Last updated on January 15th, 2026 at 12:44 pm
Paragon Pioneers – Simulation Game Review
Paragon Pioneers is a Simulation game from Tobias Arlt, first launched in 23rd June 2022.
It’s rated 12+ and currently has 326+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Paragon Pioneers Stand Out
Paragon Pioneers is a city-building idle game in which you discover, conquer and then build on islands to fulfill the needs of your inhabitants. Even with limited time to play you can enjoy this deep simulation game and follow one of the countless ways to optimize your empire. Build an impressive palace and go down in history as Paragon's most successful leader.
This is the full version of Paragon Pioneers. The lite version is available here: https://apps.apple.com/app/paragon-pioneers-lite/id1622824091
» What can I expect? «
BUILD your empire stone by stone: construct over 100 different buildings to meet all the needs of your inhabitants.
PRODUCE more than 70 goods with complex production chains.
DISCOVER more islands for your ever-growing empire: build a big fleet, send it across the sea and widen your realm step by step.
CONQUER newly discovered islands from the orcs with an intuitive and multifaceted combat system.
RELAX as your empire stays active even when you're not playing.
IMMERSE yourself in a stylized and cute medieval/fantasy setting without the bother of ads, in-app purchases or even the need to be online.
SHAPE every island in the game with a unique island generator to suit your needs.
ENJOY this game again and again by selecting a special custodian at the end that offers powerful skills for your next empires.
» Get in touch! «
Join the community on Discord: https://discord.gg/pRuGbCDWCP
Send me an email: [email protected]
» Thank you for playing Paragon Pioneers! «
With my passion project Paragon Pioneers I’m following my dream of being a game developer. After working for nearly two years on it now, it makes me really happy when it brings joy to other people. So please feel free to get in touch and tell me how you experienced my game :)
- Tobias
This Simulation game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Paragon Pioneers is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 17th October 2025
Recent improvements include:
• Fixed a infinite loading bug on some devices
Download & Availability
Paragon Pioneers is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Paragon Pioneers on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
We rarely buy games, and have only ever wrote one other review for a game.. This game is simply fantastic. Im not one for an idle game where you wait for 8 hours for a small loot, and this game just has that low-med wait time, usually 2 hours max and we can go back to farming and building.
We're completely hooked on this game. Optimizing trade routes becomes incredibly complex, but in a very good, enjoyable way. It's not a game you're going to "beat" in a few days. It's got some built in time gating. Normally that would frustrate us, but it feels organic and correct in a game like this. Grab the lite version if you want to check it out, but you'll likely be buying the full version very soon and it's worth every penny.
This is a strategy based game that really has its own unique feel with aspects of idle games alongside city build elements. Its a fairly new game with a few bugs still to work out but we would highly recommend this game for anyone looking for something to dive into.
We have really enjoyed this game – it is what an idle game should be! Many idle games try to hook you with countdowns and limited-time rewards that are predatory rather than satisfying. Paragon Pioneers has an intentional pace to it that makes you want to check in and make sure things are running smoothly. If you miss something there is no penalty- just pick up where you left off. There is also a great deal of depth to keep things interesting, as production lines keep gaining complexity. Very reasonable price for all this content.
Basically a lot of the gameplay of the Anno series, but made into a semi idle game. Build production chains to satisfy workers needs to get more workers so you can build more production, and so on. Some light tetrising of your buildings as well to figure out ideal placements. All in all definitely worth it.
Its wonderful to see a solid game that isnt crammed full of in-app purchases at every corner. This is a game that rewards strategy, requires planning, and has a good power curve and sense of advancement. We Highly recommend anyone who enjoys a good combination of idle and sim/strategy to give this a shot.
This is the first review we have ever done, but felt this app deserved a review. Kudos to the creator for creating a great idle game that requires you to think carefully about how you set up logistics. Its the perfect game for anyone who loves supply chain and optimization. Plus no IAP! Worth every penny. Be patient and you will be rewarded.
This reminds us a lot of those old Anno games. The game runs at a good pace, and it's a great value for the price with lots of hours of entertainment. The fact that this game doesn't have paywalls or endless IAPs is phenomenal. We certainly recommend it, and we look forward to future updates as well.
