I’d love to see a remaster of SimCity 4, either expanding it cover the map or letting you buy regions like Cities: Skylines.
You think so? Because it feels to me like development is moving at a snail’s pace, and may of the design decisions are making building tedious and it crashes lots…I still have hope, but maybe not faith…
This is right.
Yeah I get what you’re saying, but given that it went into EA just 2 years ago, compared to some other games that have been in EA over 5 or more…
I guess I didn’t mean to imply that it’s close to release. Just that I can see where they’re going with it, and regardless of how much longer it takes, I believe they’ll get there.
I’d like to know why cities skylines never clicked for me. I should love it as I love city builders so much.
Because there isn’t much of a game to it other than traffic management. Other than that it is a tool to paint attractive cities.
Northgard isn’t a city builder. It definitely is an RTS.
But it took me playing that game to realize why Banished – which is a city builder – is such a bad, bad game. Northgard pushes you. Your citizens get discontented. Unhappiness breeds more unhappiness if you don’t address it. Productivity spirals. People start to take sick. More unhappiness and non-productivity results. Things go pear-shaped unless you take an active hand in staving off those issues.
Banished NEVER pushes back at you. Your colonists are happy to live their lives in the same wood cabins you build for them the first year they arrive. And their kids and grandchildren too. And everyone’s happy to eat mushrooms and berries collected by your gatherers, so no worries there. And no one gets unhappy if there’s nothing to do but just sort of hang out season after season, year after year.
Banished could be very good indeed if it pushed on you. It needs for your colonists to say “Hey, we came here all the way from wherever, how about building us a stone house, hmm?” How about a mixed diet? How about recreation in the form of breweries and taverns that weren’t just town window-dressing, but actually a requirement to keep the populace happy?
That’s the fundamental weakness of the design. It never really pushes on you, after the initial challenge. And once you figure out that you should build foresters and gatherers, you’ve got it licked, pretty much.
That ever-rising “expected happiness level” is probably what keeps Northgard from being regarded as a city builder by most folks. I still think of it as a city builder because I don’t really have any meaningful criteria for what does and doesn’t qualify. But city builders tend to be sandboxes. What kind of sandboxes keeps pushing stability out of your reach?
-Tom
What about trade simulators? Open TTD has city building potential. Or Patrician III/IV, which I enjoyed a lot for some reason. Are there any newer games set in medieval times with a city build2ing and trade focus?
I’d be interested in where people think Factorio fits in comparison to city builders. Obviously you’re not building a city, but for me it scratches the same itch of wanting to build something that runs efficiently by itself, and produces resources that both let you grow your creation and open up new actions that were previously impossible for you to achieve.
Is it a fundamental difference that the core units of production don’t have their own autonomy?
Yeah, I personally think Factorio fits with the general “frame of mind” that makes people enjoy city builders - namely, the idea that you can set up a thing, watch it work, optimize it, solve disasters. The game loop is very similar to a game like Zeus or Anno (X+X+X+X==9) in a way, which makes me think that Factorio fits well in this thread despite not being a city builder per se, or a colony manager (and at the same time being a bit of both, actually).
I tried Factorio’s demo, and my brain couldn’t run away fast enough.
Maybe not pushing stability out of reach, per se, but most good city builders need to disrupt that stability, and the best ones do it in the way that city planners throughout history have struggled with. Your population demands contentment and stability, and as you are able to provide those things, more people want to live there, and the population grows, which pushes on or even disrupts that contentment and stability. In other words, a city builder requires me to make my populace happy, but then pushes against that by using that happiness as a lever to population growth…which creates more instability and unhappiness.
And that’s the other design flaw in Banished, now that we’re there. Your population in Banished grows from within, through births and deaths within your colony. There’s no extrinsic population push. At no point do aboriginals or persons from failing colonies emigrate to your surviving colony…so as long as you control the housing supply closely, you avoid having overpopulation worries that press on your food/firewood/coats supply. And as long as folks have those things in Banished, they stay happy enough. And, since you can control that population, you can get by on subsistence level hunting-gathering for food and shanties for homes.
There is a rocket involved, it should be your favorite game evah!
Ya’ll are confusing me about Factorio.
Looking at it on Steam, I never would’ve guessed that it plays like a city builder. I can see it now though.
However @BrianRubin says it hurt his brain, and he’s the master of Logistical, which sometimes hurts my brain.
What should I do!
Download the demo.
And try eating better, you only live once.
I’ll try the demo again. Fine.
It’s truly an awesome game. Totally worth trying again.
I wish Factorio didn’t look like a brown and rusty smear.
