Alternative City Builders

The Game Room
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Can’t connect to the SimCity server? Or maybe you hate online DRM? Or perhaps you don’t like the small city size, poor pathfinding, or arguably broken gameplay? Here are some alternatives to the new SimCity to scratch that city-building itch.

I’ve marked those that are available on Steam with an asterisk [li]. Those that are available on GOG are marked with a double asterisk [**].[/li]
SimCity series

The old games are still around and still playable.

[ul]
[li]SimCity [Classic] - The original game was released on every platform known to man. The source code was eventually released as open source and redubbed “Micropolis”.[/li][li]SimCity 2000 ** - one of the best in the series, IMHO. Play long enough and you can watch your arcologies launch into space![/li][li]SimCity 3000 - played it, can’t remember much about it other than it being, you know, SimCity.[/li][li]SimCity 4 * - I remember the Teeming Millions complaining about the (for the time) severe graphics requirements. The later Rush Hour expansion made for a better simulation. Big city sizes and even bigger regions. Plus a decade’s worth of mods.[/li][li]SimCity Societies * - Dispensed with the whole RCI concept in favor of a “social engineering” thing.[/li][/ul]

I’ll throw these two in as well. Never played them so I don’t know anything about them:
[ul]
[li]CityVille - Zynga’s SimCity ripoff for Facebook[/li][li]SimCity Social - EA/Maxis’s response[/li][/ul]

Impressions City Building Series

I really like these games, maybe more than SimCity itself. Most were recently released on GOG.

Unique at the time, buildings would send out “walkers” to grab resources as well as distribute services to residents. For example, a market would send out a walker to get food and goods from nearby granaries and storehouses. Then it would send out another walker to distribute the goods to surrounding houses. Depending on the number of services received, a house could evolve from a simple hut to a grand villa.

Each game has a campaign mode with missions that involve building up a different city. The earlier missions involve just making a simple farming community while later ones might involve building grand monuments. They usually have peaceful track where you just build stuff and a military track where you have to fight off invaders. The fighting is pretty simplistic, though.
[ul]
[li]Caesar - build a Roman city[/li][li]Caesar II - more Roman cities[/li][li]Caesar III ** - the first one I actually played. People move into 1x1 tents that evolve into 2x2 shacks if you give them water. Then they’ll turn into hovels if you give them food and so on until you reach the 4x4 villas where the patricians live. Patricians pay a lot of taxes but they don’t work, so you still need the plebeians to keep things running. [/li][li]Pharoah [+ Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile expansion] ** - city-building in ancient Egypt. One of the frustrations in Caesar is that the walkers would often wander off in one direction, while a house in the opposite direction would be crying out for resources. If it didn’t get serviced in time, it would devolve back to a simpler state. This game introduced roadblocks, so those damned walkers would stay in their local neighborhood. You also need to build monuments, like the pyramids, which often involved setting up a complicated resource chain and maintaining it until the monument was done.[/li][li]Zeus: Master of Olympus + [Poseidon: Master of Atlantis expansion] ** - city-building in ancient Greece. Houses no longer changed size from 1x1 to 4x4. Rather, there are separate 2x2 common housing and 4x4 elite housing ploppables, with each type evolving independently. Greek heroes and gods would appear in your city if you built them the right house or monument.[/li][li]Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom - ancient China. Instead of roadblocks, you now have gates that you could set to allow one walker type or another to pass through. This allows for some very finely grained control over housing evolution. One interesting challenge was to place your buildings in the right feng shui. If you built your city in perfect harmony, you’d get some good bonuses. Sadly not available on GOG (yet).[/li][/ul]

I’ll separate these out as they were developed by a separate company (Tilted Mill) after the demise of Impressions Games. Both are in true 3D while the previous installments were in isometric 2D.
[ul]
[li]Caesar IV - dispensed with the whole walker concept in favor of area of effect. Pretty, but rather lackluster IMHO.[/li][li]Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile ** - Back to ancient Egypt. The walkers return, but this time they actually live in houses, have jobs like farming or wood working, and may move depending on their economic situation. Rather like Tropico (see below) in that regard.[/li][li]Immortal Cities: Nile Online - Browser-based version (NOT on Facebook!).[/li][/ul]

Haemimont City Builders
Much like Caesar IV. I’ve only played the last two, and my impression of them is much like Caesar IV - a bit lackluster.
[ul]
[li]Glory of the Roman Empire[/li][li]Imperium Romanum *[/li][li]Grand Ages: Rome *[/li][/ul]

CivCity: Rome *

Pretty much another Caesar IV. This one introduced a Civilization-like had a tech-tree that you follow to unlock city advancements. The tree was rather shallow, though, so it was easy enough to unlock everything. It also had a funky mechanic where, if you wanted a house to evolve, you had to physically move it to a different part of the city.

