The game comes to fill a great gap for city building games in the style of good-ol' Caesar, with "campaigns" rather than "levels" which one could finish very quickly. Instead, the missions in 1849 take considerably long time to complete, so one can really develop its town from scratch rather than getting an almost-built-up map which one has to manage a little and then the achievements are met. So for me, at least, given that I've been looking for a city-building games with long gameplay time, lots of building and developing of your city from scratch, not just brief time-management levels, it's really great.

I only gave it 4 stars and mentioned that there is still lots of room for improvement because of the following reasons.
- It's somehow annoying to click everytime on the icon for road or house (or whatever) building. I'd prefer the ability to build "lots", like click and drag over an area and fill that area with houses (or roads or whatever).
- I'd like to see bigger maps, huge cities, like Caesar used to offer from the very first level. Of course, the area that 1849 provides is enough to complete the tasks, but still, it would be much more entertaining (for me at least) to see a huge city, spread across many displays.
- It's somehow awkward that in some missions only the "required" buildings are available. As such, it's funny how, for example, a mission which has the main task to mine and sell gold, has no bakeries available for building and the only food that is available is via a trade, to buy as canned meat. So it would be nice for any mission to have the buildings from the previous one available + what is needed now.
- Continuing my previous point, the most important improvement that I suggest and which I think would make the game AWESOME is to have a "continuity" mode. What I mean is to have only one town and a "mission" to be just a set of goals *added to this map*. For example, you start with a plain field. The first mission is to get 30 inhabitants, the second to feed them and get at least 60% employment rate, the third to make 50 units of wine and make sure that all the houses have access to a Saloon and so forth. I know, there's Sandbox mode, but still, it would be more challenging to have it like I exemplified. In my opinion at least.

Other than that, as I said, the game is extremely well intended, well built and I foresee a great future for it! Go get it if you loved Caesar! Thanks and congrats to SomaSim!