Farthest Frontier - City builder from Grim Dawn developer

I can see why.

Wasn’t there a Tower Defense game set in this universe too?

You are thinking of the Van Helsing games and universe. They have Deathtrap, a tower defense game as well as tower defense in the games series itself.

Last city-builder I played was Tropico 2.

For whatever horrible, horrible reason I no longer play these because there’s no combat. This goes for games like The Sims too. And MMORPGs because “no one ever really dies” (to paraphrase RLM) in them.

☹️

You should take a look on the Anno games.

Amusingly, the main reason I stopped playing City Builders is because they all try to shoehorn in combat eventually, and all I want to do is peacefully minmax my ore-to-pickaxes-for-more-ore pipeline.

I love city builders, but yeah, I really hate it when they force some kind of combat on you. Especially annoying is having to micromanage trade routes because of roving pirate ships in assorted Anno games. In fact, it’s one of the reasons I haven’t gotten super far into the Anno 1800 campaign yet… because I end up settled on several islands and then suddenly have to spend 50% of my time protecting the ships that are hauling my goods around. It gets tiresome and I stop playing. Which is a shame, because I adore the Anno series, and 1800 seems excellent if not for that annoyance.

Getting into a bit of a derail here, but for Anno 1800 there are two approaches that really cut down on the annoyance here: (1) sign a cease-fire with the pirates; it’s kind of pricey if you wait for them to ask you but if you ask them it can be less expensive, or (2) assign a frigate (later, two frigates) as escort (doesn’t work for routes that go to other maps, sadly). It is unfortunate that the cheaper route is to manually wiggle your ships around, especially earlier in the game, when you don’t have so much money, but I find that just poneying up the cash (either to the pirates or frigate maintenance) is worthwhile as ultimately my attention is what is the bottleneck on growth. Alternately, can you turn off the pirates for the campaign?

You can at least skip the campaign and play a custom game with pirates turned off and no competitors if you so choose.

@ArmandoPenblade You might want to take a peek at Factory Town.

Yes, this, although Factory Town may be a bit much if you’re not super into automation games. Foundation was the first thing to come to mind when I read that. Because Foundation is awesome. And it has no combat. But mostly it’s awesome.

Yeah, automation isn’t so much my thing (never really jived with what Factorio seems to be about when I’ve peeked at it), but Foundation has been hanging out on my Wishlist for awhile. Hmmm. Videos to Google after work wraps up today!

Hm, I’m not sure. I don’t remember seeing that option, but I should take a closer look next time I decide to give it a go again.

Yeah, but I do usually enjoy completing the campaigns in these games (though my observation has been that I’m in the minority there, hehe).

Honestly, I’m on board with the 1800 campaign since it’s really just a long quest chain.

I tried booting up foundation twice - every time I turned it off immediately again, because of the incredibly obtuse and awful looking UI. Man, that looks really, really bad.
Which is a shame, because the game itself looks great!

Nothing sucks like the combat in Tropico 5 sucks. Totally ruins the game. Combat is unavoidable and progress-blocking, and it’s common for the unbelievably shitty pathfinding to cost you the game.

Grumble, grumble.

Supposedly the next big update is a UI overhaul. I almost bought it in the last sale, though I usually avoid EA releases, but it didn’t make much sense if they were going to redo the UI completely. I’d rather just learn it once.

I’m one of the lucky few who owns it on Steam. Bought it there before they pulled their shenanigans and yanked it off the store. Still have to do everything through Uplay, though.

As for Farthest Frontier… having a hard time mustering much enthusiasm for this one.

Which is why I rarely buy Ubisoft games anymore. Plus Anno games I hate the ship micromanaging and islands. So haven’t bothered.

You guys are killing me in this thread. I think FF looks great and I have liked Crate’s other games a lot, so whatever they come up with I will buy.

What is hooking your interest mostly with FF? I’m a big Grim Dawn fan so I really want to be enthused, but I admit I’m not big into city builders usually. That’s the main issue for me.