they ought to be, and having only three total opponents makes the politics a little too simple. There's never really a danger of an opposing nation taking over an unrelated NPC for instance, nor is there any particular scarcity between any islands (besides space ) that would actually provide incentive to actually go to war. There isn't even really all that much incentive to go exploring the map except to find whatever NPC kingdom has pestered you for their aid.
Again, it's not a bad game by any means, especially not for the low price. I just think there's a lot to be desired, and better games worth the time.