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would you consider Surviving Mars and Two Point Hospital to be base building games? there's another promising one in early access right now called Foundation. the gimmick here is that it's a free form, no grid medieval village builder with certain superbuildings that you snap together out of components. so like you plop down your various homes and workshops, but then there's buildings like the market, the castle, the church etc. which you can make as big or small as you like, with stats derived from the various components you plug into the building. if it doesn't fall into alpha stasis it could be cool in a year or two, i'd suggest this one for the wishlist also, there's the excellent Dawn of Man which did not get much attention when it was released. it's about hunter-gatherers and the transition from nomadic to settled lifestyle from the stone age to the iron age. it plays a bit like Banished in terms of seasonal resource collection, but not as harsh or unforgiving. the main gameplay loop is allocating the labor of your scarce people to collect food and resources from the environment as you progress through the tech tree. in the early game your main hazard is the wild animals you have to hunt for meat and skins, but as you develop agriculture you have to start fending off attacks from hostile human raiders. the game keeps a somewhat chill tone as you just exist in nature but strikes a balance between not being a mindless resource collector while also not being too brutal of a constant death simulator. the devs are very active and constantly adding new free content, so there's good value for money here. also you can deconstruct/reconstruct buildings at minimal resource cost which is a great mechanic for making pretty villages
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Oct 21, 2019 18:03
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Shibawanko posted:Banished had some flaws but I really like the way that game looks, it kind of goes back to the "grey and brown" of the 2000s era but in a setting where that's actually appropriate, a European forest with understated colors and little brooks and rivers. Just feels good to play. banished was developed by a single person who has years of games industry experience writing graphics and engines, which is why the game looked real great relative to most vanity studio projects. he's teased some new code for what looks like a gridless village builder (not banished 2, exactly) but as of yet no additional news
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Oct 21, 2019 19:12
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WithoutTheFezOn posted:A guy named Raptor does a lot of videos on games like this, and lately so has Colonel Failure, kind of. in my own mental taxonomy you have city builders, village builders, and base builders. the main points on this spectrum are the level to which agents are represented in your game mapgames - too high level to exist on this spectrum, entirely about pops, maps are global, buildings are abstract. europa universalis, civ, etc. city builders - very high level, agents often entirely abstracted at the population level, buildings are placed concretely but possibly more in zones than by hand. gameplay takes place over large areas. resource extraction may or may not be present. examples: simcity, cities skylines, arguably anno, arguably frostpunk village builders - medium level, agents are present and do things, nearly all buildings are placed by hand, map focus is smaller. tropico, anno straddles this category, startopia, surviving mars, banished base builders - small level, agents and their individual needs are as important as resources, maps are very small scale. evil genius, prison architect, rimworld, probably dwarf fortress building sims - too low level to exist on this spectrum, if agents exist they are the player or controlled by the player. minecraft, the sims, the guild, etc. Volmarias posted:So where do logistics focused games come in? Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic is extremely my jam even though it's still somewhat early access. While it has populations, you're still effectively directing agents in the form of vehicles and building the infrastructure (for them to build the infrastructure etc). Is Tropico a base builder? i'd call workers and resources a european style village builder, where european style games like anno or the settlers are real fiddly about production chains and logistics. if you go too far down this road you don't have a building game anymore and it's just a logistics sim like transport tycoon Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Oct 22, 2019 |
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Oct 22, 2019 00:30
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Shibawanko posted:Startopia is really only fun for about 2 games, the station is just the same every time which kinda brings the game down it was in that weird 2000s mindset of "we don't need great AI or a single player campaign, we have ~multiplayer~"
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Oct 23, 2019 05:31
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even the multiplayer is bad today
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Oct 23, 2019 05:50
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i got Little Big Workshop over the weekend and ended up hooked. it's a factory/production line management game that focuses more on complex steps and efficiently organizing your logistics around machine tools. it felt very european and when i checked, it turns out the game was made by swedes
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Nov 4, 2019 19:09
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i've been wanting a city builder like that for years but it's not likely to happen because it's very tricky to make a game that removes player agency while still being fun. that and the fabled multiplayer city builder that isn't stealthily an economic RTS would be killer if someone could make it work
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Nov 19, 2019 16:31
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yeah foundation is pretty cool but still very early access. it seems to be on that good early access trajectory though where if you check in on it every few months it will have some new things, and not just be trapped in dev hell or abandoned
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Nov 21, 2019 15:31
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before i can properly form my opinion of your son, i need to know what his favorite radio station is there IS a wrong answer
