City-building Game Catch All

Veloxi wrote:

So Lethis: Path of Progress you guys. Looks very Zeus-ish, which makes me want it so badly.

What's this? It's not early access? I may buy it on that basis alone.

BadKen wrote:
Veloxi wrote:

So Lethis: Path of Progress you guys. Looks very Zeus-ish, which makes me want it so badly.

What's this? It's not early access? I may buy it on that basis alone.

If you do please share your thoughts on the game!

I was excited for this one, but it has the "random wanderer" mechanic that I despised so much from the Caesar/Zeus games. Maybe on a deep sale.

Veloxi wrote:
BadKen wrote:
Veloxi wrote:

So Lethis: Path of Progress you guys. Looks very Zeus-ish, which makes me want it so badly.

What's this? It's not early access? I may buy it on that basis alone.

If you do please share your thoughts on the game!

After reading the RPS Wot I Think, I think I'll pass.

Veloxi wrote:

So Lethis: Path of Progress you guys. Looks very Zeus-ish, which makes me want it so badly.

Ok - I raised this on RPS and got smacked down pretty hard by the dev. There's about 5-10 reviews that sound very similar (all saying "old school" or "Zeus/Pharoah/etc-like"). The dev says it's pure coincidence, but it's made me skittish. Am I seeing things?

Weird that they would take offense at that. I would think it was a compliment. Zeus was Impressions' best city builder.

I actually enjoyed Pharaoh more.

Lethis is very much like those, with some odd omissions in the tutorials so far. For example, it asks you to zone out houses, and you set up a very basic infrastructure (houses, wells, stores - 2nd tutorial). Then it introduces you to farms. So you zone your farms... And nothing happens.

Poking around, you'll find that without enough people to staff them, apparently in the aggregate, your farms won't start up. Okay. Get some new people. Then you discover they are only staffed during the growing season, which can lead to a surge in unemployment in the winter.

Likewise, you're informed that little pillars in the road will stop random walkers. However, it's never made clear whether people carrying goods to storage buildings are considered random walkers, or whether the little guys taking goods from a depot to an end user (like food to a store) will go past the blocks. (It seems they do go by them in both cases, learned by testing.) And why aren't your depots working? You need more houses! But you have to go hunting for numbers and comparing them, rather than having a nifty "you need more workers" popup or something.

I'm only two tutorials in, so I have not seen much. But it is a bit unpolished in the information department. Whether that will affect gameplay remains to be seen.

BadKen wrote:

Weird that they would take offense at that. I would think it was a compliment. Zeus was Impressions' best city builder.

Apologies if that was confusing - I meant they all sounded so similar as to border on the "paid review" spectrum. That's what they took offense to (and fair enough if it was coincidence).

UMOarsman wrote:
BadKen wrote:

Weird that they would take offense at that. I would think it was a compliment. Zeus was Impressions' best city builder.

Apologies if that was confusing - I meant they all sounded so similar as to border on the "paid review" spectrum. That's what they took offense to (and fair enough if it was coincidence).

But it IS very similar to Zeus or Pharoah. You can see that in a trailer. What should their point of reference be? Farmville?

I'm serious and not just being flippant. It's a walker model and that means it's not Sim City. The closest game lately is Banished and that was mentioned on RPS.

Robear wrote:

I'm only two tutorials in, so I have not seen much. But it is a bit unpolished in the information department. Whether that will affect gameplay remains to be seen.

So it should definitely be considered an Early Access title at this point. Let's hope they clean up the tutorials before people give up on the game thanks to them being poorly documented.

How did I not hear about this before now?

Anno 2205 coming November 3rd

Lunar colonies? Yes, please.

Pre-order on Steam

Right there with you, D-Man. I'm firing up Anno 2070 this evening to start sating my hunger for more economy-based city building.

Really, REALLY excited for this one. Please don't F it up, BlueByte...

GOG has just added Anno 1503 A.D. and Anno 1701 A.D. and you can get both now for $11.38 for the next week.

Still waiting on Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom..

Budo wrote:

Still waiting on Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom..

Gah, that reminds me I own it on CD and have yet to install it. I should fix that.

