City Builder / Colony Manager General Discussion Thread

Games
101

Horror/survival build-o-rama The Forest comes out of EA and goes to version 1.0 on May 1, per RPS.

I wrote this game off a long while back, but I’ve watched a couple of Gopher vids where he’s playing, and it looks like it’s come a long way in the last year or so. Intrigued.

102

Another EA game I’ve been tracking is Ostriv.

https://ostrivgame.com/home/

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103

That looks great, thanks for sharing.

104

Awesome thread! I love this genre. I haven’t played it, but does Oxygen Not Included fall under this category? Also am I the only one who first reads EA as being Electronic Arts and not Early Access?

105

I definitely put ONI in this category. It is a base builder for sure.

106

Yes, definitely, in the Colony Manager tab, pretty much.

No, you most certainly are not. ;)

107

The perils of common abbreviations/words: I conjure up this Oni.

108

Capitalization matters!

That’s what makes the EA/EA thing a PITA.

109

No, you aren’t. Every time I see EA I think of Electronic Arts before I realize what I read was referring to Early Access.

110

Pretty much every time I see that abbreviation I have to reread the sentence again to make sure. I was going to avoid Ostriv because it was coming from EA which doesn’t seem to get city-builders. Now I am going to avoid it because it is EA, and I need a few of these games to actually get finished before i try them.

There are number of games that I will do earlish, but this genre is turning out not to be one of them.

111

Is the Anno series the closest thing building upon what Impressions was doing back in the day with Zeus and Pharaoh?

112

I think Anno has its own DNA that’s very unique from Impressions’ stuff, but maybe from a high enough vantage point the distinctions are blurry enough that that’s true.

Impressions:

  • Build buildings and roads to connect them.
  • More advanced goods let your housing grow denser.
  • Goods are moved and distributed by “walkers” (characters who randomly walk the streets) and stored in storage buildings.
  • Your city trades with entities on the world map.
  • You build armies, to defend yourself against invaders or to attack other cities.
  • No rival cities playing on the same map as you.

Anno:

  • Build buildings and roads to connect them.
  • More advanced goods let your housing grow denser.
  • Goods are gathered automatically by production buildings, then they can be “withdrawn” from any main market building on the island.
  • You colonize multiple islands on the map, and use ships to move goods between them.
  • There are rival colonizers on the map doing the same thing you are and you attack them primarily with your navy.
  • People on the map are mostly window dressing. Ships are your primary units.
113

If you want a recent game that closely matches the Impressions city builder style, try Lethis - Path of Progress.

114

This looks to be abandoned by its devs so they can work on their second game, and folks are complaining of crashes and stuff with no fixes. Buyer beware.

115

As games they are quite different, but for me in a way they “feel” similar - that idea that you’re actually playing around chains of production, the awe in seeing everyone running smoothly tainted by the fear that things might go out of control if you’re not careful.

116

This is the reason I avoided it too. It sounds like it came out very, very buggy and then it might have calmed a bit but it didn’t leave a good impression.

Anno seems to be the series that has the latest entries in the city-builders genre that’s a complete full blown game, final release version, but… it does play very differently from the Impression titles. I’d think someone who likes Impression would probably like those too, but they’re not even close to the same.

117

Yeah, exactly. I’d have jumped on it otherwise.

118

This seems to be what I’ve been looking for in city builder! Too bad it seems to be abandoned.

119

FWIW, I posted upthread about Lethis. I bought it and played it to completion… and thoroughly enjoyed it. I don’t recall having any game breaking bugs or crashes, but I’m not saying they don’t exist. If loads of people reported problems, then I assume it’s a legit complaint. It’s probably just the usual thing where different people have different hardware… causing different problems.

The most memorable issue I had with the game, to be honest, was simply that the English translation was very poor. I have a vague recollection that the dev team was French, and they may not have had the resources to get proper translations done. But never was I confused about what my objectives were, so it was good enough.

YMMV, obviously. Just because I had no technical issues with the game doesn’t mean others won’t. I never got the impression that the devs “abandoned” the game as much as they finished making it and then moved on to something else. If they left in game breaking bugs, then yeah, that’s a shame. But it wasn’t really a game that needed continuing support otherwise.

That said, it scratched my itch for an Impressions style city builder, but I haven’t really had the urge to load it up again. Whenever I feel like playing an Impressions style city builder, I just go ahead and load of Zeus or Pharaoh. ;)

120

This was actually at their release, and it was wide spread. I don’t know the state of the game today, and if they finished making it it was after the release. I’ll put it this way, I think they actually released an official apology for the state of the game… at release.

It could be good now though, and I had heard it was like Impression games except… no combat at all right?