Kubifaktorium 1.0 version releases in 2 days.
OHhh I love this dev, his previous game BossConstructor was GREAT, so I might have to pick this up to support him.
I just played the demo (on EGS) for awhile, and Against the Storm is really cool! It’s a roguelike city builder currently in early access. You go to random maps and do the typical fantasy building thing, for the most part. But you’re given a bunch of random goals and also essentially random access to buildings (both of these work as “choose one from these several options” choices).
The UI and foundational systems are really solid. There’s a lot of stuff going on in this game, but it juggles it all quite well. There’s a number of unique systems, such as three races (humans, beavers, lizards) with different needs and a slowly worsening storm that establishes the curve you need to stay ahead of.
I did run into some issues–maybe my fault for playing poorly, maybe the kind of things still to be solved in Early Access. I tried two random maps after completing the tutorials, and in both I ended up stuck, seemingly unable to progress, because I couldn’t get blueprints for new buildings after a certain point. In my second game, I never got offered a Brewery, which meant I could never fuel a tavern and never raise satisfaction with my beaver-people (which is the main goal I was trying to work towards).
You can get this for less than $10 on EGS with the coupon right now… I’m very tempted, even if I had a few snags.
That does look really cool. Beautiful graphics as well.
Sounds awesome! Wonder if they’ll ever finish it.
…I should really write a bot to reply to this thread with that.
In this case, I think the fear you should have is where they land on balancing. Enough of it is in shippable shape that I’m not concerned about their ability to build more content with interesting mechanical twists on the core gameplay they’ve established. I will say that most early city builders always feel precarious, like you’re navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis, avoiding this or that death spiral. This game has a very grounded feeling. Maybe it’s just relatively easy? But I think it’s more that it’s very manageable. That said, as I mentioned above, there are some apparent dead ends in the randomized progression. Very fixable, though!
Still. For this thread, that bot could save a lot of time.
Against the Storm still feels very early access to me, because it seems very difficult to actually figure out what you’re trying to do, or what tools you have to do it. Also the overworld stuff isn’t explained at all.
The art and UI and all that are very polished, but as it stands I can’t figure out either what is required to be successful at a given map (yes, they tell you the goals, but how do I achieve those goals efficiently?), or what I’m supposed to be doing between maps.
Really hope they do some work making the game more understandable, and not just add more biomes.
I’ve had this on my wishlist for awhile and I am tired of people complimenting it and me not having it. :) It may be time to pull the trigger and at least try that demo I downloaded months ago.
Pretty sure Katherine of Sky has some videos playing it, if you can’t be bothered doing the demo!
I highly recommend it. Got it dirt cheap on EGS after $10 coupon too. I agree with @JoshL that nothing is explained well, but I was able to complete the first map. The second was going ok until I ran out of food. I think if you play a few games, you get the gist of what is needed.
Any recommendations on city builder/colony manager games that let you trade with other towns? Thanks!
It’s a core part of the latter Impressions City Builder games like Zeus/Poseidon and Emperor, but those are 20 years old (still great though!) For more recent games, hmm I’m pretty sure Nebuchadnezzar had inter-city trade but that game for unclear reasons did not click for me (it’s very much a spiritual successor to the City Building games so the fact it didn’t click for me is weird).
There have to be more but I can’t recall them…
Trading on map or off map? On map there are the Anno games. Off map there is Banished.
The latest Simcity does that very well.
I enjoyed it until I realised the only efficient wait to build things was to have warehouses cover half the area of your whole city…
Thanks for the suggestions!
(Referring to Nebuchadnezzar) Yeah I think that’s it. The whole “individually manage the number of workers per building” was too micro-managey for my tastes, and then the solution turns out to be “Warehouses everywhere! Because warehouses don’t need workers!”. I liked aspects of the design but that core decision about the workers and the warehouses crippled it IMO.
Anno is the real answer, but if you don’t mind a trading game with city building elements, then Patrician and Port Royale might be worth looking at. There was a new Port Royale just last year
Thanks, geewhiz! I’ll check that out.
Will also check out Patrician and the new Port Royale, Ginger_Yellow. Thanks!