I was amused by this patch note in Clockwork Empires:

- colonists will abort hugging more accurately

New city-building/deck-building game Concrete Jungle comes out tomorrow. It seems very similar to the 2D mobile game "MegaCity". A comment on the following video says it's from the same developer.

Dad's Gaming Addiction has a preview here:

D-Man777 wrote:

It seems very similar to the 2D mobile game "MegaCity". A comment on the following video says it's from the same developer.

Yup, the Kickstarter for the game made it clear this is the same developer making a sequel to MegaCity.

I'm looking forward to this. I absolutely love how the art style evokes SimCity 3000, and I love deck builder games.

It seems like Concrete Jungle (and Megacity) are city builders in theme only. Not that that is bad, but just not what is typically thought of as a city builder. It's almost like a city builder which uses building radii that has been distilled to the simplest possible form.

IGN makes the city-builder connection in their review of Prison Architect. They gave it an 8.3.

Planetbase coming out October 16th. It brings back fond, if frustrating, memories of Outpost from the early '90's.

More info from the dev's site here.

And Quill18 is doing a Let's Try of it too. This is where I first heard about it a couple of days ago.

That looks really good, will probably pick it up this week when it comes out.

Wow! That looks right up my alley! I'll be getting that one for sure. Thanks for sharing, D-man!

My pleasure. I try to keep this thread informed when I come across something relevant.

For those who pick up Planetbase, please share any opinions or insights here.

Cool, looks like Banished in Space, but it's got a few more things going for it, like invaders you must defend against and other "ultimate" goals. Definitely going to give this one a try!

The aforementioned Planetbase is available for purchase with 15% off.

D-Man777 wrote:

The aforementioned Planetbase is available for purchase with 15% off.

Cool, I thought it was out tomorrow.

D-Man777 wrote:

The aforementioned Planetbase is available for purchase with 15% off.

And purchased. Now I just need my PC back to play it

Banished in space? Count me in, especially at just $17.

Two Hours In Review
I stayed up until 1:30 last night playing Planetbase. Going to be a long day today, in more ways than one.

I like it quite a bit. There are a lot of interlocking systems to optimize and the planet is actively trying to kill you (maybe not actively, but it does feel malevolent at times).

Here's a quick example from my play-through last night:

Things were going along OK except we had hit a problem due to lack of metal; I wanted to add a recreation room because some of the people were mopey but no metal even though the mine was going full blast. I figured out I did not have enough workers to work the metal extractor, so I set the landing pad to allow colonists and to only bring in workers. Finally a ship landed and I got two new workers. Great! My metal extractor started being worked much more, I was getting metal and was able to construct that rec room and everyone was happy again. Except...my food stores were dwindling! I miscalculated the impact of the new workers on the food supply! Now I had to rush to build a new farm module (forget what they are actually called). Except metal takes a long time to extract and you need metal and bioplastic to build the farm thingy plus bioplastic to build the plant pads (now getting low on bioplastic) plus time to get the thing built plus more time for the plants to actually grow...you get the idea. About this time, of course, a meteor decides to take out one of my solar panels, killing my energy balance. It was a close thing, people got mighty hungry until I was able to sort it all out. At least no one starved.

This is typical of how the game is going for me: reach equilibrium, decide to do something, miscalculate its effects, scramble to recover, reach new equilibrium - with the odd disaster thrown in to keep things interesting. Rinse, repeat.

I really like it so far. Also, it is pretty to look at.

On the downer side, I am not sure how deep the game is. Right now it appears deep because I am still figuring things out. However, I wonder how much is there once I have gotten a good handle on the systems and how they interrelate. I think Banished in space might be a good comparator: I like Banished quite a bit but at some point the depth was not there to keep me playing.

Another (minor) negative for me are the unskippable scenes that pop up every so often. When your colony reaches certain milestones (like at the first landing or when you become self-sufficient), a "congrats!" screen pops up telling you of this. Which is fine except you cannot tell it to go away and let you get back to the game; it will sit there for a bit until it is good and ready to let you get back to the game. A minor nitpick in a game that does so much else right but it is irritating at the time.

Did I mention I really like it? Because I do.