City-building Game Catch All

Gremlin wrote:

The best of the Impression city-builders is now on GOG: Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom

I heard Lethis - Path of Progress was at least a spiritual successor to the Impression games. I have never played one, but I have been interested in giving one a shot. Does Emperor's UI and what-not hold up today or would I be better served exploring a more modern, if maybe a little inferior, alternative?

Frahg wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

The best of the Impression city-builders is now on GOG: Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom

I heard Lethis - Path of Progress was at least a spiritual successor to the Impression games. I have never played one, but I have been interested in giving one a shot. Does Emperor's UI and what-not hold up today or would I be better served exploring a more modern, if maybe a little inferior, alternative?

Been waiting years for this. Instant buy.

Been playing Cities: Skylines lately. I'll go in and add a bit every day, and google around for inspiration by looking at people's cities. It's really become a well-rounded game.

Traffic and transport is a viable game-within-a-game, even in vanilla. I find myself planning a neighborhood, trying different ways to organize it (will it have paths? be diagonally oriented, or circular? self-contained or single-purpose?), and then I have to lay in bus and subway service. Periodically I need to upgrade small roads to medium, and check the fire/police/health levels, and look at keeping people happy.

After a while, it starts to snowball. Okay, I have a train station bringing in tourists, but I need to give them viable, easy mass transit routes to destinations. So I have a sort of web of transport - maybe 1-3 transfers will get you anywhere in the city. But if the streets get crowded, then hearses and fire trucks can't get through easily. All sorts of second and third order issues come up, not least that expanding roads can lead to smaller lots in areas that are supposed to be densely laid out.

I still have not cracked open large parts of the toolbox - trams, bike paths and lanes, water transport, heating pipes, and a bunch of other stuff. I'm putting footpaths in some areas, and I just turned on a policy to encourage biking, but I don't yet know how useful they are in reducing traffic and improving lives. So there's a lot left to learn (and I have not quite left the footprint of my first area, except with the highway and train connections).

It's gotten to be a remarkably interesting game, relaxing and appealing to detail-oriented types at the same time. If you haven't fired it up in the last year, give it another look with the new DLC in place. For me, it's been a much more interesting and much more smooth experience that it was at the start of 2016.

the_poison_king wrote:

Rock, Paper, Shotgun just posted a review of Urban Empire: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/201...

Sounds like its bogged down by interface issues, and also, it's way too easy.

That article had convinced me not to buy it, until I saw Out of Eight's review. One of his main comments was that the game was quite difficult, especially the money balancing portion of it.

In the past I've found Out of Eight's reviews to be pretty good, however watching his gameplay/review video this time does make me a little skeptical. He was talking about how the information they gave you wasn't enough to keep you from going into debt, but he did show some nice panels that seemed sufficient. He did go into debt pretty bad at some point, but it was obvious why. He pushed forward for a $24k a month railroad while he only had a $13k a month surplus. He didn't notice that he got into an $11k shortfall until he blew through a large surplus and then was surprised to find himself more than a million in debt a couple years later..

He recovered from that mishap quite quickly actually, and it was smooth sailing after that, so it does seem pretty easy. There doesn't seem to be too much replay-ability, but I'm enough of a fan of the Democracy games and normal city builders to give this a shot next time it hits $20.

Yonder wrote:
the_poison_king wrote:

Rock, Paper, Shotgun just posted a review of Urban Empire: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/201...

Sounds like its bogged down by interface issues, and also, it's way too easy.

That article had convinced me not to buy it, until I saw Out of Eight's review. One of his main comments was that the game was quite difficult, especially the money balancing portion of it.

In the past I've found Out of Eight's reviews to be pretty good, however watching his gameplay/review video this time does make me a little skeptical. He was talking about how the information they gave you wasn't enough to keep you from going into debt, but he did show some nice panels that seemed sufficient. He did go into debt pretty bad at some point, but it was obvious why. He pushed forward for a $24k a month railroad while he only had a $13k a month surplus. He didn't notice that he got into an $11k shortfall until he blew through a large surplus and then was surprised to find himself more than a million in debt a couple years later..

He recovered from that mishap quite quickly actually, and it was smooth sailing after that, so it does seem pretty easy. There doesn't seem to be too much replay-ability, but I'm enough of a fan of the Democracy games and normal city builders to give this a shot next time it hits $20.

I have it and played a bit of it. It is interesting but not that good. It is too easy and, while it purports to let you make interesting decisions, they really aren't that interesting. I'd suggest holding out for $10 (or whatever your super impulse buy price is). Or take a miss on it, you are not missing much.

Cities: Skylines is on XB1... curious on how they took that game and made it work with a controller.

Not sure yet if this will fit in better in here, or the agent-based thread.... Paradox have announced a new simulation game called Surviving Mars.

omni wrote:

Not sure yet if this will fit in better in here, or the agent-based thread.... Paradox have announced a new simulation game called Surviving Mars.

To be clear, Paradox is publishing, Haemimont Games (Tropico series, Victor Vran) are the devs.

Anyone tried this so far? Releasing from early access soon and it look intriguing.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/201...

Thanks for reminding me. It released yesterday so it's on its initial sale. Snagged.

tboon wrote:
omni wrote:

Not sure yet if this will fit in better in here, or the agent-based thread.... Paradox have announced a new simulation game called Surviving Mars.

