I’m itching to play something like Cities Skylines, but also something that isn’t just about growing and growing, rather building within certain (spatial?) limitations and/or solving problems or something. I hope this isn’t a contradiction, but I’d also like if it had a bit more focus on individual buildings and livability rather than optimizing car traffic, if that makes any sense. I guess i’m looking for something that is a bit more than just a city sculpting sandbox, but less than a full blown metropolis-society-simulator.
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Others have mentioned Tropico, but I like talking about Tropico so I recommend Tropico 6. Campaign missions have unique goals and conditions that can lead to interesting decisions, like the one where you can’t build houses, everyone lives in shacks, and I ended up going a dictator direction just to keep the populace in line.
Traffic is easy to manage, just don’t make four-way intersections (seriously, that’s it). Building choice and location are important because citizens have to travel from one place to another, so even if your clinic isn’t overwhelmed it may be good to build another far away so citizens don’t have to travel across the entire island to get there.
I could go on for a while, but it’s good, and Tropico 7 is coming out later this year so Tropico 6 will likely be pretty cheap next time it goes on sale.
Pharaoh and Cleopatra are great
Against the Storm?
Edit: lol, seems like everyone has suggested this one
Appreciate you asking this question. I’ve been on the hunt for something like this. I was thinking back to how much fun warcraft three was, which while it was a base builder, it’s basically the same principle. But different levels, an actual story, etc…
A city builder or village builder following that track would be killer.
Oh man. I miss Warcraft games before WoW
Since everyone already recommended my suggestion I’m also gonna throw into the mix
Synergy. Fun game with more of a focus on building sustainably instead of building big and expanding. Great artwork and a neat, alien setting that you have to explore and discover for yourself, adapting to the environmental challenges and local flora/fauna
Mobius
Laysara: Summit Kingdom has a few unique twists on city building that sound similar to what you’re looking for.
Against the storm sounds like a perfect fit. It’s in a fantasy setting though, so it’s quite different from Cities Skylines.
The idea is that you build a village, collect resources, and try to survive until you complete objectives. Once you’re done, you earn some permanent progression and move on to the next area to build. Each zone has its own challenges and randomly generated resources.
against the storm isn’t fun for me idky I’m always not understanding why stuff isn’t working and then missing some specific resource and losing. i really want to enjoy it though. i found that timberborn is kinda a level-based city builder as long as you decide when you’ve “won”
When you select a place for a new settlement, you can look at which ressources are expected to be produced there based on the biome. Different biomes will have different ressources, some common and others absent entirely.
As in many roguelikes, you can’t play assuming you’ll get a perfect build with what you have, in this case meaning the best resource transformation buildings. When you’re unlocking a building blueprint in a run, never choose based on things you don’t have yet, try to work with what you already have instead even if it’s not optimal. For example, choosing a bakery that produces max quality bread when you don’t have wheat or the building to harvest wheat might put you in a bad spot, where you’re hoping for a resource that never comes.
After a few games you start unlocking more buildings and permanent bonuses which makes the game a lot easier, sometimes the seasoned players forget how tough it gets in a fresh new game.
I was super excited to try it out, and after spending about a week binging it, I came to the conclusion I didn’t have fun playing it.
It did have a bit of a learning curve but once it clicks, you’re breezing along. It just didn’t fill my city building void.
It takes some getting used to, you can play the easy difficulties until you wrap your head around the mechanics. Once I got past the difficulty curve though I found it very fun.
Ooh, sounds great, thanks!
Awesome game
banished is real good. it’s a medieval village sim. it’s also 6.50€ right now.
i see everyone recommending against the storm, banished is basically “what if that game was colorless, depressing and brutally realistic”.
Not as good as Against the Storm, but I like how Tropico games are more about building through challenges than just building.
Tropico 5 is the only one I’ve played and that was a right laugh
They all are. It’s great stuff.
Another +1 for Against the Storm. Timberborn also released recently and I lost a good bit of time to it. Timberborn has the sandbox build with multiple layers, and problem solving since you have to control water flow during three seasons (Wet, drought, tainted water) and manage resources.
You’re looking for Against the Storm.
It’s a rogue-like city-builder with goals that you meet and complete in order to move on to the next set of unique challenges. You’ll be faced with unique sets of challenges per biome, unique race-based sets of needs, and times events that need to be dealt with or their consequences will have to be mitigated.
Terra Nil might be up your alley- You start in a barren landscape, you build structures to restore life to the earth. Once the land is healthy, you pack up all of your buildings, and fly them up to your spaceship, to try the same thing with the next area. It’s more of a “puzzle” game than a sim, but it’s fun, relaxed, and moves through different levels as they introduce new tech for different restoration projects.
You might like Frostpunk
If you are ok with factory ish games, I really liked the level based nature of “mindustry”. Factorio is more “you have any space you need, nature bends to your will”. And mindustry does some stuff where it’s similar production chain puzzling, but you are hard restricted by space. Which improves the puzzling, because not all solutions will fit everywhere.
Otherwise I would also recommend against the storm.
Workers and Resources Soviet Republic is an automation simulator masquerading as a city builder.
The most played game right now on my Steam account is Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic, an automation game disguised as a city builder, with obscenely detailed mechanics. You don’t buy buildings, you have to have functional construction industries to set them up. You don’t magically draw colored lines to set up bus routes like in SimCity, you have to buy buses at the border one by one and then set up a maintenance schedule. You don’t highlight a dark patch on the map and suddenly have a metallurgy industry like in Cities: Skylines, the fuck you don’t, you need to set up a coal industry and rail transport over the course of thirty odd hours before you start cranking out steel. And that’s without even considering food production, alcoholism management, pollution from the necessary chemicals industry, storage and handling of fresh meat, and of course, citizen loyalty to the Party. It’s a fucking insane game by and for people who probably have to be insane themselves.
I wrote that in a post about my strange relationship with games and media in general in my blog a few weeks ago.
Definitely one of the most distinctly engrossing games I’ve ever played. Seriously. Your cities will be ugly as fuck because it’s genuinely difficult to progress.
Reading your post over again maybe it’s a bit on the extreme side and not what you’re asking for. This is the most extreme city management I’ve ever played. Your sewers have to flow downhill, citizens driving in personal cars is something that happens after like 300 hours, if you sell too much oil too fast you can make oil cheaper on the global market and lose money. I hate it, I’ve wasted my life on it. It’s great I want to play more.
Man, I want to like this game but it runs like ass on my rig.
Really impressive game, but holy shit can it get complicated.
The only city builder I’ve played where you have to purchase the asphalt and the equipment (dump trucks, rollers, etc.) and assign workers to build all roads.
I think you can turn that off to simplify it, but still pretty cool
