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  • Not sure if it'd quite qualify as "city builder". I'd call it "base builder". But since others mention them:

    • Dwarf Fortress
    • Rimworld
    • Oxygen Not Included

    The above games focus on the interactions of various things you build. They have a very high degree of replayability. Dwarf Fortress has a very high bar to entry, but for all of them, you're going to be reading wikis and spending a lot of time understanding mechanics. I think that they all give very good value for money.

    • Cities: Skylines (the original). It's not bad. It's quite expensive, if you're going to buy a lot of the DLC -- it's a typical Paradox game, where the cost of the base game isn't a large chunk of the overall price, where there is a lot of not-cheap DLC that really adds up. It currently has a lot of its content on sale on Steam, and even on sale, a purchase of all of it is $250. But...there's a lot of neat stuff there. It's one of the few relatively-modern citybuilders. It has curved roads. I don't care that much about this -- and I think that the focus on graphics was a major contributing factor to Cities: Skylines II doing poorly -- but it is relatively-pretty.
    • Sim City 4. It's not new, but it should still be perfectly-playable. I still don't feel that there's a game series that has really replaced the Sim City series.
    • The Tropico series. This really hasn't changed all that much (other than Tropico 2). I don't think I've played Tropico 6, but I'd probably recommend that as just being the latest in the series. It looks like they pulled the campaign from the latest, which is basically fine from my standpoint. More focus on individual characters than most city-builders. A lot of the city-builder genre feels like of Star-Trek-y, kind of a focus on creating a utopian society, so this focus on running a banana republic can be a refreshing change thematically.
    • Lincity-NG. Not technically the best, but it's free and open-source, which may appeal. Focus mostly on dealing with freight congestion and achieving sustainability, which is a significant shift from most of the genre in terms of goals.

  • Haven't played Manor lords yet but through all the games, Foundation checked all the right boxes for me. Definitely worth a look

  • I still play SimCity sometimes. The SNES version. There's something beautiful on slowly building your city, solving problems that arrive, and when you're don... oh wait you're never done! (Not even with the Mario statue.)

    More into colony sim territory: Oxygen not Included, Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld. In special I've been playing the later quite a bit (1.4 version, up to Biotech), selectively breeding colonists to get superpawns.

    • Ostriv
    • Banished
    • Surving the Aftermath
    • Frostpunk
    • Planetbase

    Smaller scale than Cities Skylines and also have other gameplay mechanics but that's how I like it.

    • I was disappointed by Frostpunk. It checks a ton of boxes that should make me like the thing, but I just did not like the game that much in practice.

      I dunno, just felt like it was too much on rails, more-restricted in layout than something like a typical Sim City-ish game.

      Like, I felt less like I was just experimenting with how a lot of levers interact, as I do in a typical city-builder, and more like I'm just sussing out the right order of levers to pull.

52 comments