this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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I've been playing not much else than city builders in the past year or two, for some reason.
Surviving Mars is good imo, and so is Frostpunk, but both involved a decent bit of trial and error to figure out. For Frostpunk that ended up being a strength, but not sure if I'd have just done a tutorial for Surviving Mars if I would have had fewer problems.
I have like 400 hours in Satisfactory, some people consider it a city builder, I guess for resource management reasons. But there aren't cute little people to watch so I don't know about that, haha. Fun though.
Kingdoms and Castles is a very cute game, but probably too easy. Still, very relaxing to play which is nice.
I also enjoyed Jurassic World Evolution, driving the jeep through the park you've built is very fun.
For the past few months I've been playing tons of Oxygen Not Included. It's really fun, but tricky, and the simulation differs from how actual physics works enough that some mechanics are unintuitive for me. It's a game that I had to figure out a specific reason to keep playing though, as once you get the main problems fixed you're arguably "done", but it's not all that hard to get a self-sustaining colony.
I tried Rimworld, and found it a very weirdly unsatisfying game. Imo it's too slow and tedious to be good as a "story generator" but the problems you face are also too banal but also devastating for it to be a good city builder. I'm guessing a lot of people would hate me for saying I actually prefer Stranded: Alien Dawn to Rimworld, even though it's just a 3d copy. But Stranded Alien Dawn is more fun to watch your people do stuff and I enjoy being able to build 3d houses too. It's almost more like The Sims.
I also briefly tried Against the Storm, but I dunno, it didn't really grab me. Seemed really slow.
Timberborn is a fantastic game, and everyone should play it. Just fantastic. I started before the badwater update and I think there's merits to either mode, so if you wanna play safer, you can turn off badwater for a game and it's still super solid.
I just bought Manor Lords, but I'm gonna wait till it gets updated more before I crack it open. My ONI world has a lot of work still.
Also, like everyone else says, Banished is great (though the UI leaves something to be desired, but it's also a custom game engine from the one dev) and Cities Skylines is good too. Haven't tried CS 2.
I also really wanna try Captains of Industry, but I've gotta pace myself
I'm a huge RimWorld fan, I'm curious, did you use the fast forward button? If you stay on regular speed, it can really drag. I believe many players just leave it on 3x speed and pause when an emergency arrives.
Your opinion is valid regardless, I just find significant overlap in our preferences, so this surprises me.
Yeah, I was playing on 3x for most of the time. I know, I was surprised that I didn't really seem to get it
I kind of wish that it'd support higher simulation rates and try to multithread at least some of the stuff (like, maybe they can have the pathfinding or temperature propagation span multiple cores or something, which has historically been a drag).
Animals and a few other things are now multithreaded, so it is something they're working on.
Last time I dipped into Oxygen Not Included, the rocket program was enough to get me to push past self-sustenance. Unfortunately in the end, getting the details of the program right just annoyed me. I don't know if it's me or if the game's just not set up well to handle large-scale construction. Building fuel production ended up being more fun than actually building the rocket silos.
You do spend more time being reactive to problems the game throws at you, but I'd note that you have a lot of ability to adjust that when starting the world in selecting a storyteller and difficulty level.
re: rimworld
it's really important to read the messages and the little bits (like the logs when a social fight occurs) to really get immersed in the story!
might be worth watching some YouTubers playing to see what i mean!
hazzor usually does a good job of getting into the story, so does ambiguousAmphibian
but as the others said: if it's really not for you, then it's just not for you!
I will say, the couple times my colonists got into nearly deadly altercations due to one of them being a pyschopath and going around starting fights was actually interesting. But that kind of conflict was much less frequent than 80% of my pawns being in the hospital due to an attack from neighboring clans
well, rimworld does have a focus on (micro)management and strategy!
if your pawns are constantly down due to raiders, then you need better defenses! ...or tame a herd of animals and release those at your enemies! (rhinos work very well for this!)
there are tons of little optimizations you can make to efficiently run a colony. for example, social fights: you can keep those from happening by keeping the problematic pawns in different areas! or removing one or both of their tongues! or sending one on basically permanent caravan missions! etc., etc.
this kind of deep strategizing, combined with the random bullshit the game throws at you, is mostly why people love rimworld!
and mods... definitely get mods! that's where the game reeeaaally shines!
Thank you for your informative comment. I know I'm almost a month late, but I'm about to start my vacation and needed a nice city building game to try.
Yeah! I'm glad I could be of help.