City-building Game Catch All

Well this just popped up on Steam out of nowhere...

http://store.steampowered.com/app/63...

That's worth a look-see... After I get paid lol.

Veloxi wrote:

Well this just popped up on Steam out of nowhere...

http://store.steampowered.com/app/63...

Watching the trailer: that escalated quickly.

It's got about half of what I'm interested in with a city builder at that scale. I'm a little more interested in the original-flavor-Railroad-Tycoon-ish entire-nation-but-in-tiny-tiles part than about the military and so on where it ends up. (I suspect I would have been all over it in the '90s at the peak of my SimCity 2000/Civilization II obsessions.)

Maybe I should just break down and go buy Factorio.

You should break down and buy Factorio anyway.

This looks like it's both a city-builder and a tycoon game a bit.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/67...

omni wrote:

You should break down and buy Factorio anyway.

That's one of those games where I read the blurb, almost plonk down my money, then watch a YouTube and my sensible brain piece goes 'be honest, you aren't going to play an hour of that, are you ?' - and I've watched some pretty good Youtubers and a few 'Factorio for complete beginners' episodes...and I never make it to episode 2.

davet010 wrote:
omni wrote:

You should break down and buy Factorio anyway.

That's one of those games where I read the blurb, almost plonk down my money, then watch a YouTube and my sensible brain piece goes 'be honest, you aren't going to play an hour of that, are you ?' - and I've watched some pretty good Youtubers and a few 'Factorio for complete beginners' episodes...and I never make it to episode 2.

You should break down and buy Factorio anyway.

First couple of episodes are always a little boring as you have to bootstrap your initial factory setup with a few kinda boring steps. But once the automation really kicks in and your factory is really going, then the "I just need to fix this and then I can go to bed" takes over and it's 4am. Skip a few episodes to see where it really shines.

Well, try the demo on Steam

The controls, though, are just... Weird.

In Factorio? I never really thought that. Driving a car is a bit weird, but is a small part of the game..

And another one drops on Steam!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/56...

I like the look of this one.

Also, Factorio isn't a city builder so take it outside, boys.

Neither was The Colonists on the previous page, so neener.

But what if i configured my Factorio to build cities?!

Now yer talking!

Aven Colony reviewed over at RPS.

Ouch!

Fraiser Brown wrote:

The whole endeavour is, ultimately, Sisyphean. Each “victory” in the campaign is merely a doorway to another trial that’s broadly identical to the last.

That...kind of lines up with why I like SimCity more than the Impressions city builders. Not that the Impression games had the flaws that Aven Colony seems to, but every city was a purpose-built machine to solve one puzzle, and didn't have a life outside of that. They are a bit...rigid, I guess.

One unrelated line stuck out to me:

... by a multitude of crises that make Banished seem almost relaxing.

Now, it's been awhile since I played Banished, but I don't remember it being all that harsh? I did lose some games, most memorably when I didn't build enough houses at a critical point and all of the children lived in their parents' basements until they were too elderly to have children of their own. But I don't remember it being a game of lurching from crisis to crisis.

On the other hand, maybe Dwarf Fortress has permanently recalibrated my sense of what can go wrong in a city-builder-ish game. Once you've solved the mystery of who the vampire is while cannibalistic elves are sieging your fortress, cats are vomiting all over the floor, and a cave-in has flooded the fortress...maybe everything else looks straightforward?

OTOH, Fraser likes everything, so him having harsh words for a game seem to be pretty telling about how good it is, in ways another critic's review might not be.

Gremlin wrote:

One unrelated line stuck out to me:

... by a multitude of crises that make Banished seem almost relaxing.

Now, it's been awhile since I played Banished, but I don't remember it being all that harsh? I did lose some games, most memorably when I didn't build enough houses at a critical point and all of the children lived in their parents' basements until they were too elderly to have children of their own. But I don't remember it being a game of lurching from crisis to crisis.

On the other hand, maybe Dwarf Fortress has permanently recalibrated my sense of what can go wrong in a city-builder-ish game. Once you've solved the mystery of who the vampire is while cannibalistic elves are sieging your fortress, cats are vomiting all over the floor, and a cave-in has flooded the fortress...maybe everything else looks straightforward?

Banished is harsh in the sense you could easily lose some games from generally not planning ahead properly, like your example, which was compounded by not knowing what you needed to do to plan ahead until you had experienced X before.

Generally city builders are easy to recover from disaster, even when you make stupid mistakes by not understanding the underlying mechanics, but mistakes in Banished could wipe out your population right quick.

