Agent-based Sandbox Games

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I was just curious. It’s so good, I figured something went on, and I had forgotten about the name change. I hope things get less hectic for you soon.

I've tried Rise to ruins a few times, and just can't get into it, I have no idea why....

Things will calm down, we've hit 8 months with my daughter, so hopefully she'll start to stop babying in the coming months Even my 4 year old is tired of her not sleeping through the night

For me, it puts me in mind of old-style games. Maybe that's it. More emphasis on process and stacking progress in increasingly complex ways, than on story-telling or system optimization. To each their own, though. I find it relaxing.

Heyooo, Rimworld DLC released:

Rimworld Royalty

Space Haven has reached Early Access.

Self-described as:

Space Haven combines the emergent story telling components of RimWorld with a tile-based gas-simulation system seen in Oxygen Not Included. Other inspirations are Spacebase DF-9 and Dwarf Fortress.

Launching with a 10% discount on Steam, bringing the price (in the UK) down from £18.99 to £17.09.

However, it's also available via Humble Bundle, with a choice of Steam key or GoG key (not both). Humble Choice subscribers can also utilise their additional 20% discount that applies to all purchases, bringing the price down to £13.67 (about $16.50 or so).

I'm not normally as eager these days to jump in early doors for Early Access, but it looks promising - Kind of what I hoped from Spacebase DF-9 before Doublefine lost a customer for life and 'finished' the game just to release it. For £13 and change, I'm in, even if I dont play it right away.

omni wrote:

I'm not normally as eager these days to jump in early doors for Early Access, but it looks promising - Kind of what I hoped from Spacebase DF-9 before Doublefine lost a customer for life and 'finished' the game just to release it. For £13 and change, I'm in, even if I dont play it right away.

It's been a good 9 months. Have you tried it? Is it, in fact, where DF-9 was headed?

I did pick it up, didn't play for long, but mostly down to life situation and big fancy games that came out, rather than any put-down on the game itself.

Once I've got over this Valheim binge, I'll make use it as my single-player palette-cleanser, rather than just going back to rimworld and civ, like I usually do

Will definitely report back my findings, when that time comes around, though. I also need to play Universim again, as they've now added a whole lot since I played it last...

Thanks; I'd appreciate some insight. The Steam Store, which knows what I like and want from a game, keeps bringing it back to the front of my Store page. But I notice that a lot of indie devs seem to be taking classes from the "Facebook Ads for State of Survival" correspondence school of marketing, and often their product doesn't play anything like their ads suggest it will.

I get pretty bored of Space Haven pretty quickly. I love the overall concept and the art style but there's a core loop of scavenging for parts, researching, and building stuff that is going to be 90% the same every run. If they'd add a chance of salvaging actual whole objects instead of always breaking things down, then the derelicts you find would be a more exciting prospect as you spot some thing you need and get your best engineer on trying to recover it intact.

It is genuinely a fun dozen hours (I show 47 but I think a bunch of that was idle, paused at work), and a good foundation on which to build a better game. I hope they do add some great updates over time.

Oops

Idling around Twitch last night, I came across a devstream for Spacebase Startopia...which, yes, is nominally a remake of Startopia. Except it kind of isn't. It's being developed by Kalypso's Realmforge Studios, who previously gave us a nominal remake of Dungeon Keeper with the Dungeons series, except again, it really wasn't. The mechanics are there, but the Bullfrog spirit was the sort of lightning in a bottle that still eludes the studio. Maybe what I really need to do is dig into that mountainous Steam backlog for Two Point Hospital, which at least has the proper pedigree for doing this stuff.

TPH is fun.

I know a lot of us are burned out on early access games, but here's another one: Timberborn The beavers survived the apocalypse and are building a civilization. Free demo available (not even early access yet.) It's charming, if not particularly groundbreaking at the moment, but they have some interesting ideas about where to take it.

I'm still bitter about Stonehearth, so I'm apprehensive about the early access situation, but the demo is fun enough and it's free, so there's that at least.

