I am kind of itching to play a City building game. It doesn’t have to be a city, it could be a town or outpost or Kingdom etc. I want something modern but I don’t have the patience anymore for the overly complex. I mostly just want to build something and watch it grow.
Some games from back in the day that I loved in this genre were Sim City 2000, Roller Coaster Tycoon and Majesty.
What are some suggestions of games I should look at? Thanks.
A similar Reddit thread brought this up:
Watch your city grow organically
No rigid grid. Your city develops naturally, expanding through districts shaped by your choices and your citizens. No two playthroughs look the same.
How modern does it have to be? Locomotion is over 20 years old but it uses the same engine as RCT, recently hit Steam, and is currently on sale for less than a buck.
Time not wasted here or drinking is wasted playing Forge of Empires. A giant time-suck.
In the 1990s, I spent many hours on SimCity. I really loved that game but weirdly, never warmed to The Sims or Spore. And then I tried A-Train and SimTower along with a few other games. And then there was an update to SimCity maybe ten or fifteen years ago, but it just wasn’t as much fun. (I used to joke with a friend that I never thought that urban planning would make for a good game but it did. And then I noticed it affected how I saw development occur in real-life cities.)
I rather like Steamworld Build, of the reliable Steamworld series. Its graphics are quite exquisite, and it couples an overground town build with the creation of a mine underground. The town bit is about improving QoL and resources which in turn let you mine more - and vanquish lurking creatures - underground. As usual from Steamworld games it seems really well-balanced. And the robots are so damned cute!
From Paradox there are Cities Skylines, Cities Skylines 2, and Transport Fever 3 now. All current and supported.
On the much more casual side, There’s Townscaper…
Or free on the web at Townscaper
You just click and buildings pop up and merge themselves into delightful combinations.
The homestead version of this is Tiny Glade on Steam
I’ll post a few more from my computer later
OK, back on the computer now… let’s talk about the absolutely absurd amount of games now in this genre! From Townscaper to Cities Skylines to everything in between, this genre is absolutely thriving right now, and has divided itself into many sub-genres that can scratch every itch imaginable.
Dorfromantik on Steam has you build a city one “tile” at a time, almost like that board game Carcassonne
Save 70% on ISLANDERS on Steam is another “minimalist” builder, one building at a time but not with tiles
Town to City on Steam starts easy and pretty but ramps up nicely. Your “palette” of options are very basic at first, just a house and some decorative plants, but as your population grows, so do their needs and corresponding buildings available to meet them.
Frostpunk has you control a small settlement through a frozen wasteland, with moral decisions that pop up throughout the game to steer the narrative (and your settlement outcomes)
Save 40% on Foundation on Steam is a medieval gridless town builder… I only played it a bit, so can’t say a whole lot. Pretty though.
Station to Station on Steam is a lightweight, train-focused voxel town builder
Kingdoms and Castles on Steam has you build up your idyllic town into a castle and eventually defend it against threats
Corsair Cove on Steam has a bunch of pirates stranded on a beautiful island in need of a settlement. What’s really cool about this is the verticality: rope bridges and zip lines connect your buildings to each other, and you can build on beaches and cliffsides alike.
Timberborn on Steam is more of a colony sim, but also a city builder. You control a small colony of beavers, and it has the usual colony mechanics (hunger, etc.), but also the water simulation plays a HUGE part. You can divert rivers, control floodplains, create dams, pumps, etc. and that all plays into the town’s needs and outputs. You control water to farm, to provide mechanical hydro power, to maintain a surplus during droughts, etc.
RimWorld on Steam is another colony sim, with people and no water, but a lot of depth. We have another thread on this one altogether: Rimworld: old west meets sci-fi - #209 by Skywatcher
Save 25% on Going Medieval on Steam is similar to RimWorld, but medieval
Save 35% on Manor Lords on Steam is another medieval builder
Farthest Frontier on Steam is another; can’t really remember much about it, but pretty
Terra Nil on Steam is an anti-city builder, where you’re using nature to restore an ecosystem after industrialization left it broken
The aforementioned Cities Skylines 2 has gotten quite a bit better since release. A new developer took over from the previous one and is working hard on improving it and making it live up to #1.
Captain of Industry on Steam mixes a “city” builder with production supply chain management in a realistic way… think Factorio, but set in the modern era.
Save 70% on Oxygen Not Included on Steam is not really a town/city builder in the traditional sense; it’s a 2D survival settlement engineering simulator, like a tiny microcosm of Factorio in a cutaway space station, but it’s one of my favorite games. You manage not just the typical needs but also things like fluids and gases, all simulated. Probably a bit too out-of-genre compared to the other games in this list, but worth a brief glimpse, at least.
Dwarf Fortress on Steam is the OG of hypercomplex super-simulations, down to the needs of individual units. The modern release has a graphical layer on top of the old ASCII one, but it still looks like crap… people who love it, love it, but I could not get past the first hour or so. However, it’s supposed to be so good it made the two brothers who made the game millionaires overnight.
There is of course the Anno series: Anno Franchise - Ubisoft (US) but they are kind of formulaic by now. If you’ve never played them, though, it’s worth a Ubi subscription for a month to check them out. There are several games in the series, each set in a different time period and theme. They’re all very pretty, but the basic gameplay across all of them boils down to supply chain management in a big grid of roads and zones. They don’t feel as dynamic/alive/charming as the more indie games above.
There are a LOT more games in this genre than just those. That’s just a shortlist of well-received or notable (to me) games… if you have specific interests, let me know and I’ll try to think of a few more.
PS If your computer isn’t very recent/modern, a subscription to GeForce Now will let you play most of these games, on max graphics too, even on a very old laptop. Works best if you can connect via ethernet cable to your router, instead of wifi, but otherwise it’s a pretty seamless and incredible service.
Oh, even the theme park genre has expanded greatly! I have less experience with that genre, but check out:
(And there are many similar Bullfrog-likes now, from hospitals to museums, to schools to gas stations to waterparks, etc.)
Thanks everyone! Lots of titles to look into. I think I actually already own a few of them and have them sitting in my steam library.
I just watched a video for a goofy new game called Car Park Capital, where you build suburbs and shut down public transportation to bring business to your parking lot empire.
One of Epic’s freebies for the week appears to fit the bill.
And it is. The steam version has more than just a graphical layer, it also adds a much more functional UI compared to the original.
Great game, but there is a LOT to learn.
Personally, I found both the graphics and UI to be a huge turn-off. I wish they kept the internal sim but gave it a proper 2.5D graphics engine and modern UI instead of the weird/ugly pixel graphics…
I know, I know, don’t judge a game by its pixels… I keep wanting to try it every few months, but every time I do, I spend a few minutes in the game and then bounce back out to Skylines or some other game. It’s just so unwelcoming and ugly…
The pixel graphics worked for a mid-complexity game like Terraria, but for something this heavy, that makes Cities Skylines look simplistic, I find the limited UI to be a real hindrance. Clearly others don’t, though!
Guess I’m just spoiled these days 
Ooh, and if you want a really complex city builder:
And it is apparently 75% off right now!
Can recommend W&R, if you like detailed and realistic. Probably the best one out there.
I’ve been playing CS2 since its release and its definitely improved.
Recently purchased Transport Fever 3 but haven’t had much time to play it lately.
The main difference is with the CS games you plop down all the networks and buildings and roads and whatnot while in TF you mostly build supply chain networks to connect factories to towns and the towns more or less grow themselves.
TF games also feel a bit more “solid”. What I mean by that is CS you kind of build and bulldoze at will. TF every inch of road feels like a major business decision.