City Builder / Colony Manager General Discussion Thread

Hahahahah I know right!

Settlement Survivial hit early access this week. It had a demo that I really enjoyed. A bit like Banished with Kingdom and Castles graphics. I like that the tech tree is quite broad and each building can be upgraded different ways. It even has a “cat” upgrade for houses. Stats are available right from the beginning but I didn’t need those in the demo to survive multiple years. Moving workers around and allocating jobs is well done.

Katherine of Sky has been streaming it and I’ve been studiously ignoring the videos. 1.0 or bust.

I have been watching them. If you’re really dead set on 1.0 or bust, I agree you should keep not watching. It is already a really good looking game - probably the best among the recent spate of city/colony builders.

Agreed. There’s definitely a game there - I noticed no holes in the available features (“why isn’t this a thing?!”) during the demo. The year of EA to come is adding more stuff (additional factions, maps, that sort of thing) and refining the existing features based on feedback. I don’t expect any paradigm-upending updates. Plus, 1.0 likely gonna have a price increase.

Yes I enjoyed this too…seems like a reasonable amount of depth already. The translation needs some work but that will come I’m sure.

Settlement Survival we’re talking about.

So this is on sale, I’ll get it and report back.

Ooh nice find! Yes please do post your impressions. It’s on my wishlist now anyway.

So I’ve spent a little time with Silicon City, in its tutorial, and it really has potential.

Did anyone grab this? It’s on Game Pass now and I like the idea of a non-violent city builder in a cosy universe. Not sure when I’ll find time to play it though. Farming Sim is a massive time sink, and I still have half a dozen backlog games to finish.

I didn’t, at least not yet, and my gaming time has been really limited and mostly dedicated to FF XIV, so…

Right now Ubisoft gives away Anno 1404, a remastered version. It’s pointless to give links cause it will redirect you to your regional store main page so google it.

Nice! Thanks for the heads up!

Just learned about Sky Tale. Looks like a modest, relatively casual little city builder in the vein of Islanders.

Looks very similar to Kingdoms and Castles, which is a lovely little game.

Played some Timberborn based on a recommendation in this thread. It has early access hiccups but the game was complete enough to steal a few evenings from me, and the terraforming / river control mechanic is really something.

The core loop of the game is about water management and dam building. Your colony can only survive next to water — you need it to grow food and to power your production tree with waterwheels. Basic survival is easy enough, but every season there’s a drought where water stops flowing into the map, and when the water near your colony dries out your crops and forests die off too.

At first it’s enough to dam up the river and turn it into a temporary lake to survive the drought. But the dry season gets longer every year — long enough for a shallow body of water to evaporate — and soon you’re flooding valleys to create reservoirs or dynamiting channels to make new parts of the map habitable. This is where the game’s at its most novel, and it was really fun to play a colony builder where the map is alive and not just a slightly varying collection of resources and buildable areas.

For early access problems: the toolbar has way too many buttons and most actions take a few more clicks than is probably needed. There’s a citizen happiness mechanic that doesn’t have any effect on gameplay and can be ignored. Also, the game tries to make you create new self-sufficient colonies to expand, which is frustrating since a lot of the work you need to do is temporary (“I only need a camp here to blow up this pass, after which this plain will be underwater”). Hopefully they address these, but the game’s playable enough now to be enjoyable.


Expansion settlement with dam/reservoir

Thanks for that write up. With a nice detailed analysis like that you should post more often than every 12 years!

Cool screenshot.

Kubifaktorium 1.0 version releases in 2 days.