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Some good City Building/RTS games?
chasehatesbears
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
My girlfriend is a really big fan of the old Pharaoh city building series. However, it is a little dated, and I would like to get her a good game for Christmas.
I'm not really familiar with this genre, so I was wondering if you guys could suggest some newer city building/rts games that she might enjoy. Any suggestion would be very helpful!
EDIT: For clarification, she has a high end PC so system reqs are not limited to "Pharaoh" standards :P
I'm not really familiar with this genre, so I was wondering if you guys could suggest some newer city building/rts games that she might enjoy. Any suggestion would be very helpful!
EDIT: For clarification, she has a high end PC so system reqs are not limited to "Pharaoh" standards :P
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How about Civ? You can get the collection (1 through 4 with bonuses) for fairly cheap.
Emperor was a good "sequel" to Pharaoh, though they added an extra "feng shui" element to it that made things a bit more complicated.
EDIT: Yay for reading!
i've only met 1 person in real life that also enjoys dwarf fortress, all of my gamer friends can't stand the ascii
WTF?
Exploit
Rectify this immediately
Spore is as much a 4X game as it is an MMO, which is to say hardly at all. It would be like saying Mirror's Edge is an FPS because while yes, it is first person and you do shoot, it doesn't even begin to describe the design.
IRT the OP, you are looking for the newer version of Pharaoh from the same guys which is Hinterland from Tilted Mill (tiltedmill.com)
It is a cross between a pure city builder and an RPG in the vein of Diablo. I highly recommend it, the guys there are super awesome and the game will get you a lot of mileage. The fantasy setting is also highly accessible.
That said, I dont see any game better in the city building genre than the original Pharaoh. Still awesome. Perhaps you could dip your feet into more expansive RTS games that focus on base building rather than city building. Supreme Commander is a good example, though you will need about eight PCs to even run it. GalCiv I reccommend in ever thread ever because it is quite simply incredible. Turn based, vast universe to explore and colonize. In fact, the recent Galciv2expansion added immense size maps as an option and I've been playing a game on one of them for the last 3 months nearly every day and I'm nowhere near winning.
Children of the Nile - literally, a modern incarnation of Pharoah. Can be had cheap on Steam or Impulse
The Settlers - Heritage of Kings - the wife has been obsessed with this, though initially it was a little too combat heavy for her tastes
1701 Gold - Personally, I'm enjoying the demo, and I'm not even that much of a fan of the genre. City building and economic/trading sim
Ceasar IV - haven't put a lot of time into it, but seems pretty promising.
Sins is more of an RTS than a 4x.
Other than that pickings are pretty slim. You're either going to run into RTS games where the combat is more the point than the building, or huge mashups like Spore or X3 that try to do too much.
My wife and my best friend's wife both enjoy the heck out of it, so it's woman-approved and, as such, man-friendly.
edit: aye aye, I did not read the clarification for PC goodness. Excuse that small oversight and chalk my recommendation up as reference for others then.
Rock Band Profile/Rock Band DLC
I hate RTS, and love 4X games. While the combat is RTS-style, the dynamics and structure of play is very much a complex 4X research tree/build dynamic that is based on control of planets and planetary-level resource/building management. It also plays pretty slow unless you make it go fast. So while I don't want to debate what exactly is Sins of a Solar Empire, I would check out the demo before you rule it out as a 4X game.
http://www.openttd.org/en/
Less city building as such, but it's all about creating and maintaining an infrastructure, and gives me a similar "feel" to the Caesar type games, so I think it might be a good fit.
Oh I bought it the day came out, I ended up not liking it, as it felt too rts'y, when I wanted a 4x. The research feels more like buying upgrades for your units as you would in an RTS, than actually getting new tech. It's been awhile since I have played, but aren't all the new units unlocked by unlocking their blueprints in the tree, not actually researching differant tech like in normal 4X's? IE, research engines, life support, sensors, ect ect.
The construction also feels more like building a base, since apparently in the future building things like research stations on a planet is dumb.
I don't regret the purchase though, if for nothing else than to show a game without DRM can still sell insanely well. And I also recommend everyone check out the demo if you haven't. But its not a 4X. :P
BAM!
Why does EVERYBODY in this thread apart from the TS spell it wrong :x
@ TS: Get Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom. You will not regret it.
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Its more similar to the Pharaoh series where you place buildings that generate resources which your city consumes. The theme is like Colonization where you start off with a single ship and start a new Colony, and in the beginning you have to produce wood and food to start your city. By the end you are mining ore and turning it into weapons that you can arm troops and warships with.
The map is a series of small islands and you can found other colonies and trade resources with your own cities and with NPCs. Each Island can only have certain resources too so you need to expand to grow or build different things. Theres a lot of personality with the NPCs as you encounter other Colonists, Natives and even Pirates.
The graphics are still very good and the 3d engine works flawlessly on my PC. You can rotate and zoom in at any angle and your towns are filled with little animating workers that collect the resources and distribute them through the town. Overall I think its an excellent city-building/resource gathering game that hasn't gotten enough exposure in the U.S.
Man, who plays GalCivII for the campaign?
In all seriousness, I have no idea. The expansions do add col stuff though. Like unique tech trees for each race (second expansion).
Shit, I haven't played it in months, I'll have to boot it up again at some point.
Also, it looks fantastic.
Hey, there's always Sim City 4, too. It's so great, I can't figure out why people keep passing it up to play the Sims.
The gameplay in the Sims is so drastically different than Sim City I can't even believe that Will Wright was behind both of them. I've been a lifelong Sim City addict but I returned my copy of the first Sims the day after I bought it. So far the Sims 2 and Spore has only continued the disappointment.
As much as I hate to admit it, I actually had some fun with the Sims. The problem was all my fun was had building the houses. I fell into a pattern of designing houses, furnishing them, and then handing them over to my sisters to play in. Dealing with those whiny Sims just annoyed me.
My sisters, on the other hand, absolutely love playing with virtual people with virtual lives. I guess I just don't get it.
I played the heck out of settlers 2
It is a castle building sim but you have to manage the economy and happiness of your people or else no one actually shows up to live in (or outside) your castle.
There is a main quest and online play. But I think the best part for your situation is that if your wife doesn't want to be bothered with building armies to defend her castle, there is an option to just run economic missions. There is no combat, just economic goals such as stock 100 stone blocks for the king by X date.
Also IIRC the game has an infinity feature that just gives you a map, and lets you build for as long as you can.
I had alot of fun times playing online with my buddies when I was in college.
And the game, to me, looks great. All of the little details are very nice. I loved watching my workers mine for stone blocks.
I second thos, The Stronghold series is amazing. I used to spend hours on this just perfecting my castle and only than would I go out and slaughter the enemies. But it does have a decent bit of combat but the combat is backed up by more managing than RTS's. You mine the iron, than you buld the suit of armor and sword etc. So if your wife wants just city building I would have to say go a different route.
Haven't touched it since.
That was Stronghold: Crusader, I haven't tried any of the others.
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