Probably my favorite type of game, I've played dozens of them but I'm always looking for something good I might have missed. My personal favorite for the past few years has definitely been Farthest Frontier but theres been a ton of good ones. And if anyone else is looking for recommendations let me what you like and I probably know something that fits.
El Presidente paid me $20 to say Tropico, but jokes on him, I would have said that without being bribed
Tropico three was cool, butI've hear the series has gone down hill.
IMO it’s stagnated. It’s not so much worse as not improving in any meaningful way.
I've played so much Tropico. Great series but the last one seemed like merely a rehash of five. Game play and the jokes were pretty much the same.
It also has some of the best ever soundtracks in a video game series.
Shame 5 wasn't very good and I don't think 6 runs on my PC.
Dorf Fortess by a huge margin. It's so much weirder and more complex than most of it's competitors and doesn't force you to have neoliberal car brain. Plus the warcrimes you can commit are endlessly amusing.
Apparently they've domesticated angels now, somehow, so fresh horrors abound.
:brezhnev-shining: Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic!
I also really love Dwarf Fortress. Been playing it since the Boatmurdered days.
Yeah, Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic is unironically great for how in depth it is.
It's got a harsh learning curve, but still.
We should have a hexbear collective game where we decide things as a bloated committee (one player plays while the rest of us gossip and post memes)
I haven't played a ton of them but I've put a lot of hours into Rimworld. There's such an active modding scene that you can set up just about any kind of scenario you can think of.
RimWorld mods are great, I think I was at like a 120 mods last time I played.
I think my peak was like 300ish and then I realized how much it was slowing down my computer. Just started a Juche android colony a couple days ago.
"Have you heard about this new game, Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic?" As mentioned elsewhere I like the 1917 Cosmonaut mode modded start. Horse drawn village into international powerhouse.
Also a big bif fan of the Patrician games, which start as a trade sim and become a City builder.
There's a bunch of mods that together provide a pre-industrial start.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-rally-point-dont-krai-for-me-in-workers-and-resources
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2617743266
I don't have a permanent favorite, I've always enjoyed Caesar 3(Augustus), Cities Skylines, Workers, Banished, Farthest Frontier. All have their strengths.
The latest one I enjoyed is Against the storm, its pretty damn good.
Well barring the obvious ones like Cities Skylines and Sim City 4, Timberborn is a lot of fun and being actively expanded and I find myself going back to Oxygen Not Included often, even though it's not exactly your traditional city builder.
I haven't played it in a while but Tropico is probably my all time favourite city builder, even though it's got :brainworms:
Timberborne just got a big update, but I haven't had the chance to play it yet. Timberpunk is definitely a top-tier aesthetic.
ONI made me think I needed a chemistry and engineering degree to play the game without looking at tutorials to do basically everything.
It’s one of those games that overwhelms you with complexity right off the bat but the mechanics aren’t actually that bad when you get a feel for them. It’s nowhere near as hard as something like dwarf fortress.
Timberborn seemed like such a cool concept but the game itself felt really shallow to me. But it's been almost a year since I last checked it out so there's probably a fair amount more to it now.
Definitely give it another try, IMO the last few updates have focused on giving it more depth and differentiating the factions.
Try Foundation, the roads are created by paths of desire, although I wish they would continue to upgrade and allow faster travel depending on the traffic level and the resources available
I've been trying to download that for a few a days but there's no damn seeders.
Here - those direct links will work. GOG version, updated five days ago.
Cities Skylines. Vanilla is pretty mid but with mods its poggers af.
Give me Cities Skylines, but with realistic traffic/parking/induced demand so I can build mass transit accordingly.
City Skylines never really captured me even with mods. I mean I have 100+ hours played but that's not that much for compared some games.
Oh, Songs of Syx is really cool and good. Very dwarf fortress/ant colony feel. Active development, lots and lots of individual characters, like thousands.
Damn over a 1k reviews on steam and I've never even heard of it. Downloading it now.
Caesar III was a favorite back in the day, and I started it again recently with some quality of life mods. It holds up.
I used to love that game, had no idea there were mods for something that old though. I think I'll five it a shot.
The main mod is Augustus - it stops your people from wandering too far, so now your firefighters and laborers will go where you want them.
I love the farthest frontier farming and stuff, but the whole colonial theme is always in the back of my mind.
huh I never thought it was a colonial theme, always felt like it was set in feudal Europe to me.
Gives me early 1600s Late Elizabethan/Jacobean vibes, so colonial, but, like, Jamestown dying-from-malnutrition-because-you-are-all-idiots colonial.
Eh, just vibes, I have no idea.
(a lot of 4x or strategy games or whatever have this problem)
I'm still looking for a really good Neolithic - iron age city builder. I think I've played most of them. Dawn of Man is good, but pretty clunky and not very replayable. Ancient Cities seems like it's not in a good place right now. There's another one that I can't remember the name of where you can build custom buildings and have to discover techs by having people experiment with materials. It was good when I checked it out but pretty early in development. Ymir is a crazy cool game of building pigmen civs, multi-player, that operates with long timers so you log in and do a little every day, but it requires a lot of commitment.
There's a growing number of sumerian ones that all look like they might get somewhere eventually, but none of them have quite tickled me.
