I’m itching to play something like Cities Skylines, but also something that isn’t just about growing and growing, rather building within certain (spatial?) limitations and/or solving problems or something. I hope this isn’t a contradiction, but I’d also like if it had a bit more focus on individual buildings and livability rather than optimizing car traffic, if that makes any sense. I guess i’m looking for something that is a bit more than just a city sculpting sandbox, but less than a full blown metropolis-society-simulator.
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Not as good as Against the Storm, but I like how Tropico games are more about building through challenges than just building.
Tropico 5 is the only one I’ve played and that was a right laugh
They all are. It’s great stuff.
I should play the others some time, I got em in a humble bundle I think
You’re looking for Against the Storm.
It’s a rogue-like city-builder with goals that you meet and complete in order to move on to the next set of unique challenges. You’ll be faced with unique sets of challenges per biome, unique race-based sets of needs, and times events that need to be dealt with or their consequences will have to be mitigated.
Against the storm sounds like a perfect fit. It’s in a fantasy setting though, so it’s quite different from Cities Skylines.
The idea is that you build a village, collect resources, and try to survive until you complete objectives. Once you’re done, you earn some permanent progression and move on to the next area to build. Each zone has its own challenges and randomly generated resources.
against the storm isn’t fun for me idky I’m always not understanding why stuff isn’t working and then missing some specific resource and losing. i really want to enjoy it though. i found that timberborn is kinda a level-based city builder as long as you decide when you’ve “won”
When you select a place for a new settlement, you can look at which ressources are expected to be produced there based on the biome. Different biomes will have different ressources, some common and others absent entirely.
As in many roguelikes, you can’t play assuming you’ll get a perfect build with what you have, in this case meaning the best resource transformation buildings. When you’re unlocking a building blueprint in a run, never choose based on things you don’t have yet, try to work with what you already have instead even if it’s not optimal. For example, choosing a bakery that produces max quality bread when you don’t have wheat or the building to harvest wheat might put you in a bad spot, where you’re hoping for a resource that never comes.
After a few games you start unlocking more buildings and permanent bonuses which makes the game a lot easier, sometimes the seasoned players forget how tough it gets in a fresh new game.
It takes some getting used to, you can play the easy difficulties until you wrap your head around the mechanics. Once I got past the difficulty curve though I found it very fun.
Awesome game
Ooh, sounds great, thanks!
banished is real good. it’s a medieval village sim. it’s also 6.50€ right now.
i see everyone recommending against the storm, banished is basically “what if that game was colorless, depressing and brutally realistic”.
Another +1 for Against the Storm. Timberborn also released recently and I lost a good bit of time to it. Timberborn has the sandbox build with multiple layers, and problem solving since you have to control water flow during three seasons (Wet, drought, tainted water) and manage resources.
I second your Timberborn recommendation. I think I heard one YouTuber describe it as “Banished, but beavers” and I found that to be relatively accurate. I also enjoy the vertical building aspect—it really mixes up what you can do with different spaces.
No ones mentioned Steamworld Build yet
Ixion is a bit more roguelike/RPG side of citybuilder sim but fits the bill
It’s not strictly a city-builder, but the PS2’s Dark Cloud involved building cities to accommodate all of the inhabitants’ requirements. Each city was like a puzzle, where you had to arrange things in a particular way (with some degree of freedom) to avoid conflicts.
Then there’s action-RPG combat and dungeons that might not be your style. But it’s a really great game. One of these days I really ought to play the sequel.
Since everyone already recommended my suggestion I’m also gonna throw into the mix
Synergy. Fun game with more of a focus on building sustainably instead of building big and expanding. Great artwork and a neat, alien setting that you have to explore and discover for yourself, adapting to the environmental challenges and local flora/fauna
Others have mentioned Tropico, but I like talking about Tropico so I recommend Tropico 6. Campaign missions have unique goals and conditions that can lead to interesting decisions, like the one where you can’t build houses, everyone lives in shacks, and I ended up going a dictator direction just to keep the populace in line.
Traffic is easy to manage, just don’t make four-way intersections (seriously, that’s it). Building choice and location are important because citizens have to travel from one place to another, so even if your clinic isn’t overwhelmed it may be good to build another far away so citizens don’t have to travel across the entire island to get there.
I could go on for a while, but it’s good, and Tropico 7 is coming out later this year so Tropico 6 will likely be pretty cheap next time it goes on sale.
I haven‘t tried 6, but I loved 4, it‘s my fav city builder ever (altho kinda easily exploited lol) and I liked 3, but I bounced off of 5 so hard that I never gave 6 a chance. I definitely recommend 4 though…
I played some 4, but like 6 a lot more personally. A lot of folks still prefer 4. 5 I think feels like the worst of both worlds or a stepping stone from one to the other. The big thing I like about 6 is that citizens actually have to travel to buildings to work or use services.
In Tropico 4/5, a clinic may have a capacity of 200, so if your population is 350 you need two clinics placed anywhere, which I think makes city planning a little boring because you could just have a clinic corner where you build all your clinics as needed. In 6 a clinic has 8 visitor slots, and when a citizen needs healthcare they claim a slot and physically walk or transit across the map, enter the clinic, then spend some time there before leaving and freeing the slot up. This means you could build a couple clinics far away from each other so citizens have less distance to travel to the nearest clinic, or you could have one in your population center, but invest in making that building high quality so when a citizen leaves with a higher healthcare value it takes longer before they need to visit again, reducing the overall demand and making the visitor slots go farther.
It lends itself toward building actual neighborhoods where they are needed which I like!
Against the Storm?
Appreciate you asking this question. I’ve been on the hunt for something like this. I was thinking back to how much fun warcraft three was, which while it was a base builder, it’s basically the same principle. But different levels, an actual story, etc…
A city builder or village builder following that track would be killer.
Pharaoh and Cleopatra are great
I’ve been enjoying The Crust quite a bit. Timberborn. Frostpunk etc
Not sure if they fit your needs though
Timberborn looks great!
It is great, but I don’t know if it fits your level based building idea. Mods make it interesting, but then again mods are also available for cities skyline 2.
Perhaps maybe stronghold HD. Stronghold DE. But that game also has combat and building.
Pure building that is level based… Nothing comes to mind.
Oxygen not included, timberborn, anno.
