It does seem like you only get one warehouse, but I feel like that’s a mistake, if so. Maybe a system where you have to earn new ones or each new one gets much more expensive would be a happy medium between being trivializingly common and agonizingly overburdened (if there’s one and only one).
Wait, there are frogs in this game?! OMG, jumping to the top of my list!
I see what you did there!
Wondered if anyone would notice hehe.
I’m looking to play a good, relaxing, non-stressful builder right now. What are people playing?
Anno 1800 in easy sandbox mode. But I’m waiting on Farthest Frontier to drop in August. The biggest thing to worry about is crop rotation.
I agree with Anno 1800. Play on easy mode, or even on hard but selecting easier opponents (where most of the annoyance comes in higher difficulties). The game can get very complicated if you insist on playing at max speed at all times, but take it down to 1x or even 0.5x as you balance your urban supply chains. It’s a great diversion to get lost in a few hours at a time.
Farthest Frontier is very intriguing - is August release for EA or 1.0?
Early Access as always.
Wow, Anno is a kinda wild recommendation for a relaxing city builder. I think it’s only relaxing if you’ve already logged a few dozen hours into it.
@Charlatan my recommendation is still Early Access, but it’s MicroTown. It has a lovely ant-colony feel and no fighting or economic collapses in sight. You will eventually run out of interesting new resources to harvest and process, but it’ll give you several hours of chill times until then.
You can turn off all of the opponents and pirates in Anno and make it pretty relaxing. Hell, an easy opponent won’t really be aggressive ever either. At that point it’s really just about keeping your income positive and you can be as chill about it as you want.
If you never picked up Townscaper, while it’s still not really a game, it’s only $4 right now and remains incredibly non-stressful.
Banished is another good one. Only $7 on Steam right now.
I think Patron is a better Banished.
On a somewhat different scale, Stonehearth can be very chill.
Need more city builders like (the on sale) Airborne Kingdom where I can make the city get up and move around. I had fun making this flying wedge – I wish I could see other players’ finished cities, because with how the game works I’d expect each player’s to look kinda distinct.
Oh, geez, can’t believe I forgot Airborne Kingdom! (Well, I kinda can. I don’t mind having lots of storefronts, but when you’re searching for games, it’s easy to miss the ones on Epic, etc.)
Charlatan – It’s just what you were asking for! Chill and accessible, but also a unique experience.
@DoubleG – I wish the aesthetic part of city builders came more naturally to me. I think my AK cities have been big rectangles with houses on one side and industry on the other, and lamps where I get the best coverage…
It’s a mixture, I would say? There are these hand-designed cities with hand-designed quests, but they’re randomly scattered around the map and you can encounter them in almost any order. And scattered between/around them are the destinations where you fulfill those quests and the resource pools you need to keep yourself afloat and build new stuff. So the arrangement of the world is different each time you play, even if the content is the same.
Awesome, thanks! Yeah, I’m seeing a ton of variety in aesthetics and strategy. The game gives you several valid ways of solving how to keep your city aloft and moving – all of which have different resource consumption and placement requirements – so it naturally pushes you to make unique cities.
My design used a ton of human-powered rowers, but here’s somebody who went in the opposite direction and made a compact coal burner using a bunch of turbines and propellers:
And here’s somebody who went really wide, reminds me of the mothership from Homeworld:
Neat “Klingon Bird of Prey during Pride” design:
And I would say it’s definitely progression based. You have a tech tree that you work through, and you collect new branches in the tech tree through exploring the world. As your city grows your people demand more luxuries so you need to find and exploit new resources and tech.
The default difficulty is pretty relaxed, though, and there’s no danger beyond you using up your resources faster than you can replenish them. If you’re looking for a challenge it’s probably safe to play the game on hard for the first time.
Quick question: can you fully pause and build in Airborne Kingdom? I really hate the city builders that don’t let you fully pause and build.
Also is this primarily a “design and watch it go” kind of city builder or is it a city builder that requires frequent management of stuff within the city? I tend to dislike too much micromanagement, and prefer the design-focused city builders. For example, for my tastes, a city builder where I set up efficient production chains and they do their thing is great; a city builder where I have to micromanage transport and inventory on an ongoing basis to keep production chains going is not great. Needing to set up transport and storage within the production chains is fine; I just don’t want to have to constantly manage them. How does this game handle that?