Great game. We think a neat addition would be to upgrade more of the basic buildings. Its rewarding to see the visual changes when you upgrade a building. Maybe we could update the lumberjack to chop faster, even if its just a small amount. Same for fisherman huts, farmers, etc.
Was skeptical but Id say the game is worth it, especially if the dev is active in updating with new content.
Really happy that we found this! Thank you to the dev for making an incremental game with just an upfront cost. You can tell that waiting times are optimized to make a fun & addicting gameplay loop, rather than merely existing to nickel and dime the impatient. Looking forward to making progress bit by bit as time goes on.
In a sea of games, this is a hidden gem. We are so happy we stumbled on it, we are truly enjoying it. Thank you.
Please youve seen it suggested. Make it so you can pick up buildings and store them or at least move them from A-B. Locking parts of the island makes it so you have a terrible setup for efficiency and you have to end up deleting all your buildings one by one to rebuild into a proper setup. Its not a fun mechanic to extend content its an annoyance and clearly others agree. Other than that one tiny thing that makes this game take way too long to set up we think it fantastic.
Im actually between four and five stars for this, but we dont want to drag the rating down. Our main beefs are personal preference. When the dev says this is an idle game, he means it. Most things take a long time to complete. Ships take hours to travel between islands, and getting things like trade routes optimized can be a bit of a chore at times. That said, for the price, this is an excellent value, something we can check throughout the day but not have to enslave ourselves to timers or micro transactions. The dev is also very responsive to player feedback. Compared to a lot of grindy, ad-ridden games, this is a clear standout. Perhaps even a paragon of its genre.
- one time purchase, no IAP (even cosmetics!) – responsive developer, already updating with QoL enhancements – so in-depth you could almost forget this is an idle game, but never punishes you for failing to check in frequently enough This game costs less than a grande latte, and youll enjoy it a hundred times more.
So this game took some concepts from Anno series which is our favorite game of all time – but it didnt stop there, they improvised in many aspects for the mobile experience and make this game satisfying and pleasant. If u like Anno series or just a fan of games in that genre give this game a try.
A lot of idle games seem to be little more than thinly veiled fronts to sell your time and attention to advertisers. This game treats you like the customer, and rewards you with a deep, fun, and well placed strategy game. Its a new favorite.
Amazing game for a mobile device. More like this please. No in app purchases, no ads. SO GOOD. Wait times grow exponentially but you can make them faster with upgrades. Only con is the tutorial is too short.
Pretty buggy game. No way to edit after you place an item and crashes often. Perhaps will get better but for now its not the best.
This isnt your basic click stare at idle game. This is a very deep and immersive idle game that will definitely keep you busy and will require you to work at it. Ive been playing pretty regularly for just under a week now and we havent scratched the surface on what this game has to offer. To be completely honest there are times where all you can do is just wait until a ship gets to its destination or attack is completed ( in the game you can upgrade your ships so having to wait wont be much of issue in the future). Overall we think the developer has done a great job with this game there is a lot to do. Anyone looking for a deeper and captivating idle game should definitely give this a try.
Only one complaint (and this is for our OCD min-maxing brain), and maybe we just havent unlocked this feature yet, but we would like layered views showing what ground is covered by certain stations. For example, a filter to see all your wood cutter coverage without selecting each lumberjack station individually.
Fun game, great art, our only issue is that its too idly. It would be nice to have optional content to play while Im waiting 4 hours for our ship to find an island and have nothing else to do.
Its an idle game starts out fine then theres wait times for everything and it goes up even more like a war of empires game :( sad.
If youre the type of person that gets a lot of satisfaction out of making optimally efficient systems, this game is for you This is so fun and requires a nice kind of patience that we enjoy. There are waiting mechanisms built in, you cant pay to speed them up, and theyre part of the lore and gameplay. Theres no fall off in terms of production when you dont have the game open. So it can lend itself to an hour or more of tweaking and analyzing your network of islands, redistributing resources – and then maybe 10 minute chunks a couple times in the day, to check in and tweak as needed, with the system you built running along in the background. This is a long-running game, and the only way to speed it up is to get better at it. Ive been playing for a week and still feel like Im in the very early stages, getting our first few islands set up, but as we learn our systems get better and our growth gets faster. SO satisfying. Also, play with the music on if you can, the soundtrack is stunning.