Tropico Series

AKA The banana republic simulator. Be the dictator of your own Carribean island, set to a Latin soundtrack. Each individual citizen is modeled, from El Presidente down to the lowliest farmhand. You can turn your island into a workers’ paradise or you can build up the tourism industry to fleece the yanquis. Maintain good relations with the US and USSR and they’ll even give you foreign aid. Annoy a superpower, though, and they might instigate a coup or even invade the country.
[ul]
[li]Tropico *[/li][li]Tropico 2: Pirate Cove * - the sequel has a pirate setting, which doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the series[/li][li]Tropico 3 *[/li][li]Tropico 4 * - probably the easiest in the series, if only for the “Quick Build” button[/li][/ul]

Anno Series

I haven’t played any of these, so I can’t really comment on them. Combines city building with real-time strategy.
[ul]
[li]Anno 1602[/li][li]Anno 1503[/li][li]Anno 1701[/li][li]Anno 1404[/li][li]Anno 2070 * [/li][/ul]

Cities in Motion *

This isn’t a city builder but a transport management simulation. You take an existing city and design the lines for buses, trams, subways, ferries, and helicopters. Place stops, lay track, buy vehicles and try not to go broke.

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There’s also Cities XL, but I don’t know enough to recommend it or not.

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Oh, crap. I complete forgot to include Cities XL. Come to think of it, there was also City Life from the same (original) developer which was similar to SimCity Societies. I haven’t played City Life.

On initial release, Cities XL had a subscription-based online component, rather like an MMO where players could trade resources. Because of a low subscription rate, the online component was removed and the game patched to be single player. Eventually the original developer folded and the property was bought by another studio, which has put out yearly editions with additional content.

Different city sites have different resources like oil or water, which you can exploit by building the appropriate improvements. You can create multiple cities and have them trade resources with each other. You’ve got the standard RCI with four wealth classes: unskilled, skilled, executive and elite. It allows for curved roads and has enormous city sizes. Ultimately, though, the simulation is rather weak. It does create very pretty cities.

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City builders are by no means my specialty, but I wanted to second Cities XL. I have the 2011 version, and while I don’t play it often, I rather enjoy it when I do. I work at a computer all day solving problems, so I don’t want to spend all night doing it, too. Even so, the level of complexity is about right for me. And the cities are very detailed and pretty, with a good variety of zoom levels. Cities can be quite large.

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I suppose Dwarf Fortress kind of qualifies as a city builder.

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How was Cities XL 2012?

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Cities XL 2012 is the same as Cities XL 2011, which was the same as the original Cities XL; the only thing added was more buildings. The latest installment is Cities XL Platinum, which continues the trend of adding more buildings but not much of anything else. These are actually full-blown games (executable and all) and not just expansion packs. However, if you bought the previous version on Steam, you can buy the later edition at 85% off which is pretty much the price of an expansion pack.

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Anno 2070 is also on Steam Sales now

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I’d like to offer my endorsement of Tropico 4. It’s pretty, it’s funny, it has a great soundtrack, and it’s wonderfully complex. There are generally several ways to go about each mission, lending the game good replay value.

One of the biggest aspects of gameplay is that that each Tropican belongs to one or more factions; people in different factions are kept happy in different ways, and there are sometimes trade-offs. Communists care the most about housing and healthcare, capitalists care the most about crime safety and an advanced economy, intellectuals care the most about free elections, and so on. A museum of modern art will please the intellectuals but displease the religious (they think the art is obscene). The religious faction may ask you to demolish all casinos or nightclubs, which will upset the capitalists. The environmentalists may ask you to shut down all of your newspapers or stop growing transgenic corn, but giving in to either demand will upset the intellectuals. The communists like low income disparity, but capitalists like high income disparity.

