As much as i’m enjoying Cities:Skyline, I do prefer the type of city building game where you are given certain objectives to meet, e.g. get the population to 5,000 or get 1,000 people into a certain quality of housing.
I’ve been re-playing Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdoms and I’m enjoying it, but it would be nice to play a more modern version.
Does anyone know of any recent city building games where you are given objectives to meet?
Have a look at Tropico, where you play a the dictator of a banana republic in the Caribbean. You’re tasked with building up your island’s economy. You can make a literal banana republic and grow crops, rape the land and extract its minerals, or maybe develop scenic locations to fleece the yanqui tourists. Keep the people happy to win “elections” or just keep the military happy and rule with an iron fist. If you keep the superpowers happy, they’ll give you foreign aid, but if you piss one or the other off enough they might stage a coup.
It’s mission-based, much like Emperor, so I think it’s right up your alley. The latest version is Tropico 5; it’s pretty new so still somewhat pricy. The earlier versions T3 and T4 are regularly discounted on Steam. T1 and T2 are also available, but far more primitive and may be frustrating to play. I’d recommend starting with either Tropico 3 or Tropico 4.
Has there been a newer version of Phoenix or Cleopatra? I’ve been thinking I’d like to play those again. They would seem to fit the bill, but they may be a bit long in the tooth.
Closest thing to an update of Cleopatra is Children of the Nile - same devs, different company, but significantly different design philosophy. Their Caesar IV is more similar, though.
After much puzzling, I finally figured out that you meant Pharaoh. If it’s Ancient Egypt you’re after, there’s Children of the Nile, which is pretty much Pharaoh updated to use a 3D engine. The maps are massive, which comes in handy when you start building pyramids. The pace is quite a bit slower,though. Pyramids take a long, long time to build.
Oh. Buh. I’ve been thinking too much of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I guess.
Good lord, slower than Pharaoh? That’s crazy.
SimCity 2013.
Ducks and runs.
Are we talking exclusively of computer games? Because there’s the board game Suburbia.
The Simpsons: Tapped Out is loosely and comically based upon city-building, with objectives.
You can get Cleopatra as well as the other city-builders in the series, updated to run on modern systems, on GOG.com. With some googling, you can even get widescreen patches for them. What I’ve found is that, if you set the speed to 100%, the game runs as fast as your CPU can run, which is quite fast on a modern system.
So frustrating that Rise of the Middle Kingdom isn’t there or anywhere else online. I loved that game so hard.
Which is available as a iOS app (which does have some solo challenges)
Brian
I know it has an app version but I’ve never played it and I don’t know how close it is to the tabletop version.
Thanks for the recommendations! I was after a computer game rather than a tabletop game, but now I’m quite intruiged!
I will give Tropico a go. I have a feeling I downloaded a demo some time ago but never really gave it a proper try.
I’m not clear on why you think Cities: Skylines doesn’t have objectives. To unlock certain buildings (and get cash bonuses) you need to reach population thresholds. There are also unique buildings that only unlock after certain objectives are met (some of them fairly odd, like “maintain a crime rate over 50% for X years”). Monuments are only unlocked after you build a certain subset of unique buildings. And then there are achievements that have their own objectives.
The game doesn’t force you to meet these objectives if you don’t want, so maybe that’s what you mean… but if you set goals for yourself there’s not much difference.
I checked on this, actually. I’ve heard there’s some awkwardness about the rights, but nothing specific.
Emperor and other games in the Impressions city-builder series have mission-based objectives. You are given a mission to build a city at a certain place and must fulfil certain objectives in order to complete the mission and move on. For earlier games (Caesar, Pharaoh) the next mission will involve building another city at a completely different site. Later games (Zeus, Emperor) could have the next mission continuing to build the same city with different objectives or even returning to an earlier city.
It occurs to me that you might also like Cities in Motion, also developed by Colossal Order, the same studio that made Cities: Skylines. CiM is in fact their first game. It is NOT a city builder but rather a transport management simulator. You build bus stops, lay rail for trams, dig tunnels for metros, docks for water ferries, and helipads for helicopters. You then set the public transport routes and hope that people actually ride so you can make enough money to be profitable and maybe even build more routes to make more money.
There are two games in the series. CiM2 is arguably more polished, with depots, transport schedules you can adjust for different times of day, and roads. In the first game, you can’t even build roads, and you have manually space out the buses and hope they don’t bunch up due to traffic. But the first CiM has it’s own quirky charm. It’s set in real life cities like Berlin or Amsterdam. The missions are vaguely historically based, like dealing with the Berlin Wall going up or (later) dealing with the Berlin Wall going down.