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.
If you are ok with factory ish games, I really liked the level based nature of “mindustry”. Factorio is more “you have any space you need, nature bends to your will”. And mindustry does some stuff where it’s similar production chain puzzling, but you are hard restricted by space. Which improves the puzzling, because not all solutions will fit everywhere.
Otherwise I would also recommend against the storm.
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.
I am not sure if it fits your bill, but when I am overwhelmed by my factorio mega base or tired of traffic in cities skyline I now switch to the recently released Sintopia. It scratches the build-optimising itch, but does so in rounds with a clear goal and a defined end. You can go endless and sandbox if you wish but I find it at the moment relaxing to know that after maximal 10 ish hours of avoiding the goal I can finish the run anytime and do a new one. And don’t actually have to fix everything.
You may want to give an Anno game a try. Best recent one is Anno 1800, but Anno 2070, 1404 and 2205 are great as well. In these you manage population levels, needs and logistical chains instead of traffic.
Or maybe look into more survivaly city builders like Kingdoms&Castles, Nova Roma, Farthest Frontier or Banished.
If you want more puzzle than city builder then there’s Terrascape or Dorfromantik.
Finally, you may enjoy Railgrade or Train Valley 2 - these are not city builders, but tycoon games with a mission structure, strict confines and puzzle mechanics.
Edit: Oh and forgot Ixion. Absolutely superb story based scifi space station builder. Really really nails the vibe.
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”
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.
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.
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.
Terra Nil might be up your alley- You start in a barren landscape, you build structures to restore life to the earth. Once the land is healthy, you pack up all of your buildings, and fly them up to your spaceship, to try the same thing with the next area. It’s more of a “puzzle” game than a sim, but it’s fun, relaxed, and moves through different levels as they introduce new tech for different restoration projects.
If you are OK with historical city-builders, the campaigns for Caesar III, Pharaoh and Zeus/Poseidon, are largely level-focused. They are available on GOG and there is a really nice modern engine for Caesar III.
Based on feedback and discussion that I’ve seen (I haven’t tried it yet), Microlandia seems to mostly fit your request in a modern city-builder:
I have played UCB and it does have a bigger focus on neighbourhoods and types of commercial/industrial areas. I felt that the tutorial makes it seem like it’s not a city-builder, it very much is and with it’s own game design approach.
You can play it as a Metropolis city-builder too, but there can be some annoyances with this approach (I had to design blocks for certain things for space efficiency, some blocks are available in the guide section on steam).
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.
Caesar 3 has different “levels” where you have different cities and have to meet different demands from Rome with them. If you play this game I highly, highly, highly recommend using the Augustus mod from the get-go to have modern quality of life features. Also look up some tutorial videos as there are some counter intuitive mechanics.
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!
Workers and Resources Soviet Republic is an automation simulator masquerading as a city builder.
The most played game right now on my Steam account is Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic, an automation game disguised as a city builder, with obscenely detailed mechanics. You don’t buy buildings, you have to have functional construction industries to set them up. You don’t magically draw colored lines to set up bus routes like in SimCity, you have to buy buses at the border one by one and then set up a maintenance schedule. You don’t highlight a dark patch on the map and suddenly have a metallurgy industry like in Cities: Skylines, the fuck you don’t, you need to set up a coal industry and rail transport over the course of thirty odd hours before you start cranking out steel. And that’s without even considering food production, alcoholism management, pollution from the necessary chemicals industry, storage and handling of fresh meat, and of course, citizen loyalty to the Party. It’s a fucking insane game by and for people who probably have to be insane themselves.
I wrote that in a post about my strange relationship with games and media in general in my blog a few weeks ago.
Definitely one of the most distinctly engrossing games I’ve ever played. Seriously. Your cities will be ugly as fuck because it’s genuinely difficult to progress.
Reading your post over again maybe it’s a bit on the extreme side and not what you’re asking for. This is the most extreme city management I’ve ever played. Your sewers have to flow downhill, citizens driving in personal cars is something that happens after like 300 hours, if you sell too much oil too fast you can make oil cheaper on the global market and lose money. I hate it, I’ve wasted my life on it. It’s great I want to play more.
Really impressive game, but holy shit can it get complicated.
The only city builder I’ve played where you have to purchase the asphalt and the equipment (dump trucks, rollers, etc.) and assign workers to build all roads.
I think you can turn that off to simplify it, but still pretty cool
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Oxygen not included, timberborn, anno.
