(I’m defining city building pretty broadly to include any sort of base/colony/city type stuff.) The last one I tried was Caesar IV, which for a variety of reasons, I didn’t get into.
Games I’ve liked quite a bit: Impressions series (especially liked Caesar III and Zeus, didn’t really care for Emperor); SimCity (the first two, didn’t care for 3K or 4 that much).
Games I’ve tried but didn’t really click: Children of the Nile (felt too hands off); Tropico 2 (the sims moved too goddamn slow). City Life (too weird, couldn’t grok the whole energies thing).
Games I didn’t care for: Civ Cities Rome (bleah), Anno 1602/1701 series (like watching paint dry)
The recent-ish releases I haven’t tried: Sim City Societies, Imperium Romanum
Older Games I never tried: Space Colony, Startopia
I like games that combine good design aspects, good management aspects (productiont trains etc) with some type of “gameplay” (ie a reasonably good combat system or equivalent). On the latter point, I felt the combat missions in Zeus and the piracy stuff in Tropico 2 were good, but could have been developed better.
Of all the Impressions series, I loved Pharaoh and Emperor the best. I thought Zeus was just a reskinning, and it didn’t really do much for me. Didn’t stop me from buying them all.
Like you, for some reason, Children of the Nile didn’t click for me. Perhaps I wanted it too much.
I really got into the Colonization expansion for Civ 4. If you played with one of the “no war” mods, you could build a pretty intense economic competition.23
If you like building cities for shits and giggles just to make your own aesthetic design, Simcity Societies is nice for that, although it doesn’t have diagonal roads and it’s very gamey.
I don’t see how you can’t get into Simcity 4. The game has a HUGE mod community with some very great changes to the game. As far as city building goes, nothing has topped it.
The Settlers series might be your type of thing, perhaps look into the Settlers II remake. Great production lines and management, although the combat/territory system isn’t as easy to understand right away.
Obviously the Civilization series or Alpha Centauri might be your thing, although that’s more ‘society building’.
Monopoly Tycoon. It’s part Sims, part city building. It’s a fairly lightweight game, but I sunk a good number of hours into it.
IIRC, Space Colony was also a mix of the Sims and city building, but I think Monopoly Tycoon places more emphasis on the city development, where Space Colony was more about keeping the characters happy. I could be wrong, though.
You haven’t played Startopia? It’s still one of my favorite PC games; I absolutely adore it. The missions and sandbox are both fun. The game’s only real downside is that playing “vs” or whatever it’s called, doesn’t work too well. Trying to take over each other’s parts of the station is a little wonky, with the AI being able to control their units much better than you. Every time I install the game, it’s suddenly almost 3am.
I just picked up Imperium Romanum on Impulse (sale!) and it’s pretty good.
The Bad:
very little feedback
difficult to tell anything about your finances
building placement can be somewhat wonky
no grid style placement of buildings
The Good:
radial menu for building placement is very nice
can expand city with “town center” style warehouses that allow for distant outposts
maps are very large relative to city
generally an excellent update of the Impressions/Tilted Mill style
I really recommend picking it up if you’re a fan of the Pharaoh style CB. I’d say it’s on par with Zeus, although it lacks the voice work and bright artsy style that made the Impressions CBs so great.
I also recommend Hinterland. It’s a nifty merging of the CB and RPG styles by TM. It isn’t nearly as complex as, say, Pharaoh, but it does make for an excellent CB light game.
You know how in Pharaoh and Zeus it was easy to get your buildings all lined up in a row? In this game, it is a major bitch because the grid they snap to is far too small. Caesar 4 had the same problem.
This game takes it to the next level by allowing you to put buildings on top of roads. So you’ll see the building overlap the road upon completion even though it looked fine prior. And since I.R. is designed around the concept of extremely scarce resources (you can tax your citizens only once per forum upgrade, with money coming in in trickles from your markets and temples and resources exhausted regularly to maintain buildings), it’s a non-trivial matter to adjust them.
Couple that to the requirement that worker housing be within a certain circular radius of their place of employment and you can end up with some crazy ugly looking cities.
The gameplay is good enough that I’m willing to overlook it, but it really is frustrating.
Dwarf Fortress! So far my favourite ‘city’ management type game right behind the Simcity series.
I’m with you though, I don’t like City Life and I prefer Simcity 2000 over Simcity 4, though I do play 4 most of the time.
I would recommend trying Simcity Societies before buying it, I wasn’t able to get into it and neither were any of my casual gaming friends (granted they were all hardcore into Simcity 4, to the point where we had tourny’s). I just didn’t feel like I was building a city, it all felt completely artificial with very little actual simulation involved. Kinda like Spore, all creativity no simulation.
Ahh I see. I personally liked building and road placement in Black & White 2. No grid system, but you could easily see the area of effect of certain building types, and the road building was fluid.
Black and White 2 was a terrible, terrible game. I’m fairly certain that the only good thing about it was throwing rocks at the sky scrapers you could build.
I remember the city building mechanics being alright, though, with its stockyards and gatherers and the way buildings snapped distinctly to the roads you laid out. That’s really all I was referring to.
Oh I did, back whenever the English demo came out. Has one of those damn time limits. I found a copy shipping through Amazon out of NY and a generous, overseas Qt3er has offered to pick one up and ship it to me. That said, I have heard it is buggy to the point it will not even load and start. Now I am in a quandry.
I guess I could find III somewhere as that is about where they departed from the formula. Or just play the original II on DOsBox.
EDIT: Sharpe, I think we are outta luck. There is nothing else. :)
Chock me down for loving Black and White 2 city building, from what I can remember. That’s not actually due to the building and simulation dynamics though, more to do with my creature interacting and playing with the villagers - and the sacrifice/worship system.