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Jan 8, 2020 03:45
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Char posted:Work prevented me to fully explore Surviving Mars, but... is it me or the game is kinda obscure, early on? this is all good advice https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/the-complete-surviving-mars-guide.1178125/ it is very easy to outbuild your capacity to maintain in the early game. your initial goal should be to build a small dome of some kind, with life support, that you can use to start doing research and turning a profit basically don't build something until you NEED it. you must get your foothold colony established before you can start playing this game like simmars and go plopping stuff everywhere. when you land, do these things absolutely first -fuel supply. bring a vaporator and a fuel depot. you can power them with solar during the day and let them turn off at night, or build an extra solar panel and battery if you are impatient -concrete. build a concrete scraper and power it with solar. make sure to put the solar panel five tiles away so that the dust from the scraper doesn't coat your solar panel -collect spare resources nearby and sort out your materials. you can order a second rocket from the second the game starts with more stuff -if you find a water deposit nearby, you can speed up the early game by tapping it to produce more fuel, though building a bunch of fuel depots early on is costly. making fuel from vapor water is preferable as it is cheaper -for your first rocket, i like to ensure that there are no negative traits on any colonists (some are worse than others) and that i have a balance of six men, six women, as many sexy people as possible, at least three botanists, and three medics if you have them. the other skills dont matter, but avoid scientists if you can. this will get you a martianborn asap and you have the base skills you need to produce food and ensure good comfort -first wave of colonists is only here to grow food and have a child -second wave should be geologists to mine rare metal, for profit. maybe some engineers too if you want to try to cover your maintenance cost in machine parts -third should be engineers or researchers, fourth should be whichever you didn't pick for third -colonists with no skills but good traits are valuable! don't worry too much about unskilled colonists working farms or scientists working in factories or whatever -windmills are great for constant power but expensive in terms of machine parts. don't go crazy with them -in fact really just build only the things you need. you don't need to run a moxie all of the time, you can turn it off most of the time until you need the constant O2 it provides -aim to explore as much of the map as possible with your scout rover and sensor towers. anomalies give you big bonuses and you can manually command the transport rover to collect distant materials, though really it's just the odd polymer and a bunch of base metal -important techs to get first - +research from sponsor and rover, reduce fuel for rocket from 50->30, increase rocket payload by 10,000, vapor production boost, windmill production boost, colonist skill boost gains, whatever protective techs you need to ward off the disasters common on your map
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Jan 10, 2020 20:48
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i really don't think sims 4 belongs on there. if they're going to dip back to 90s games like dungeon keeper then sims 2 trumps sims 4 in terms of gameplay
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Jan 29, 2020 04:59
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yeah tropico is so broken by the slightly oppressive welfare state capitalism angle that none of the political stuff matters
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Feb 5, 2020 16:08
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i just think of 'rent' and 'entertainment fees' as 'taxes' really, since you can't eliminate money from the populace
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Feb 5, 2020 16:17
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Poil posted:That's a very difficult question. the only thing i can think of that is even remotely similar is sims medieval guild 2 was fun for a while despite the jank. racing your way to the village reeve seat, riding the ladder to the top as the town expands, everyone else in town bribes you to vote for them to gain office and you just vote in your family anyway... nothing else like it
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Feb 10, 2020 23:22
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well, i'm addicted to little big workshop again. drat it
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Feb 19, 2020 18:54
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Mayveena posted:My son was too. I can't get into it for some reason but I'll keep trying. Not today on stream though, hate fumbling my way through stuff. it's a pretty simple game, it's all about optimizing that manufacturing process. it only has that one loop really but it does it drat well. there's not much else there, it's one of those games where the core idea grabs you or it doesn't Anime Store Adventure posted:little big workshop seems like it breaks that model a little though. it's more of a classic pc style production chain game like industry giant/rise of industry. you end up moving things around different production locations until you sell a finished good. the more unique factor here is that instead of shipping things around between black box factories, you design the interior of a factory and you have some choice in what materials/workstations to use when setting up a production chain. like, you might have two different types of wooden desks you could produce, but one might require very high end materials and more complex parts like metal knobs, where the other can just be cheaply run out in quantity using crappy wood. its a pretty good game for adolescent kids Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Feb 19, 2020 |
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Feb 19, 2020 21:02
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workers and resources just seems like kind of a bad game that folks are getting into mostly because of the aesthetic there are a LOT of small dev city builders out there that just iterate safely within the bounds of the genre and i avoid them as a rule, as they tend to conform exactly to what the solitary developer's idea of a perfect game is - usually somewhere within the triangle defined by simcity, anno, and transport tycoon. my read on w&r is that it is mostly a crate-moving sim with annoying infrastructure building, which is a big pass for me