We really love playing this app. We enjoy the world building that it provides it doesnt get boring. It actually gets more complex as time goes on as your master more and more skills you can actually really get into building a really diverse world. Well done to the developers.
Its an idle town building game without the in app purchases! One thing we think would be cool is if you could add little people waking around, so its more like a town. :).
Really fun especially with the trade route waypoint system, tons of freedom and opportunity to customize your supply chains and economic empire.
This reminds us a lot of those old Anno games. The game runs at a good pace, and it's a great value for the price with lots of hours of entertainment. The fact that this game doesn't have paywalls or endless IAPs is phenomenal. We certainly recommend it, and we look forward to future updates as well.
We cant compliment this game enough. Tobias (dev) charges $3 for the best game Ive played on iOS since 2007. Tobias could succumb to micro transactions for ships, or to speed time up, or anything else, but he doesnt. You just have to spend a bit of time to learn the game. For Anno lovers, this is a phenomenal mobile port to satisfy the itch. We only need to check in once a day to monitor routes and production. T5 in one month. Pop crashes not possible with the current base mechanics. Looking forward to updates or a new release.
So many hours put in to this game.
Edit: we had to come back and edit because this game is by far our favorite. Im on round 3 and its every bit as fun as the first time. Its the right amount of everything. Definitely addictive, but doesnt distract you too much from your daily life. Challenging but not frustrating. The developer is working on a new game and we cant wait for him to publish it. *** Ive only been playing this game for about a week but Im hooked. Raves: 1- The game play is simple, yet complex. It involves strategy and brain power to manage your resources efficiently. As soon as school starts we will recommend this game to our students. Id much rather they play this than be on Tik Tok. 2- No ads, no in-game purchases, no subscriptions. We are sick of playing free games that require you watch ads. $3.99 is an incredible deal. 3- Community support. The developer has a discord channel and a wiki page for support. We like what the developer is doing. He seems invested in his game and listens to feedback. As soon as Im done with this review we will be looking to see if he has other games. Cons: we feel like we have to put something, but honestly there arent any, other than a suggestion for a feature. It would be nice to have a world map view of your islands and trade routes. Edit: After playing the game for a little while longer, this con isnt feasible. Having this feature would be impossible. Ill have to get back with you for a real con. We simply cannot think of anything negative to say.
Ive experienced a couple persistent bugs related to production. For example, the farm that produces material for rope/paper wouldn't begin production unless we removed the farm and placed it again. Another one that is more persistent is the production of booze. We would come back to the app the next day and see that pioneers werent happy because they didn't have enough booze. We would build another farm and think we have it resolved. Next day same thing we began to notice that when we returned to the game after a break their production was halted because they had no available storage. How could that be though if the people dont have enough? We then noticed that if we tap on the farm it would clear the error and production would resume. This bug was a bit of a dealbreaker for us we couldnt progress to the next level bc the Pioneers werent happy enough to upgrade. Sad because it had a ton of potential. Im going to check out the sequel hopefully these bugs were resolved.
Its a cleverly disguised puzzle game. You have to selectively build structures nearby other structures in a random-ish map. Almost every building has its own blueprint that is required by or from other buildings. As a casual gamer that loves idlers, builders, clicker games and similar, we should have went with our gut when playing the lite version. This is definitely not for everyone.
The thing is. We dont know what we are doing. Doesnt make things clear and after 4 days trying to figure it out. We are disappointed because we still cant. We dont know how the trade routes go, we dont know how to even trade, and gold is very very hard to get. The tutorial was some what helpful BUT not really at same time. It doesnt have a look here to know how to do things. Suggestion from us? . A detail tutorial. With at least a place where you can read how to do things. But the good things, we love the concept of the game. And it has potential.
We tried the game. We felt it was a waste of time.
Great for playing now and then. No coins or pay to win shenanigans. Loading time of the app could be improved. Or buy a newer device.
