I played the game for 22 hours and although I really like the game it seems something in the engine is broken. Throughout the game you are fighting with various supply issues with various products that move around as you solve them. This is fine and keeps you going in the game. It is fine as long as the population keeps growing.

Something breaks down though once you hit around 2000 Thetes and 1000 Zeugitai. The Thetes stop in population growth. Even though there is plenty of empty housing. Instead you just start to have labour shortage. For a long time I was trying to untangle this situation and thought it was probably going to be solved by increasing number of certain goods, building certain buildings etcetera. No, it never solves. I started running a deficit and had to put the tax on max on each social class. My idea was that I probably made everything a bit inefficient with to many Lesches and too many buildings poorly placed. I redesigned the entire city creating a large residential area in range of all the important service buildings, an industrial zone with very efficient access to a large amount of warehouses. Optimized all service building ranges etcetera. Nothing changed. The population was static. I then thought it was probably because Aphrodite was angry. So I sacrificed to Aphrodite to get devotion up to Tier III. No difference whatsoever. There were still empty houses. And at this point even in the middle class. As I had a stash of drachmas I then tried to run a deficit for a while with zero taxing on all classes. This even unlocked the achievement "Very Happy Polis"... But the population growth was still zero.

Then I discovered it seemingly did not even matter if I was -470 Thetes workes and -100 Zeugitai workers. All buildings were operating anyway. And homelessness and sick was constantly on 0. Seems like there is something inherently broken in the engine. Also, migrants stopped coming after a while. I was only raided one single time in my 22 hours of gameplay.

There are also a few bugs. When upgrading Thetes to Zeugitai for instance, all you need to do if they are not happy enough is to pause the game, lower taxes to zero, upgrade the house, and then raise the taxes again.

If anyone has an idea how to get population moving after trying all these solutions I am happy to hear, I tried everything. But somehow it seems to max out a certain stage. No matter how many houses are available and jobs available. Despite having no shortage of any important goods.

Another disappointing piece of Unity garbage. Do not buy.

On one laptop the game does not start, on the other laptop the map does not work.