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Mar 4, 2020 16:36
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zedprime posted:I need to go back and check the quality of life stuff in Autonauts. But Little Big Workshop is scratching a lot of the itches I wanted Autonauts to. watch out - i tweaked my very large factory design to be more efficient, and i think there's a problem with placing break rooms only around the edges of your factory. once you have a factory that covers the entire table, this could actually lead to operators being too far away from tasks for the pathing AI to find them, so your operators just sit endlessly in the break room idling while nothing else gets done i hope this is the problem, once you hit max employees there seems to be some issues with the AI and everything slowing down, sending you into a death spiral because you can't get orders out on time. i'm going to try again placing break rooms in the center of the factory
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Mar 15, 2020 23:03
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Tonton Macoute posted:I still have Banished, Anno 2205 and Prison Architect sitting around in my backlog untouched since buying them sometime in the past 5-6 years. I kind of know what to expect of Anno and I am not sure if I want that right now. Is Banished more of the same or is it it's own beast? banished is somewhat similar to tropico but way harder. it focuses entirely on a small village trying to survive the winter. it's like the first 5-10 years of a tropico island where everyone is starving and broke, and the threat of hunger never really leaves your people. it's pretty good on its own and i've heard mods make it even better prison architect is also good but it's more of a facilities management game like rimworld, except instead of raiders attacking you from the outside you fill your base with raiders and keep them from stabbing each other
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Mar 24, 2020 15:25
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kaesarsosei posted:I have never played any Tropico games but have Tropico 5 on PS4 and was tempted to try it. Is it a good version of the game? I haven't played any city builders since the '90s. tropico 5 is ok but it has a much, much worse soundtrack than tropico 4 which is unforgivable it's an ok game though, not the best tropico, but tropico is not the best series either explosivo posted:Anyone here play OOTP? I've got a hankerin' for some baseball and do love me some management games but wasn't sure how fun these games are when you're not actually playing the games and it is literally just looking at spreadsheets. Additionally, I see a lot of people saying 21 is basically 20 with a fresh coat of paint and could probably just play 20, is there new stuff that got introduced in the newest one that I'd miss as a newcomer? if you're not the kind of person who can explain baseball stats and what they mean then you probably won't like OOTP if you ARE that kind of person then it is the exact game for you, if you like both baseball stats and spreadsheet games
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Apr 1, 2020 05:38
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Alamoduh posted:Curious to see if this is good. Also curious about Foundation- I generally don’t buy early access games, but both of these seem like they’ll be decent. i'd wait on foundation. it has a lot of promise and they're headed in a good direction, but i'm not confident that they are there yet. if you are really interested in the concept then it may be worth a try, but if you're so-so then hold off for more content. there's possibly enough there to make it worth a purchase, especially during quarantine times, but i can't say that it is a must play or rises above the middle of the backlog
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Apr 2, 2020 05:36
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ToxicFrog posted:Any thoughts on Megaquarium? It looks neat and my partner is interested in it. it's not bad! the core loop of the game is that you're trying to generate prestige points by showing interesting aquatic displays to visitors. you have to choose the plants, fish, etc. that go into each tank, and the balancing act gets more complicated as your tanks get more complex, because some fish can't live together or will try to eat each other, etc. the actual building stuff part of the aquarium is decent, all of the gameplay comes from trying to puzzle out how to fill your tanks for maximum prestige. if you find appealing the idea of comparing all kinds of fish stats to logic puzzle the best tank populations, then this game is a solid buy
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Apr 10, 2020 22:37
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surviving the aftermath is not very good, so industries of titan would have to be much worse than it looks for it to be the worse choice
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Apr 14, 2020 07:14
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COOL CORN posted:Oh good, a thread to directly feed my quarantine boredom! I love Factorio and Stardew and Cities and Rimworld. there's some good stuff in there -surviving mars is worth $20 for sure, especially if you liked tropico 3-4. same developer, same mood, it's a chill game without a whole lot of city building meat but it's fun to collect resources and build domes. terraforming mars is a very long term goal, you could play through it once and maybe twice and get your money's worth -prison architect is the same style/tone as rimworld except the threats are contained within your base instead of beating down your walls. if you liked rimworld for facilities planning and pop management/converting prisoners, it's worth checking out -two point hospital is fantastic if you've ever played the original theme hospital, it is a spot on remake by some of the same dev team. it's very good on its own merits as well, but it can get a bit overwhelming -frostpunk is good, not so much a city builder as a logistics based misery simulator and building plopper from the people who did this war of mine. still worth a playthrough -dawn of man is pretty good, stone age tribe simulator. very drilled down into resource production of things like hides, logs, and stones, and awareness of the passing seasons to collect resources. it's like a cross between rimworld and banished -cities in motion are the two games made by colossal order so they could get cash and practice to create skylines. they are just mass transit planning games. if you like to plan bus and train routes, they're good buys
