City Builder / Colony Manager General Discussion Thread

Sounds good. And they have a roadmap that basically reads like this: “Our game is more or less done but since this is called EA we will add some minor stuff and maybe you’ll come up with some ideas too.” I love those EA-roadmaps : )

I don’t understand why they made it early access then. I imagine there’s a whole bunch of people, myself included, who have been burned from EA in the past and are as a result wary of any game with it.

Is it because game devs want two chances to release the game? Ea launch and then 1.0 release?

The game looks interesting though, it’s a neat idea for a colony management game.

I think in some cases Early Access is a soft launch, let a wider group of fans stress test it on more systems, do some patching and balancing tweaking then go to official 1.0.

At least that’s what I think the Distant Worlds 2 devs should have done!

There’s a Simulator sale over at Humble that has quite a few builder and management games:

Wow. F1 Manager at 70% off is probably worth it, even with all the hate.

Meanwhile, City Skylines came out 2 years later, has a huge following, and was getting DLC up till last year. And now has a sequel planned.

Wishlisted!

See your city grow and transform over time. With stunning graphics that are as beautiful as they are detailed, Cities: Skylines II will bring your city to life.

So close!

Workers has made it’s way back to steam:

Ran across The Exogate Initiative today, it’s a base-builder/explorer with a lot of familiar elements. You’re running an underground base whose focal point is a Stargate, oh wait, ‘Exogate,’ that allows you to travel to different worlds. You have to build the base so you can send your team out to explore strange and unusual planets. There’s a demo available.

The demo has got a bit of an XCOM feel in that you’re building a base, managing personnel, and sending them out on missions. I did not run across any aliens though, so there wasn’t any direct combat (though you DO hire soldiers eventually). Some of the away missions result in scripted conversations/events where you have limited choices to direct your team (choices like “go to this location and explore the interesting thing” versus “stay away and do this other thing”).

The idea has a lot of appeal to me but the demo has a few rough edges, especially as it relates to the UI. I found myself drilling down into different screens and then having to x-out a few panels on the screen to get back to where I wanted to go. I also encountered a few minor bugs in the demo (not to mention that after a while the music starts skipping - maybe a memory leak going on there).

Rough spots aside, the demo was a bit of fun, and I’m going to keep this in my wishlist to see how it pans out.

Wahey, I was intrigued enough to get The Colonists in the Steam sale.

It is a brilliant design, I think it does a fantastic job of updating the Settlers idea, and I fricken love a game that knows how to do hotkeys properly, but I have to say that I am as unimpressed by the visuals as I thought I would be.

The animations are cute, I like the clockwork woodcutting, and especially the little robot dance that the haulers do when they’re idle, but man, I wish they weren’t a bunch of interchangeable little squares, and I wish the colors weren’t muted.

Giving them names almost seems perverse. It’s like people who name their roombas. Sorry weird person, but your device is not a pet, and it will never be as adorable. Feeding them real food also seems weird.

So it is a great game, but less of a great ant farm, at least for my tastes. Really enjoying it though, kudos for pushing me towards the light!

It is weird, but their dream is to be human.

The game supports mods so they might be some redskins or the like for the robots. Hard to search on such a generic name though 🫤

I name my fans. I think that is the trend, right? Want Alexa to know which fan to turn on!

You name them so you know what job they’re doing

Cities Skylines streamer City Planner Plays did a (sponsored) Anno video:

I had to laugh out loud (in a sympathetic way) when he was making fences and yards. It’s so different and looks so nice. I never ever have managed to build anything like this in 300+ hours Anno. This kind of decorating looks awesome! And it’s funny to see for someone, like me, who’s puzzling every inch out of every map… but he’s building nice little cottages, oh hey. Great : )

Yeah, even his Cities Skylines streams are definitely more on the aesthetic side of things than, say, Biffa’s.

That is me with any builder. If something doesn’t benefit me mechanically I just don’t really ever do it :-)

Probably with City Skylines didn’t do much for me. I’m not really artistic in any way.

I saw a neat video yesterday from Splattercat about a game named Bulwark (there is a demo available right now for those so inclined):

It’s being developed by the guy who did Falconeer and is set in the same universe (for what that’s worth!).

The game is not out yet, but the aesthetic and building interface are unusual and really appeal to me. You’re building in what is essentially a waterworld. So you build most of your buildings on craggy rocks or in shallow water. This forces most (all?) of the buildings to be towers. You connect one tower to another via walkways/sky bridges. The building UI is minimal and the building you place is context sensitive, so if you build near a rock deposit, you get a quarry. Build near a sea fungi (which provides ‘wood’) you get a lumberer. Build near nothing and it’s simply a tower. You can upgrade the towers as you get more advanced materials (by right clicking on them) and the towers grow and become more elaborate - using procedural generation. They’re quite good looking.

I went to put this game on my wishlist so I could keep tabs on it and found it was already there, so there may have been some pumping of it prior to this. I can’t imagine I found this game on my own!

At any rate, it looks to be an interesting and different take on a city builder, and I’m definitely keeping tabs on it.

The dev of Falconeer has been posting about his new city builder here in the thread for his original game.

It sounded like it’s not a super gamey city-builder, but more open-ended and exploratory. Looks like a really unique interface for building! Looking forward to giving it a try.