This reminds us a lot of those old Anno games. The game runs at a good pace, and it's a great value for the price with lots of hours of entertainment. The fact that this game doesn't have paywalls or endless IAPs is phenomenal. We certainly recommend it, and we look forward to future updates as well.
This is a great game but it's pretty chill you're able to jump on play for a few minutes or up to even 30 minutes. Only thing we wish this game had was some side quests or boss battles or some PVP to keep you busy on those day you have lots of time.
Doesnt support landscape on iPad, making it unplayable.
Okay, so we were initially very skeptical of paying for an idle game, but Im really glad we did. This looks cutesy and simplistic at a glance, and for the first couple of hours it is, but by the time youve been playing a few minutes here and there for a week youll realize youre now quite busy and the game mechanics go much deeper than meets the eye. Youll also see all the mistakes you made staring you in the face and spend the next week or two trying to correct them. For some that will be a bummer, but for the min/max and micromanaging crowd its an awesome experience. If you like resource management games, you cant ask for better on mobile. Our criticisms to the dev (we see that you read these)- The tutorial needs expanded a bit. We went an embarrassing amount of time just guessing at battle results before realizing we could scroll through the attack rounds to see who hits who and for how much damage. Also, the best tools for managing input/output of tiles is hidden in the settings menu and turned off by default? Why? Lastly, we know its an idle game, but mid-game slows to a crawl if you didnt get lucky and set up your starting island correctly, which Im sure many of us did because theres no way to anticipate just how constrained space will become pretty quickly. Overall a great experience for the price, and the dev seems to be listening to feedback and updating. We say throw your coin at it and give it a try for yourself.
Well this developer nailed it. This game scratches all the right spots! Its as idle as you need it to be, and we often am playing 30-60 min without needing to wait for a battle or ship delivery. Which is perfect for us! Looks like it will have great replay value too, and with the relatively low purchase cost (and no pay wall at all!), this is probably the best app ive gotten in a long time. Great work! Thoughts on things to consider: a little clearer detail on the trade route tutorial would be good, as well as a better explanation of how to grow gold supplies. Also, we think it would be helpful if when we click on higher level settlers like merchants or paragons, it would show us what buildings they open up. That would help beginners plan. Not a deal breaker at all, and we highly recommend this game :).
It starts out as a simple island management game and scales to a transport/supply chain puzzle. Absolutely recommend.
Very nice game – reminds us of the original Settlers game from way back in the day. Love it so far.
This game is wildly addicting and finally scratches that idle itch without any stupid in game currency. No pay to play nonsense like some other games are entirely built upon. This game just requires thought and strategy. Has a splash of Caesar 3 and a mix of other elements. We couldnt recommend it more.
This game is worth its price. Its an incremental without the nasty brain rewiring that happens to the player. Its complex enough to make you think a little, but you dont have to open Excel to git gud. Its nice enough to ramp you up at a rate appropriate for the game play. Theres no punishment for forgetting to check in. Your people will stay, your processes will run youll just make less money. And it seems like it doesnt try to take data from you. Neat stuff. We dont write reviews often. Developer did good.
We love this game, happy it doesnt have micro transactions because we probably would have spent some money in the game already :D.
We just wanted to take a minute and recognize what the dev did here. A full game thats super affordable, has no ads and is very enjoyable. Oh yes, and there is a lite version that you can download for free and try the game out. We wish more devs had this approach. We went ahead and bought the game on both iOS and Android. As far as the gameplay goes, its a perfect balance between active and passive gaming on the go. Dev, if you get to read this, thank you and we look forward to more from you.
The game was phenomenal until we started exploring other islands. Having to grind through other islands for the little maps in order to get a map we can grow wheat on is awful. We were hoping there would be like islands you find that are randomly generated that would allow you to continue progressing in the game but at this point our main island is just a gold farm so that we can conquer small uninhabitable islands to get maps to hopefully one day get an island that we can do stuff on.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.0.125
- Size: 180.15 MB
- iOS: 13.0 or later
- Languages: EN, FR, DE
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References, Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
- Developer: [Tobias Arlt]()
Last updated: 17th October 2025 | Genre: Simulation | Developer: Tobias Arlt