Timberborn looks great - I love the aesthetic they're going for, and it looks like they have some good game/engine mechanics at work. I'll definitely give the demo a try.

If I might be a bit reductionist: It looks like the delightful complexity of Dwarf Fortress, but with good graphics and above ground?

Spoiler:

 

Hard to tell at this point. I'm only a half-hour into the demo, but it looks like it might be headed that way as a finished project. The status checkboxes on each Beaver are remarkably complex and seem to cover satisfaction and awe, for example, as well as the normal hungry, thirsty, etc. Their plans talk about including stuff like scavenging the ruins of the old world for more advanced materials like metal, so I'm optimistic about their plans for a deep game.

That said, it's no secret that I'm a sucker for a good theme, and I'll play the hell out of this demo for the next few days regardless. "Lumberpunk." Heh.

Timberborn hit early access today. Still playing the hell out of it. It's like Banished - settlement management with no external conflict. Very zen.

Nice. I very briefly played the demo in the previous Steam Next festival. Will definitely keep an eye on it for next time I'm looking for something new.

I've also recently become aware of Clanfolk, which I will definitely be trying out the demo for this evening.

It's also been announced that another Steam Next festival will begin on October 1st, which, if it's anything like the last one, was a superb opportunity to try out all manner of games that otherwise wouldn't have had a demo.

Factory Town is out of early access today and on sale for $10. I've had it on my watchlist for a while but didn't follow it's development, but I do know there are no enemies (which I appreciate). I'll update with some impressions later on.

First impression: I like it. The graphics are kind of cute and colorful and the soundtrack is a pleasing harp-like background to the gameplay. I usually turn off ingame music and play my own stuff, but I haven't really felt the need to here (yet). I only did the first campaign mission (Tutorial). There are 8 campaign missions, a sandbox mode, a map-maker and victory-condition editor and workshop support. The workshop already has a bunch of maps on there.

The first tutorial mission took me about 2 hrs to complete. It didn't really feel slow. The pacing, I think, is actually pretty good. It was more just me figuring out the systems and in particular, what I needed to get the research resource. I imagine if I were to replay that mission, I could probably do it in half the time (or less).

The game, as far as I can tell, has no fail state. It's just a matter of time until you produce what you need to get access to the next tier of research and buildings. That being said, the resources (trees, wheat, stone, etc) do deplete as you harvest them. Although I did read that there is a way to replenish them, I haven't progressed that far yet. There is a tier of research that goes into magic, so perhaps it is in there.

The usual progression for these type of games exists. Build a house to enable more workers. Make a worker, set them to harvest lumber. Then make a lumber mill to make planks. Then a workshop to make other things. Your town levels up as you make stuff (it tells you what you need on the left side of the screen), and as your town levels up, the houses are able to hold more workers. The houses individually can also upgrade based on happiness (kind of similar I suppose to the old Impressions games).

As you deliver food and items to homes and markets, you generate coins of a certain color, and the coins + a specific research commodity are used to unlock the next items on the research tree. The system took a little bit of getting used to, but it works just fine.

The game uses tooltips extensively, and they are extremely well done. Hover over any item and it will tell you what it is, what it is worth, what buildings use it, and where it is made. I can't emphasize enough how nice it is to have all of the information you need for any resource or item just a mouse hover away.

I did not see a way to find an idle worker, and I would have like to have a keybind for that. It might be there and I just didn't see it. I also did not see any indication when my building was not producing, other than the workers standing around outside the building. I had reassigned the building to produce a different item and didn't immediately realize I needed to supply an additional ingredient. With the workers standing idle, it's easy enough to click the building and see what is missing, but I feel like it might have been nice to have an icon over the building that indicated it was out of supply of something. Workers might also be standing outside the building because the input queue is full and they can't deliver an ingredient or the output queue is empty and they are waiting on production. It's a pretty minor gripe, but would be a 'nice to have' thing.

The game is enjoyable. There is no pressure, it isn't multiplayer, and there's no fail state. It is fun to build up your little town and watch the little guys run around doing their thing. I'd imagine it gets even better as the tech tree opens up in the next maps.