To be clear, Paradox is publishing, Haemimont Games (Tropico series, Victor Vran) are the devs.

Tropico in space could be good.

Omerta in space, not so much.

Surviving Mars sounds almost exactly like Planetbase, which I enjoyed quite a bit. From the description, the bonus is that it will have good mod support.

garion333 wrote:

Tropico in space could be good.

Omerta in space, not so much.

But Omerta isn't a city-builder. IMAGE(http://www.indiancricketfans.com/uploads/emoticons/p.gif)

Plus, I liked Omerta for what it was.

I had Planetbase on my wishlist for a good while, but never pulled the trigger. From friends that have it, it was enjoyable, but very quickly ran out of things to do. Kinda glad I skipped it.

omni wrote:

I had Planetbase on my wishlist for a good while, but never pulled the trigger. From friends that have it, it was enjoyable, but very quickly ran out of things to do. Kinda glad I skipped it.

Since release, the devs have added Steam Workshop support, so there are now short campaigns and challenges to do after you've mastered establishing a thriving colony. Plus, it's currently 35% off at the Humble store.

More info on Surviving Mars in this preview at RPS.

Dont have anything other than their twitter page at the moment, but..

Ancient Cities

Could be interesting...

EDIT: also found this small playlist on youtube.

One of which is:

Looks interesting. Not sure they really understand what we know of the culture, though? Would you really put a village on a location with dolmens? Either they are your holy spot, in which case gtfo, or they were raised by some group unknown and probably are haunted and unlucky... Just seemed like a weird thing to me...

It's now on Greenlight: Ancient Cities

Robear wrote:

Looks interesting. Not sure they really understand what we know of the culture, though? Would you really put a village on a location with dolmens? Either they are your holy spot, in which case gtfo, or they were raised by some group unknown and probably are haunted and unlucky... Just seemed like a weird thing to me...

There are a lot of other constructions, roads, pits, and so on near Stonehenge for instance, and its still extremely unclear what went on near and around these places. A settlement may actually be exactly what was around and near these structures, of which there were several in the vicinity, not just StoneHenge.

It looks great, and it's funny - I was talking about this the other day about how I'd love to run a tribe simulator instead of a city builder.

Your youtube video link appears to be incorrect.

omni wrote:

Your youtube video link appears to be incorrect.

It's because youtu.be URLs don't work with the video embedder.

Budo wrote:

Though Youtu.be links do work if you just paste in the id part of the link and not the prior https://youtu.be/ part.

tboon wrote:
omni wrote:

Not sure yet if this will fit in better in here, or the agent-based thread.... Paradox have announced a new simulation game called Surviving Mars.

To be clear, Paradox is publishing, Haemimont Games (Tropico series, Victor Vran) are the devs.

Huh, I thought that was Kalypso. Regardless.... that studio, whatever it's called, has excellent programmers and QA, but IMO are quite weak on design. I'd be a little cautious about that one until you've seen some feedback.

Malor wrote:
tboon wrote:
omni wrote:

Not sure yet if this will fit in better in here, or the agent-based thread.... Paradox have announced a new simulation game called Surviving Mars.

To be clear, Paradox is publishing, Haemimont Games (Tropico series, Victor Vran) are the devs.

Huh, I thought that was Kalypso.

Kalypso is the publisher of the Tropico games.

(I don't think there is a thread for this game, so I'm putting this here.)

Life is Feudal: Forest Village was gifted to me during the last winter sale. It left early access a month ago, and I just fired it up and played through the tutorial.

This is so much of a Banished clone that I don't see the reason to play it instead of Banished. Look at this screenshot (not mine):

IMAGE(https://i.imgsafe.org/273f1710f8.jpg)

Besides the slightly different in-game graphics, this looks like a mod for Banished, not a totally separate game. While playing the tutorial, the only slight gameplay differences presented were:

- Banished's trader profession has been replaced with an "explorer" profession to acquire new seeds, livestock, etc.
- In the inventory window, individual foods have been grouped as fruits or vegetables, although when seeding a field, you do choose a specific food item, such as potato which is part of the tutorial
- There is a (poor) terraforming tool

You could argue that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", but this goes beyond imitation IMO. I guess I'll reinstall Banished and see if there are any good mods that have been released since the last time I played.

There are a few on that list that seem interesting to me. I didn't realize Aven Colony is releasing so soon (July 25). It already has a Steam store page, so I wishlisted it.

Something very concerning for me is that the Aven Colony segment showed no user interface whatsoever.

If Ancient Cities doesn't fall on its face during develoment, I'm really interested in that one.

Mode7 will be publishing Codebyfire's The Colonists:

The Colonists is a settlement building game inspired by classic titles like The Settlers and the Anno series.

You take control of a team of robots tasked with settling a newly-discovered planet, preparing the ground for an influx of inhabitants from their homeworld.

You'll advance from the Stone Age to the Space Age as you build the infrastructure for your colony by constructing complex road, boat, train and drone transport systems.

Harvest natural resources, set up farming and food production, sculpt the terrain to optimise your networks, conquer other settlements or trade with new allies. Explore, research, manage, tweak and refine to your heart's content!

The Colonists will feature a single player campaign, a free-play mode, competitive multiplayer and co-op. It will launch in Early Access in August 2017.