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Grand Ages: Rome is an interesting game. It’s complicated and works by balancing static production; that is, if you have the right inputs available your buildings give you resources, just measured by an arbitrary number. Of course, some resources reduce others in the course of manufacture, people need food, and different types of citizens can work different buildings.

It’s a mission-based game, and you have a character that contnues from one to the next. You get to buy many talent-based abilities, as well as purchasing estates that give you free resources in all missions. The missions themselves are pretty interesting, as they’re given to you by major historical figures in the two decades leading up to the Civil War. Some missions can close off other options, and each one has optional goals that get you extra resources and such.

I’ve heard it’s great fun, but they have some significant bugs which can randomly cause immense trouble to the city.

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Cities XL is currently 9 bucks off on Steam.

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I’ve played the last few Anno games and I’d heartily recommend them. They don’t really have any more real time strategy than the Caesar games; there are strong limits on how big your army/navy an be, and the AI is terrible, so can pretty much run circles around the computer. I’m okay with that, since I’d much rather build things anyway. They’re maybe a little simpler in terms of city simulation (there’s no work force; building simply have a gold upkeep, an a minimum population to build them), with more emphasis on trade routes and production trees - different islands can produce different raw materials and crops, so you need to set up various shipig routes and colonies to keep your people happy. Also, you need things like bricks, wood, tools, etc. for buildings; it’s been a while since I’ve played Caesar 3/4, but I seem to recall that being not such a big part of the game. The Anno games also have a bit more RPGish elements; missions you can do for rewards, NPCs, etc. The campaign is a bit more developed than most city builders, with pretty varied goals, which I liked.

I thought Anno 2070 was less awesome than te previous ones, but still worth playing. 1701 and 1440 are absolutely worth a look.

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I like Tropico 4, too. It’s made me laugh a few times, especially dialog from my second, Penultimo (har har). I’m going through each mission and slowly learning ways to balance the happiness of my citizens against foreign and natural threats. I started off as a benign ruler - high wages and equality for all - but am slowly turning more ruthless and efficient with the treasury in order to serve the greater good. It’s no longer “how much do my farmers deserve?”, but instead “how long can I pay them this low wage before they revolt?” Good game in that I’m learning something (nice guys don’t make the best rulers).

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:smack:

I’ve just gotten that.

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In all the Impressions games, you absolutely need resources like clay to produce pottery, which then need to be supplied to houses to get them to evolve to higher level. Sometimes the resource simply isn’t available on the map, so you’ll have to import it. You can also export resources or products.

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This: The games did get pretty easy after Pharoh introduced gates and roadblocks, but was still pretty fun, with lots of varied objectives.

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Thanks, Terminus Est and everyone so far! Yeah, thanks to RockPaperShotgun’s relentless coverage I’ve been following the SimCity5 calamity with tons of schadenfreude for EA but sympathy for those who’ve bought it.

This seems like the thread to ask: for years (I think I first posted this request in 2010) I’ve been searching for a city builder that just lets me build a city without the simulation stuff.

I basically want to create a cool-looking city or town, and not have to worry about whether the Crips and Bloods are living too close to the Yuppies, or if I’ve allotted enough sewage plants considering I have fifteen fast-food restaurants in a city that’s only 5 square miles. I don’t care if it’s not financially viable and I don’t want to be restricted by funds or even logic–if I wanna put a bridge over a flat patch of cement with no water in sight, damn it, I wanna be able to do it!

I just want a pretty city map. Is there any game that will turn off these sim elements and just give me a sandbox to create a town?

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Without a doubt, you should pick up Cities XL Platinum; it’s even currently on sale on Steam.

There are four different wealth classes, from unskilled to elite, and you zone each independently. With three different densities, that gives you twelve types of zones, and they’ll all stay where you put them.

There’s some semblance of simulation, in that you do have to strike some sort of balance between the different classes, but it’s extremely gentle and you’ll almost always be able to do what you want.

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I’ll try to find a link to Shamus Young’s review of it. He found it quite engaging and much more organic than SimCity. Not sure if they fixed the bugs, though.

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The later editions added more buildings without fixing the core executable. The game allegedly bogs down at high populations. I haven’t encountered this myself as I’ve never filled an entire map.