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Some good City Building/RTS games?
Posts
Of course the entire Sierra series (Caesar III, Pharoah + Expansion, Zeus + Expansion, Emperor, Caesar IV) are all excellent if she missed any of them. Caesar IV is relatively new (and looks quite nice) while keeping the core gameplay of the series. An excellent sequel all round.
I would also recomend Majesty + Expansion (again, a bit older but well worth playing) and Startopia (like a city building game on a space station).
Just as a side note, Sins is not in any way a great 4x game. At least by the standards of the Genre as set down by the likes of Master of Orion 2, Imperium Galactica 2, Stars! or even Galactic Civilizations. Its about on par with 3rd tier games in the genre like Star Wars: Empire at War.
Also: Hinterland, while a good game, is not really a city building. There is a tiny amount of city building going on as a side game but 90% of the game is a twitch-based hack-n-slasher.
BTW: The newest settlers (6: Rise of an Empire) is quite good as well. Be sure to get the Gold edition with the expansion though (just came out).
But the Pope is such an interfering little bitch in that game.
How dare you! His majesty, the Pope will overlook your insult if you would give him a gift of 4 gold.
Edit: Wow, it's been about 10 years since I last played Castle and even then it was only a demo. I need to find it.
The sims is a really fun game. that why it sells millions of copies. Nobody puts a gun to peoples heads and makes them buy it. It just happens that most of the people who play those games (and Kudos for that matter) are not typical gamers, so don't defend it on forums a lot.
But the Sims is very original, very well designed, and deserves it's success.
I compare the sims to James Blunt. Both are really popular and successful with people who aren't obsessive about the medium, and both attract hordes of hardcore haters entirely because they are popular and accessible.
I'm off to invite bella goth to a james blunt gig.
Seriously though I have no problem with so many people enjoying the game. I'm happy when any game can attract such widespread attention and get non-gamers interested in the PC as a gaming system. It was just that as a Sim fan of the previous games (SimCity, SimAnt, SimEarth) I was more used to a detached, omniscient interaction with my Sim world instead of assuming roles of the characters that live in it. But it's that human angle, that personal interaction between the characters in the game that so many people find stimulating.
I had to stop playing the night where I found myself directing a computerized version of "me" to sit down at a desk and play video games. When I realized I was spending my free time in front of a computer simulating myself spending my free time in front of a computer, it felt like holding two mirrors up to each other and seeing the same image repeated infinitely in both directions. I'm sure that if you could actually play The Sims inside of The Sims game it would tear a hole in the fabric of reality.
City Building: Sim City 3. I enjoy 4, but honestly 3 was my personal favorite.
RTS: Stars! or some equivalent. Its a rather old 4X game. It was really nice though, it felt like a precursor to Spore, except it did everything right somehow. I've also heard some pretty good things about Sins of a Solar Empire, but alas, I haven't tried it yet.
I'm intrigued by the recommendation of Anno 1701 though, I saw the game at the store the other day and passed it up, never having heard about it. Now that someone highly recommends it, it makes me curious. I just thought it was shovelware.
Sure you guys haven't tried dwarf fortress? I mean it hearkens back to an era of gaming with ascii, but the complexity is even more intense.
Actually, in Sims 2, your sim can play Sims 1.
Interesting.
For me, ALL Anno sessions play out exactly the same and that's why I stopped playing.
I had the same issue with Settlers 6, all maps play out exactly the same as well (not that there were many of them either).
I mean, you begin exactly the same, build exactly the same thing in exactly the same order, and you absolutely have to do this before you do that. It all feels so limited.
I never had that feeling from Settlers 2, Patrician, Pharaoh or the old original Stronghold. In those games you had different starting conditions and you constantly had to adapt.
In the never games, it feels like "whatever, now build two of these close to this" and you're done.
I'm not sure why this is, but I think it is because they are dumbed down. They no longer care where you place things, as long as it is inside a radius of something. You don't have to deal with transport routes or traffic congestion. They just don't feel dynamic enough. The only sandbox aspect left is aesthetic, should I place the building this way or that. There's very little strategic elements left, because the games are so easy. I guess that's good for casual play, though, but my brain goes on auto pilot so I could just as well be watching TV.
EDIT: Holy shit, "skrull"? Only time I've ever seen those were in the Star Trek comic books... can it get nerdier?
Well, with Anno you have things like your starting location (ressources, shape...), ressource distribution over the whole map, enemy placements, enemy behaviour. All of these things had an impact on how I played the game, especially on higher difficulties. And getting a good layout on my islands was actually hard when I enabled fire and the plague, especially having the transport routes keep up with production.
Anyways, I think the demo is worth a try if you like City Builders.
But I do agree that nothing's quite up to Settlers 2 in terms of gameplay. I love that they did those remakes of Settlers 2, with updated graphics and a few minor changes.