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Apr 14, 2020 22:33
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each of those games aside from frostpunk could individually keep you occupied for a month. personally i'd pick two point hospital as the best of the group but they're all worthy buys
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Apr 14, 2020 22:53
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explosivo posted:I'm watching Sips play Ostriv on twitch right now and this game seems pretty neat, like a spiritual successor to Banished. It's still in Alpha but I've wishlisted this so I can keep an eye on it, seems right up my alley. i just dove into this and it's really solid right now for an alpha early access game. imagine a game with the same graphical presentation and tone as banished, with the freeform building placement of foundation (and a way less annoying housing mechanic) i wouldn't jump on it yet because large parts of the game are not implemented, but what is there right now is highly promising. the core gameplay feels very good and if the developer doesn't gently caress it up then this will be a must play village builder
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Apr 20, 2020 15:33
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Ineptitude posted:Really been jonesing for a City Builder or similar in the last few weeks. from your feedback it sounds like what you're looking for is something very much a spiritual succession to the Impressions style of city builder, in which case there's nothing that has come out like that recently but a few games releasing soonish which should scratch the itch surviving mars is great but it's also definitely not what you are looking for. may be worth a try in a pinch though
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May 6, 2020 15:03
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hydroneer is pretty ok? it's well made, the physics are bit wonky but that's the nature of the game. it's mostly just a mining sim. i think it's a bit one note, if you like mining for gold then give it a shot but there's not much more to it than that
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May 9, 2020 18:51
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everything being a tangible object in the world which you have to pick up and interact with is kind of annoying, yeah
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May 9, 2020 20:22
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Boxman posted:Watching some of donoteat's videos has put me in the mood for some city simulation after having not touched one since Simcity 2K, and lo and behold, Skylines is on sale. It and its billion expansions. if you have the money the DLC is fine, otherwise just try the base game first and see how far you get. none of the DLC is really essential if all you want to do is screw around
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May 15, 2020 20:20
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Wow. I always wondered "Why would anybody write anything as ugly and lower-case fascist as managing a prison?" Knowing that the win strategy is being humane whips my head around. it's one of those things like tropico where superficially the game is a dictator simulator but you have to go out of your way to be a bastard, and the better way to play the game without going for some gimmick run is to lean real hard into rehabilitation when i played the games years ago i preferred to just put showers in everyone's cells instead of a common shower, so that prisoners could shower whenever they wanted without having to be granted access to a specific room. no common showers makes it easier to protect prisoners from violence also, even if it is more expensive in the long run
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May 18, 2020 16:51
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Volmarias posted:I thought the problem with that approach was that you need to clean each shower area daily, and each cell requires a guard to walk up and open / close the door for maintenance, unless you do something like set all the doors to a schedule? it's been years since i played prison architect so i dont know if my approach had any downsides. maybe everyone's cell was always soggy and i didn't notice  with tropico it was always, always better to run a benevolent social democracy than any kind of police state. like you could easily flush tons of cash into the swiss bank account if you were just making and spending giant piles. one of the best ways would be to enact the "special building permits" edict as soon as possible, which inflates all building costs by 20%, sending 10% of that into your SBA. then just coat the entire island in buildings and you get your corruption slice. way better than trying to knock pennies out of the pockets of your poor oppressed farmers or whatever. stealing five percent of a million bucks is way better than stealing half of fifty grand
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May 18, 2020 18:07
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LLSix posted:The game doesn't give much feedback on what causes problems or which items to use. There are a bunch of seemingly identical plants for example, but each plant provides different amounts of attractiveness and the UI doesn't give any indication as to which is which or what the downsides are. More important things are equally opaque. I got all 3 stars on the first 3 hospitals, and I still have no idea how I'm supposed to tell when I need to build a new room of the same type, or how many people I need to hire per room. there's no downsides to placing items except your hospital gets more cluttered / more spaces for worms to hide. generally over time you unlock more expensive but more efficient items, or items that have special effects the main thing to watch for feedback is queuing. if you have long waits for certain rooms, build more of those rooms. each room generally needs one staff member to operate it, with a few exceptions like wards and surgeries. there's no optimal number of staff to have room coverage, because your needs will vary depending on how long staff spend on break and what kind of patients you're getting. a good rule of thumb is slightly more than one staff member per room but this gets expensive and you can cut down on it a bit with micro, and training your staff to handle specific tasks while