As Cities Skylines II still isn’t worth it (the sub has a regular thread about that, in summary: no it’s not: https://old.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/1ch6lup/is_cities_skylines_ii_worth_it_megathread/) which games scratch your city building itch?
I’ve been playing not much else than city builders in the past year or two, for some reason.
Surviving Mars is good imo, and so is Frostpunk, but both involved a decent bit of trial and error to figure out. For Frostpunk that ended up being a strength, but not sure if I’d have just done a tutorial for Surviving Mars if I would have had fewer problems.
I have like 400 hours in Satisfactory, some people consider it a city builder, I guess for resource management reasons. But there aren’t cute little people to watch so I don’t know about that, haha. Fun though.
Kingdoms and Castles is a very cute game, but probably too easy. Still, very relaxing to play which is nice.
I also enjoyed Jurassic World Evolution, driving the jeep through the park you’ve built is very fun.
For the past few months I’ve been playing tons of Oxygen Not Included. It’s really fun, but tricky, and the simulation differs from how actual physics works enough that some mechanics are unintuitive for me. It’s a game that I had to figure out a specific reason to keep playing though, as once you get the main problems fixed you’re arguably “done”, but it’s not all that hard to get a self-sustaining colony.
I tried Rimworld, and found it a very weirdly unsatisfying game. Imo it’s too slow and tedious to be good as a “story generator” but the problems you face are also too banal but also devastating for it to be a good city builder. I’m guessing a lot of people would hate me for saying I actually prefer Stranded: Alien Dawn to Rimworld, even though it’s just a 3d copy. But Stranded Alien Dawn is more fun to watch your people do stuff and I enjoy being able to build 3d houses too. It’s almost more like The Sims.
I also briefly tried Against the Storm, but I dunno, it didn’t really grab me. Seemed really slow.
Timberborn is a fantastic game, and everyone should play it. Just fantastic. I started before the badwater update and I think there’s merits to either mode, so if you wanna play safer, you can turn off badwater for a game and it’s still super solid.
I just bought Manor Lords, but I’m gonna wait till it gets updated more before I crack it open. My ONI world has a lot of work still.
Also, like everyone else says, Banished is great (though the UI leaves something to be desired, but it’s also a custom game engine from the one dev) and Cities Skylines is good too. Haven’t tried CS 2.
I also really wanna try Captains of Industry, but I’ve gotta pace myself
I’m a huge RimWorld fan, I’m curious, did you use the fast forward button? If you stay on regular speed, it can really drag. I believe many players just leave it on 3x speed and pause when an emergency arrives.
Your opinion is valid regardless, I just find significant overlap in our preferences, so this surprises me.
Yeah, I was playing on 3x for most of the time. I know, I was surprised that I didn’t really seem to get it
I kind of wish that it’d support higher simulation rates and try to multithread at least some of the stuff (like, maybe they can have the pathfinding or temperature propagation span multiple cores or something, which has historically been a drag).
Animals and a few other things are now multithreaded, so it is something they’re working on.
but the problems you face are also too banal but also devastating for it to be a good city builder.
You do spend more time being reactive to problems the game throws at you, but I’d note that you have a lot of ability to adjust that when starting the world in selecting a storyteller and difficulty level.
Last time I dipped into Oxygen Not Included, the rocket program was enough to get me to push past self-sustenance. Unfortunately in the end, getting the details of the program right just annoyed me. I don’t know if it’s me or if the game’s just not set up well to handle large-scale construction. Building fuel production ended up being more fun than actually building the rocket silos.
re: rimworld
it’s really important to read the messages and the little bits (like the logs when a social fight occurs) to really get immersed in the story!
might be worth watching some YouTubers playing to see what i mean!
hazzor usually does a good job of getting into the story, so does ambiguousAmphibian
but as the others said: if it’s really not for you, then it’s just not for you!
I will say, the couple times my colonists got into nearly deadly altercations due to one of them being a pyschopath and going around starting fights was actually interesting. But that kind of conflict was much less frequent than 80% of my pawns being in the hospital due to an attack from neighboring clans
well, rimworld does have a focus on (micro)management and strategy!
if your pawns are constantly down due to raiders, then you need better defenses! …or tame a herd of animals and release those at your enemies! (rhinos work very well for this!)
there are tons of little optimizations you can make to efficiently run a colony. for example, social fights: you can keep those from happening by keeping the problematic pawns in different areas! or removing one or both of their tongues! or sending one on basically permanent caravan missions! etc., etc.
this kind of deep strategizing, combined with the random bullshit the game throws at you, is mostly why people love rimworld!
and mods… definitely get mods! that’s where the game reeeaaally shines!
Thank you for your informative comment. I know I’m almost a month late, but I’m about to start my vacation and needed a nice city building game to try.
I’m really very much not a City builder guy so grain of salt here: I really enjoyed Banished.
I dislike the scale of other games- in stuff like Cities Skylines I tend to get overwhelmed by how much is going on and everything I need to make work together. So I guess it makes sense that I prefer a village builder over a city builder lol
Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic flashbacks intensify.
I’m the same way with games that just get overwhelming and I loose interest.
Ostriv is another game like Banished where it is smaller scale so you might like that too.
Ooh, thanks. I’ll check it out!
I really love Caesar III, nostalgia plays a role, but I just like it overall.
Nebuchadnezzar (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1157220/Nebuchadnezzar/) seems to be a nice recent game in the same style. It seems promising, but not “there yet” compared to C3 and Pharaoh.
I can’t believe I forgot Caesar and Pharaoh. I played the f out of those when I was a PC only player. I sucked at them but loved them.
I think I need to check Nebuchadnezzar out.
Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom is still my favorite in this genre by a mile. Dripping with cultural flavor, and there was really something about monument building in all of the games in this series.
I agree with most of the suggestions here, and I’ll also throw out Tropico 6. It’s one of the few coty builders outside of Frostpunk where the soundtrack actively pulls me into the experience. It’s also fun building up an island balancing between investing in economic growth, citizen happiness to get reelected, or military/oppression methods so you don’t have to get elected.
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Tropico is nice.
skylines 1, factorio (its not quite a city builder but close enough), oxygen not included, sim tower (the elevator simulator)
I just found out last week factorio is on a system that I own. Turns out there was a major addiction missing in my life.
As a programmer, I knew I would enjoy it. What I didn’t realise was that in just a week it would literally make me better at my job.
I’m playing the game, and solving problems for work, I’m working, and solving problems in the game, in a huge feedback loop.
Can a video game make you better person? I’m not sure, but if they can, this and Kerbal Space Program are the ones to do it.
I love SimTower. I’ll pull it out from time to time.
I went looking to see if there were subsequent clones in the “Sim Tower” at one point, and was kind of surprised that it didn’t really take off after the Yoot Tower sequel.
Sim City 2000 used to be my game and I’m looking for the same vibe on a non-demanding game I can play on my Surface Go 1 with Fedora.
Not sure if it’d quite qualify as “city builder”. I’d call it “base builder”. But since others mention them:
- Dwarf Fortress
- Rimworld
- Oxygen Not Included
The above games focus on the interactions of various things you build. They have a very high degree of replayability. Dwarf Fortress has a very high bar to entry, but for all of them, you’re going to be reading wikis and spending a lot of time understanding mechanics. I think that they all give very good value for money.
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Cities: Skylines (the original). It’s not bad. It’s quite expensive, if you’re going to buy a lot of the DLC – it’s a typical Paradox game, where the cost of the base game isn’t a large chunk of the overall price, where there is a lot of not-cheap DLC that really adds up. It currently has a lot of its content on sale on Steam, and even on sale, a purchase of all of it is $250. But…there’s a lot of neat stuff there. It’s one of the few relatively-modern citybuilders. It has curved roads. I don’t care that much about this – and I think that the focus on graphics was a major contributing factor to Cities: Skylines II doing poorly – but it is relatively-pretty.
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Sim City 4. It’s not new, but it should still be perfectly-playable. I still don’t feel that there’s a game series that has really replaced the Sim City series.
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The Tropico series. This really hasn’t changed all that much (other than Tropico 2). I don’t think I’ve played Tropico 6, but I’d probably recommend that as just being the latest in the series. It looks like they pulled the campaign from the latest, which is basically fine from my standpoint. More focus on individual characters than most city-builders. A lot of the city-builder genre feels like of Star-Trek-y, kind of a focus on creating a utopian society, so this focus on running a banana republic can be a refreshing change thematically.
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Lincity-NG. Not technically the best, but it’s free and open-source, which may appeal. Focus mostly on dealing with freight congestion and achieving sustainability, which is a significant shift from most of the genre in terms of goals.
Along with your not city builder but somewhat has the same feeling as one, I’d add Factorio. The way things link together, and you essentially build roads/trains for supplies, gives a similar experience. I think there’s also a mod that adds people you have to take care of and other City-builder mechanics.
Anno 1800, love working with the supply chain.
Anno 1800
I’ve been eyeing the boardgame version which is also highly regarded. I guess will have to look into the original too. Always fun when hobbies intersect.
Dwarf Fortress
Haven’t played Manor lords yet but through all the games, Foundation checked all the right boxes for me. Definitely worth a look
SimCity4 Deluxe modded to a state of fragile beauty
Against the Storm is my favorite one. It gives me my favorite part of city building: the early/mid game.
I’ve been playing this as well and really enjoying it. Now I need a similar game that does early game Civilization.
As in, turn based? Or grander?
Haha, turn based. I love the early game, with the exploration and determining what your civ will be like The late game can be tedious.
- Ostriv
- Banished
- Surving the Aftermath
- Frostpunk
- Planetbase
Smaller scale than Cities Skylines and also have other gameplay mechanics but that’s how I like it.
I was disappointed by Frostpunk. It checks a ton of boxes that should make me like the thing, but I just did not like the game that much in practice.
I dunno, just felt like it was too much on rails, more-restricted in layout than something like a typical Sim City-ish game.
Like, I felt less like I was just experimenting with how a lot of levers interact, as I do in a typical city-builder, and more like I’m just sussing out the right order of levers to pull.
I still play SimCity sometimes. The SNES version. There’s something beautiful on slowly building your city, solving problems that arrive, and when you’re don… oh wait you’re never done! (Not even with the Mario statue.)
More into colony sim territory: Oxygen not Included, Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld. In special I’ve been playing the later quite a bit (1.4 version, up to Biotech), selectively breeding colonists to get superpawns.
I play a lot of random city builders and enjoyed most of what’s already listed by others here.
Haven’t seen these ones mentioned yet (I think), but you could check out these to see if any tickle your fancy:
Modern:
- Haven Dock
Prehistoric:
- Dawn of Man
Casual:
- ISLANDERS
- Microtown
Fantasy:
- Founders’ Fortune
- Airborne Kingdom
- The Wandering Village
- Fabledom
- Noble Fates
Medieval:
- dotAGE
- Foundation
- Going Medieval
- Farthest Frontier
- Kingdoms Reborn
- Settlement Survival
- Clanfolk
Sci-fi:
- Cliff Empire
- Space Haven
- IXION
- Stranded: Alien Dawn
I honestly love Going Medieval. I found out about it from Spiffing Brit and Ambiguous Amphibian videos and have made a few different settlements since.