Skrulls are shape-shifting aliens in the Marvel Comics universe.
http://www.playnileonline.com/
Looks like a decent use of my work hours. Thankfully thinks seem to happen on an hourly basis....not that it will stop me from staring at it, waiting for that refresh so I can see how many pieces of bread I have now.
It's 62, no - wait! - 63.
Des
Hey, I just tried that Anno 1701 demo and it seemed pretty neat.
What do you call someone with zero posts who resurrects a thread from 2008 to pimp a completely unknown game which has very little information about who made it and requires registration to play?
You don't talk about 4X without talking about SMAC.
@wildhalcyon- Stars! isn't RTS, it's all TBS and it's pretty much one of the best 4X games I played back in the day. While some of my buddies were totally hooked on MOO2 I was slinging mass packets at enemy worlds and raiding with fleets of high stealth super star destroyers.
The Guild 2
If the sims are like playing house with your dolls, then The Guild games are like playing General Hospital with your dolls.
I stopped playing with my last family after the mother picked a fight with the queen. Mother fought alongside her bodyguards and rendered the queen unconscious at the cost of her bodyguards. She sprinted back to her eldest son's hospital and passed the family's sole long-sword to her youngest daughter. While the queens guard kept watch for the mother outside the hospital, scholar of a mere eighteen years old plunged the blade into the queen's bosom, ending the bloodline, and securing the crown for herself.
Long live the queen.
There isn't. As already mentioned, being a completely different kind of game than SimCity doesn't make The Sims 2 any less of an awesome game--it's one of the few games I'd actually forgive for having an obscene number of expansions (even though some are inevitably unnecessary), just because of the sheer amount of crap it has to simulate in "life".
Don't get me wrong, I love SimCity 4, even though I literally could not play the game without mods (especially transportation mods that actually make it feel like you're creating an actual city, instead of just plots of buildings linked by roads). It's a shame that the engine is showing its age, particularly in areas of instability and graphical glitches. It just demonstrates how badly we need a SimCity 5, and then a year for the proper mods to start appearing, alongside the inability of games like CitiesXL. I'll be checking out some of these suggestions.
I am wondering how the bolted the leader mechanics into it...
I purchased Anno 2070, and thus far I like it. It's more complex than 1404, while keeping a lot of the same things that made 1404 more accessible. You now have three "civilizations" not just two, and you can build underwater as well (not everything, but a few buildings). Also, all three can be placed on the same island(s) so there's an interesting dynamic if you choose to do that, especially since one faction can destroy the island's ability to grow things while the other helps it along.
The campaign is not that great, but all it needed to do was introduce you to the game and it's mechanics, and it performs that well, so that we can get on to missions and endless games. I will say the "end game" is much more complex than 1404, in that there's a ton of options.
I'm putting together a list of games I'll pick up if they happen to go on sale on Steam this week.
PSN: Beltaine-77 | Steam: beltane77 | Battle.net BadHaggis#1433
Yes, it still has the area of effect radius system. However it feels like there's fewer of them (at least I think there is) and the area of the city center (marketplace) is really expanded. Also you no longer need to be within range of a warehouse to place a city center, just plop it wherever you want on an island.
Cities XL 2011 is worth a buy if you can get it at a discount. It gets boring after a while (at least for me, because I'm not a type of person to play a city builder for aesthetic reasons) but there's a good amount of game in there, and juggling the buildings you need to satisfy the upper types is interesting. All the cities you make are linked together, virtually. It's not like SC4's overworld map where one city adjoins another. All cities can trade with each other. The part that annoyed me about trading is that there's no necessary give/take. Same problem as with SC4 where you could make one city a trash dump, and every other city is 100% clean.
Maps are stock (not randomized/created) but there's a large variety, from desert to tropical island to tundra, to beautiful green plains, and you really can make some neat farming or resort or industrial cities.
One thing I miss from SC4 is the ability to overlay new zones. (which NO one has done really.) I liked laying out light residential, let it grow on it's own, then zone it medium or high, and eventually it makes apartments and condos. In CitiesXL, you plot a piece of land a specific size and a specific zone, and you have to completely bulldoze it if you want it to be something else. Which really isn't a huge problem because money is super easy to come by in this game.
My recommendations would be a couple games from GoG.com
Alpha centari (best civ game made)
Roller coaster tycoon 2 (and expansions). Such a great game. Build manage a themepark, and make your own rides!
CitiesXL was great for just starting a game, unlocking all the buildings immediately and seeing what you could come up with. The canyons around dusk looked just amazing with a city built around it.
Crap. Everytime someone mentions dwarf fortress, I want to reinstall it.
One of my all-time favorites, I still have it installed and play occasionally.
Complaints I've heard about it haven't been from a technical perspective, but rather actual game aspects they changed, as well as a serious case of feature creep.
Having said that, I haven't played it myself so