I wonder if it’s a European thing. The Frostpunk devs are Polish and the Project Aura devs are Spanish. In America, we just plopped down grids next to whatever rivers we could find. But aren’t European cities more like spokes emanating from a central marketplace or some such thing? Just look at a map of Amsterdam. What kind of crazy way is that to build a city?
BTW, Project Aura is, uh, kicking my butt. I love complex games, and this is certainly that!
And here I was just recently lamenting the lack of Impressions Games’ style city-builders in development, so quite the timing. Now that Triskell Interactive have a couple of games behind their ears the sequel should hopefully benefit technically from everything they’ve learnt since their debut title as a studio and developers. It will be interesting to see what additions and refinements they make to the gameplay in the sequel, especially since the setting is the same so they can’t fallback on a new setting to help make things fresh like the Impressions games could.
Also, the original Lethis - Path of Progress is 50% off on Steam at the moment as well for anyone interested in giving it a whirl.
I still hold out the faintest hope that maybe one day we’ll get another game from Tilted Mill. I was interested to see how Chris Beatrice and gang might refine or improve on the very formula of city-building games they helped create back when Medieval Mayor was still a thing. At the very least it would be interesting to hear about what directions they think the gameplay loop\mechanics could be taken to be improved or expanded upon.
The interesting aspect of Cliff Empires is that it states build multiple cites at the same time and then connect them. Though they do look like minicities. :)
Hope the sequel takes a page out of the Impressions Games playbook and adds in a map editor and custom scenario\campaign support. Once you complete the campaign you haven’t many options for scenario based play outside of repeating campaign missions, what with sandbox being rather freeform in name and nature.
There were some pretty amazing user created scenarios and campaigns for the Impressions Games. So it would be interesting to see the creative minds of the city-builder community let loose on scenario design to push the boundaries of narrative, difficulty for advanced players, and so on.
Been a while since I’ve played Zeus so I’ll have to look through the Zeus Heaven download section to refresh my memory, but I recall Dead Seas being a pretty good and well rated user-made adventure. It leans towards player having an advanced grasp of the game though, so people might want to avoid the harder difficulty unless they are looking for a true test of their abilities.
Alternatively, Godwatch is fairly good option for beginner-to-intermediate level players looking for a fun custom adventure.
Wow! That’s rad. I didn’t know there were user made scenarios for Zeus. I also just found out about the game Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom. I thought Zeus was the last one in the series, but I guess this one is. I’m going to check it out tonight.