So I've been learning and enjoying the game for a few days and am pretty good at city design being an old Caesar and Pharoah vet, but I was playing the second mission of the first campaign (where you have to get four trading partners) and ran into the most frustrating issue.

I had designed a large city with four closed blocks, perfectly built around my market with industry around the outside walls. The town was thriving, but I did go into a little bit of debt for a few months before my trade picked up, and I also had high unemployment for MAYBE one or two months. Immediately, my citizens start emigrating over "despotism" and "poor feng shui" and this starts a massive chain-reaction where my employment then drops and even more people leave until my city is basically destroyed and I lose.

This is really stupid as there was no "despotism" and they had to go maybe two months in debt with some high unemployment and it basically ruined my entire city and ended my game even though after that month my finances recovered and I started making thousands in trade. There was plenty of food, hemp, religious coverage, and music, but it didn't matter because they all just started flooding out of my city with no way to stop it and no way to seemingly recover.

It's just very stupid and petty behavior from your moron citizens. I mass-deleted everything and now see where there were maybe so many atrocities in historic China if the people act like this. Just kidding, but it's very frustrating and I don't think makes any sense or is as good of a design as Caesar or the other Sierra city builders. Very disappointed tbh.

So I've replayed the same scenario again, this time micro-managing labor and making sure I don't go into debt while satisfying the ridiculous demands from my neighboring cities. Now, my "Feng Shui" is somehow bad even though on the Feng Shui map, at least half of the city is green, with only a few yellow houses and some industrial spots in the yellow.

Now I'm short tons of workers because "past bad Feng Shui prevents immigration." Like what a STUPID mechanic! It's not even that bad, and I have Nu Wa literally walking around the city blessing things and tons of food, money, and entertainment with all services met, but nah the FENG SHUI IS BAD! I wish I could turn that garbage off, wow. It's about to ruin another playthrough.

How did anybody play through this nonsense and think it was fun? Most of the time, you literally can't even get perfect Feng Shui without tons of trial-and-error. Very frustrating and tedious mechanic.