preventing them from using certain rooms clustering rooms together by type is usually a good idea. put all the nurse diagnostic rooms in one area, the radiology rooms together, the nurse treatment rooms, the doctor treatment rooms, the staff only rooms (research, training, marketing) in their own distant corner. you want to spread break rooms, bathrooms, and general practice around. it may seem like a good idea to put all your GP rooms in one spot, but remember that the patient cycle is: GP -> diagnostic -> GP -> diagnostic again, but a different kind -> again and again until GP makes a diagnosis -> treatment so if you cluster all your GP offices together, then you'll have one central hub area that is constantly full of patients bumping into each other place entertainment, food/water, bathrooms, and other things near where patients cluster. a patient who is in line for a room will hold up the entire line as they wander off to the rear end end of the hospital to pee and get a snack. you want to make sure nobody has to walk too far to take care of whatever need they have treatment rooms are always the final stop before a patient is cured or dies, so they can be on the periphery of your hospital. you'll want to pay more attention to the needs of patients who are in the GP -> diagnostic cycle since that is where most time is spent in your hospital also don't forget to constantly train and specialize your staff! you absolutely need as many 5xGeneral Practicioners as you can get, and have them do nothing but GP. the GP office is the pillar of your hospital and is probably your biggest bottleneck in patient turnover
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May 20, 2020 20:47
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a slime posted:Space Haven early access starts in a couple hours. i'm definitely buying this one and i'll check back in later. i'm a 100% purchase on sight sucker for games where you build a space station. it doesn't look very great to me but even the caution of early access isn't enough to restrain my lust for this microgenre
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May 21, 2020 16:40
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building ships fun so far. it really nails that same mood of spacebase df-9 but with like, actual content. i like that the ships feel very cramped and in that chunky 80's functional style. still very early impressions but it seems like solid work. deffo in the honeymoon phase for me though and barely out of the tutorial
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May 22, 2020 02:23
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Trivia posted:Does space haven have multiplayer? I'd love to build a station with a couple friends. Kinda like Space Engineers but hopefully a little less grindy. single player only the devs have said limited multiplayer may be possible but not simultaneous play, more like exploring other people's ships and such
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May 22, 2020 16:38
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Spaseman posted:Does anyone know if Space Haven plays like Rim World where the game gets continually more difficult until you reach a failure state or Dwarf Fortress where you could keep playing indefinitely? its not structured to keep increasing the difficulty, no. i think it's more random my problem with space haven is i keep restarting and refining my spaceship build, before actually going around and exploring and such. the spaceship building is like 80% of the game
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May 23, 2020 22:32
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Disappointing Pie posted:My kid is looking for a really particular type of game and I'm not sure if this is the place or not... He wants a game where it has some light management features but it's mainly about building and maintaining a settlement or crew and you can build underground / above ground. He's picturing something 3D. is combat important? i think most of the entries in this genre are going to be more tower defense. i can't really think of any first person or third person voxel based bunker builders which are more kid oriented check out gnomoria or castle story perhaps, or kingdoms and castles e: oh stonehearth also, i haven't played it but it looks like it may meet his requirements https://store.steampowered.com/app/253250/Stonehearth/
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May 26, 2020 20:23
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i like evil genius, but it's not a very good game, and much of the reference based humor would be lost on someone born in 2012
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May 27, 2020 05:58
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so i've put a decent amount of time into space haven and i'd say it's pretty good. not a must buy, but a conditional should buy. if it doesnt die in early access it will be a solid contributor to the genre on the pro side, the spaceship building is well baked. this is like most of the game though. building a spaceship feels good, it's fun to get creative with it, and the genre innovation here is taking your little basic rimworld settlement and moving it around in space rather than sitting on one map and exhausting the resources. all the systems the game needs are in place and just need to be iterated and filled out on the con side, once you've got a ship up and established, there's no further challenge aside from avoiding traps and resource death spirals. the economy feels a little unbalanced, as some resources (water, energy, tech blocks) are far more critical than others (basic metals, infra blocks). the game doesn't make immediately clear how hyperspace works or what you need for effective warp travel, and the production chain of advanced resources gets a little annoying. for example, you'll want to start immediately producing tech blocks instead of hull blocks, and with the limited space you'll have at first you can really only support one of these chains. also, your crew will spend a LOT of time schlepping crates around, which to me feels like there should be some basic automation you can build like a box-moving robot. combat is also pretty crude right now which could be a turnoff for some if you really like the idea of building a base in space and going on limited space adventures then this would probably be worth the money as-is. if you want a more complete game around the spaceship construction, wait for more updates
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May 27, 2020 15:01
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