You might like Frostpunk
If you are ok with factory ish games, I really liked the level based nature of “mindustry”. Factorio is more “you have any space you need, nature bends to your will”. And mindustry does some stuff where it’s similar production chain puzzling, but you are hard restricted by space. Which improves the puzzling, because not all solutions will fit everywhere.
Otherwise I would also recommend against the storm.
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.
I am not sure if it fits your bill, but when I am overwhelmed by my factorio mega base or tired of traffic in cities skyline I now switch to the recently released Sintopia. It scratches the build-optimising itch, but does so in rounds with a clear goal and a defined end. You can go endless and sandbox if you wish but I find it at the moment relaxing to know that after maximal 10 ish hours of avoiding the goal I can finish the run anytime and do a new one. And don’t actually have to fix everything.
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 may want to give an Anno game a try. Best recent one is Anno 1800, but Anno 2070, 1404 and 2205 are great as well. In these you manage population levels, needs and logistical chains instead of traffic.
Or maybe look into more survivaly city builders like Kingdoms&Castles, Nova Roma, Farthest Frontier or Banished.
If you want more puzzle than city builder then there’s Terrascape or Dorfromantik.
Finally, you may enjoy Railgrade or Train Valley 2 - these are not city builders, but tycoon games with a mission structure, strict confines and puzzle mechanics.
Edit: Oh and forgot Ixion. Absolutely superb story based scifi space station builder. Really really nails the vibe.
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.
Awesome game
Ooh, sounds great, thanks!
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”
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.
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.
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.
I was super excited to try it out, and after spending about a week binging it, I came to the conclusion I didn’t have fun playing it.
It did have a bit of a learning curve but once it clicks, you’re breezing along. It just didn’t fill my city building void.
Terra Nil might be up your alley- You start in a barren landscape, you build structures to restore life to the earth. Once the land is healthy, you pack up all of your buildings, and fly them up to your spaceship, to try the same thing with the next area. It’s more of a “puzzle” game than a sim, but it’s fun, relaxed, and moves through different levels as they introduce new tech for different restoration projects.
If you are OK with historical city-builders, the campaigns for Caesar III, Pharaoh and Zeus/Poseidon, are largely level-focused. They are available on GOG and there is a really nice modern engine for Caesar III.
Based on feedback and discussion that I’ve seen (I haven’t tried it yet), Microlandia seems to mostly fit your request in a modern city-builder:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4094120/Microlandia/
Might also be worth checking out Urbek City Builder (also modern).
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1411740/Urbek_City_Builder/
I have played UCB and it does have a bigger focus on neighbourhoods and types of commercial/industrial areas. I felt that the tutorial makes it seem like it’s not a city-builder, it very much is and with it’s own game design approach.
You can play it as a Metropolis city-builder too, but there can be some annoyances with this approach (I had to design blocks for certain things for space efficiency, some blocks are available in the guide section on steam).
I came here to suggest Urbek City Builder too. It could be right up their alley.
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.
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”.
Caesar 3 has different “levels” where you have different cities and have to meet different demands from Rome with them. If you play this game I highly, highly, highly recommend using the Augustus mod from the get-go to have modern quality of life features. Also look up some tutorial videos as there are some counter intuitive mechanics.
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.
Aaaaand now I’m reinstalling Tropico 6 for the umpteenth time. Such a great game and has the best soundtrack of any city builder series.
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!
Workers and Resources Soviet Republic is an automation simulator masquerading as a city builder.
I wrote that in a post about my strange relationship with games and media in general in my blog a few weeks ago.
Definitely one of the most distinctly engrossing games I’ve ever played. Seriously. Your cities will be ugly as fuck because it’s genuinely difficult to progress.
Reading your post over again maybe it’s a bit on the extreme side and not what you’re asking for. This is the most extreme city management I’ve ever played. Your sewers have to flow downhill, citizens driving in personal cars is something that happens after like 300 hours, if you sell too much oil too fast you can make oil cheaper on the global market and lose money. I hate it, I’ve wasted my life on it. It’s great I want to play more.
Really impressive game, but holy shit can it get complicated.
The only city builder I’ve played where you have to purchase the asphalt and the equipment (dump trucks, rollers, etc.) and assign workers to build all roads.
I think you can turn that off to simplify it, but still pretty cool
Man, I want to like this game but it runs like ass on my rig.