TL,DR: I'd say it is worth the asking price, and at 50% off, it's a steal.

Songs of Syx popped up randomly in the Steam carousel for me and I curiously clicked. This one is really interesting. It's maybe the closest to Dwarf Fortress that I've seen. Conceptually its a lot like DF. Start on some spot you pick on a big map of existing civilizations and build up a community. I haven't played it a ton yet but I wanted to boost the game's visibility a bit. It's been in early access for about a year. It's gotten 4 major updates and a bunch of minor ones. Its a 1 person team. What's there now feels like a good amount of content, and there's a demo.

Thematically it's way more brutal. Its low/dark fantasy, reminds me of Dark Sun. The art style matches this well (also, it has an art style!). The UI is pretty good (also, it has a UI!)

There is one main innovation I like:
* When you build a building, you select that specific thing, like a Carpenter shop. You draw out the space in whatever configuration you want (Circle, oval, rectangle, or tile-by-tile custom room size) choose whether you want exterior walls, where you want doors if you did want walls, and finally position the core components of the room. Do you want your forge to have 1 main work bench or 10? That will affect how many people can work there. There are other components like storage and auxiliary benches, which affect the performance of the shop (storage and 'efficiency').

Did you make a good building and need more of the same (like dormitories) Great, just copy and paste it. Rotate if you want, modify the 'stamp'. You're going to want to because where Dwarf Fortress takes a few years to get to 100 dwarves, 1000 dwarves, etc. This one is designed to ramp up from outpost to town to city much more quickly and you probably don't want everyone sleeping in the warehouse and carpentry building for shelter.

Like I said I haven't played it a ton, only a few hours. I haven't gotten that deep into it, but it seems like it's worth exploring.

DonD wrote:

Factory Town is out of early access today and on sale for $10. I've had it on my watchlist for a while but didn't follow it's development, but I do know there are no enemies (which I appreciate). I'll update with some impressions later on.

Thanks for the lead on this. I picked it up based on your impressions.

Really nice 1.0 launch discount.

This is not usually a multiplayer genre, and I know a ton of the titles in this genre, but can anyone think of one with cooperative play?

There is a multi-player mod for Rimworld. I've never actually played it myself, because I tend to change the speed of time a lot and figured that would be a big pain in a multiplayer game. I believe there is a plan to allow for time differences, but I think this doesn't work yet.

I did watch others playing it. At first they tried working on the same map tile, and that ended up being too frustrating. Creating colonies on separate tiles worked out ok for them though; the time sync was still at times a source of frustration, but everything else worked pretty well. Everyone has access to everything, so you would want to make sure you play with someone you can trust not to be a jerk.

polypusher wrote:

Songs of Syx popped up randomly in the Steam carousel for me and I curiously clicked. This one is really interesting. It's maybe the closest to Dwarf Fortress that I've seen. Conceptually its a lot like DF. Start on some spot you pick on a big map of existing civilizations and build up a community. I haven't played it a ton yet but I wanted to boost the game's visibility a bit. It's been in early access for about a year. It's gotten 4 major updates and a bunch of minor ones. Its a 1 person team. What's there now feels like a good amount of content, and there's a demo.

Burning question: Are there z-layers? I keep coming back to Rimworld, but my biggest complaint about it is the 2d world.

There are not Z layers in Songs of Syx unfortunately. That remains the realm of Dwarf Fortress and, like, Gnomoria

polypusher wrote:

There are not Z layers in Songs of Syx unfortunately. That remains the realm of Dwarf Fortress and, like, Gnomoria

I think KeeperRL has added Z layers. It's a not entirely successful hybrid of Dwarf Fortress and a Gnomoria and like, a roguelike. But the author keeps plugging away at it and I think it has developed a bit of a mod community.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1...

Going Medieval is a recent RimWorld-like with Z layers.

Picked it up at launch for the discount but I'm letting it bake in the oven for a bit before diving in proper.

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