In that way, Banished can be super tough, so I get why he would say that. Banished is, essentially, mini crises after mini crises of basic survival. That's a bit more intense than most city builders which focus on the crises of having too much crime in a neighborhood or poop backing up and making people sick. None of these things kill off your population with no way back. Banished frequently had scenarios in which there was no way to fix it.

garion333 wrote:

In that way, Banished can be super tough, so I get why he would say that. Banished is, essentially, mini crises after mini crises of basic survival. That's a bit more intense than most city builders which focus on the crises of having too much crime in a neighborhood or poop backing up and making people sick. None of these things kill off your population with no way back. Banished frequently had scenarios in which there was no way to fix it.

That makes sense. The Dwarf-Fortress-ish agent-based city builders do tend to give you the possibility of failure in ways that the SimCity-descended games don't.

The SimCity games, notably, don't really require you to ever rebuild significant portions of your city. Once you've laid down a section it mostly keeps humming. You might have to adjust things a bit if something gets a little off (like traffic problems) but in the main once something is zoned you can just leave it be.

Other games have a more dynamic balancing act, where something that worked early in the game is less efficient or stops working and needs to be rethought. (And the Impressions games are about keeping your Rube Goldberg contraption spinning until that pyramid gets built.)

kergguz wrote:

Aven Colony reviewed over at RPS.

Ouch!

Yeah, just before reading that review, I was watching a Let's Play of the beta from 3 weeks ago. After seeing the game in action and reading the review, I've decided to not get Aven Colony, which is disappointing. I was looking forward to playing a good, new, sci-fi city builder.

MeatMan wrote:

I was looking forward to playing a good, new, sci-fi city builder.

How about a new, sci-fi space station builder?

Looks nice! Watching that Let's Play just now to get me through Monday morning.

However, it may be more suited to the Agent-based Sandbox thread, as it's more aligned to that genre than a pure city-builder.

OG_slinger wrote:
MeatMan wrote:

I was looking forward to playing a good, new, sci-fi city builder.

How about a new, sci-fi space station builder?

Wishlisted.

OG_slinger wrote:
MeatMan wrote:

I was looking forward to playing a good, new, sci-fi city builder.

How about a new, sci-fi space station builder?

Did you leave off "good" on purpose?

Yonder wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:
MeatMan wrote:

I was looking forward to playing a good, new, sci-fi city builder.

How about a new, sci-fi space station builder?

Did you leave off "good" on purpose?

Well, you can't call a game good if it hasn't been released and reviewed. That said, I just watched the first and second video of that beta LP, and I like what I'm seeing.

MeatMan wrote:
Yonder wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:
MeatMan wrote:

I was looking forward to playing a good, new, sci-fi city builder.

How about a new, sci-fi space station builder?

Did you leave off "good" on purpose?

Well, you can't call a game good if it hasn't been released and reviewed. That said, I just watched the first and second video of that beta LP, and I like what I'm seeing.

Exactly, MeatMan. I like what I see, but it's beta gameplay.

There's a third one out now, too :p

omni wrote:

There's a third one out now, too :p

Yep. I watched all 3, which is enough to get a very good idea of what to expect when the game releases next week.

garion333 wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

One unrelated line stuck out to me:

... by a multitude of crises that make Banished seem almost relaxing.

Now, it's been awhile since I played Banished, but I don't remember it being all that harsh? I did lose some games, most memorably when I didn't build enough houses at a critical point and all of the children lived in their parents' basements until they were too elderly to have children of their own. But I don't remember it being a game of lurching from crisis to crisis.

On the other hand, maybe Dwarf Fortress has permanently recalibrated my sense of what can go wrong in a city-builder-ish game. Once you've solved the mystery of who the vampire is while cannibalistic elves are sieging your fortress, cats are vomiting all over the floor, and a cave-in has flooded the fortress...maybe everything else looks straightforward?

Banished is harsh in the sense you could easily lose some games from generally not planning ahead properly, like your example, which was compounded by not knowing what you needed to do to plan ahead until you had experienced X before.

Generally city builders are easy to recover from disaster, even when you make stupid mistakes by not understanding the underlying mechanics, but mistakes in Banished could wipe out your population right quick.

In that way, Banished can be super tough, so I get why he would say that. Banished is, essentially, mini crises after mini crises of basic survival. That's a bit more intense than most city builders which focus on the crises of having too much crime in a neighborhood or poop backing up and making people sick. None of these things kill off your population with no way back. Banished frequently had scenarios in which there was no way to fix it.

The Banished death spiral from starvation can be a real challenge to halt. This usually happens from rapid overpopulation because of housing outpacing infrastructure or too many nomads.

The most insidious slow death spiral in Banished comes from an undereducated population caught in a cycle of broken tools. Miners can't supply enough iron because of the double hit to productivity: uneducated and broken tools. As you try to increase the iron output by assigning more miners, your other industries suffer until they can't keep up either (most importantly food). Finally your town of dummies all starve.