Rustica
“Give the people what they want and they will… do what they want to do.”
Your Citizens Need You
Rustica puts you in the unique role of a custodian of a Greco-Roman colony. You have land but not much else and it’s up to you to spruce up the place. You’ll need to discover and provide resources for your world and your citizens will interact with it as they see fit, they have free will after all. Watch your world grow over time and with a keen eye for planning and a bit of luck you can sit back and watch your people thrive.
Start Out Small
You’ll need to begin by laying down the foundations. Your citizens can’t build out of thin air so you’ll need to give them the basics like trees and stone and hope they know what to do with it. Each object has requirements called schemas in order to be placed in the world and some need other objects present in specific spots, and it’s up to you to discover how to unlock them.
Plan For the Future
Eventually, some of your citizens will feel the need to specialize and focus on a trade. They’ll become farmers, miners, priests and then some. This will allow them to interact with their world in new ways and this in turn will open up new objects and schemas for your growing community.
A Hero Rises
Once in a while a citizen decides to go on a hero’s quest. Foolish mortals. You can then go and give the hero what they need to finish their quest or don’t mind them because you have better things to do, like making sure that temple gets built over there by those trees.
Sit Back and Watch the Sunset
Tinker and tweak with the world you create and watch your citizens hard work pay off. Or do like Nero and watch the world burn, figuratively.
It’s your world to play with, you decide.
Read More: Best City Builder Early Access Games.
One Military Camp
Design and manage a military camp, as well as its essential facilities for the sustainability of life there. Set the layout of buildings where your soldiers will train their physical and tactical abilities. Eating and resting are very important too! So take it all into account to achieve a profitable and efficient academy.
Every recruit is born to serve the country, but only a few are the best for your camp. Following requests from the army, you will have to check the fear in the eyes of your soldiers before choosing them to join the camp.
Each training course will transform regular soldiers into highly specialized ones. Check the attributes of your ensigns and set them in the right path for their born specialty.
Affirmative! Training and maintaining soldiers is expensive, but you can make it a profitable business. Managing as a real tycoon will turn your camp into a money-making machine by completing government missions.
Upgrading buildings will allow you to improve the training of your soldiers. Having many strong soldiers will help you to face all the missions. Enjoy blowing stuff up? Don’t forget to build the Bomb Defusal Training building!
The war is constantly evolving, so stay ahead of the curve. Each mission will require specific soldiers. You’re not thinking of sending your best divers into a land battle, are you?
Read More: Best City Builder Base Building Games.
Festivals - Headliners
Design your Event Sites, Book Artists, Build your Career as a Promotor and Produce your own Festivals in Festivals - Headliners.
Construct your Site
Build the festival site of your dreams with dozens of stages, food stalls, bars, and hundreds of decorations, billboards and lights. Put up fences and lay down paths to guide your guests in the right direction across your venue and include signing to manage any crowding. Use generators and power lines to form a temporary power grid. And most important of all, keep your fans safe.
Setup your Lineup
Every festival needs entertainment! Book bands, DJs and other talent to entertain your visitors, design awesome shows, include special effects, and make it a night your guests will never forget. And add fireworks. Lots and lots of fireworks.
As your career progresses, you make more connections, and get the option to book some very popular artists and acts for your events. Take good care of them, they’ll draw in huge crowds!
Be ready for D-Day
Start load-in early enough to be ready on time, but not too early or you’ll spend too much on rental. Don’t start too late, because you’ll never know what might happen. The event industry always has some “interesting” surprises for you along the way. Stay on schedule!
Staff Management
A festival is only as successful as the staff running it. They are your most vital asset, treat them accordingly. Hire staff in advance, so you know you have the best people on your team. Provide training and coaching to ensure they’ll stay with you for years.
During the event, provide them with good catering and plenty of breaks. As always, safety is important, so make sure everyone is wearing earplugs!
Finance
While hosting festivals is the most fun job in the world, money still has the be made to pay the bills. Not everyone is doing this for fun. You have to be careful not to overspent. As most festivals don’t make any profit in their first 3 events, don’t be to hard on yourself, but if you’re still in the red by year 4, you might want to consider a different profession. Also, not everyone is to be trusted. Watch out to make sure you’re not lured into anything illegal.
First-person / Third person
Of course you’ll want to witness the spectacle first-hand. As your the head of the event, your AAA card grants you access to every nook and cranny of the venue. Walk around among guests in first-person view, take control of the FOH booth where the lights are controlled, or join the talent on stage to wave at the crowd!
Workshop
From the early release on Steam on, you’ll be able to share your festival sites on the Steam workshop to share with your friends! Before the final release, we’ll add options to add your own assets to the game, which you’ll also be able to share on the workshop. How this exactly is going to work is still a secret, sign up as a tester to learn more first hand!
Progress
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2019: Initial work
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2020: Work on background systems
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Now - 2021: Get frontend ready for (beta) testing by end of year
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2022: (Early) Release
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2023: Initial DLC’S
Tester Needed!
We’re currently actively looking for testers! We hope to ship a first playable version in private beta soon, sign up using this form now to make sure you’re included!
Initially we’ll be testing on windows mostly, but if you want to test on macOS or a console, please let us know through the form, once we’re ready for you, you’ll be the first to know.
Read More: Best City Builder Sandbox Games.
Panda City
Late game there is a lot of lag but over all a very enjoyable experience.
– Real player with 2.7 hrs in game
I played for a few hours and it seemed like a fantastic game with a lot of potential. A simple and addictive game. Of course, I see that there are several errors, such as that no more pandas arrive to my city and the game remains constant. Another example is when I load my game, there are buildings that I eliminated and they appear on top of others that I had already placed. Despite this, I loved the game and would like to see more updates to fix the bugs and also add more content. Sereusly, I WANT MORE UPDATES, PLEASE!!!
– Real player with 2.6 hrs in game
Per Aspera
It’s rare for a city builder / logistics game to have a good story, but this one sure does. Through monologue and dialogue options we follow the self-discovery and existential ruminations of the player character, an AI tasked with terraforming Mars. The planet visuals are beautiful. It’s incredible to zoom in and look at the contoured terrain and watch it change as it fills in with water and plant life.
Gameplay is less elaborate than most city builders and the logistics are not even close to the level of complexity of something like a Factorio style game. Managing the interconnected temperature and atmospheric composition is interesting. The end result is a casual, relaxing builder with a memorable story.
– Real player with 95.2 hrs in game
===SUMMARY===
This is my favorite game of 2021. I like simulation games as a group, and this is a beautiful installment of this growing genera. I love what simulations teach me, being spoon fed facts off a list. I love that (having played Per Aspera) I know the landscape of Mars better. I know some of the names, sure, but grokking the SCALE, the oddness, sparking my curiosity about Noctis Labyrinthus, just from working on the planet is priceless. I became familiar with Mars in a way that Surviving Mars never did (though I played that a lot too).
– Real player with 68.7 hrs in game
Deisim
One of if not THE ONLY “God game” I have ever played that is not another RTS borefest.
You do not have to build everything for the people and I love that!
You place land tiles in a seemingly infinite grid. Land tiles such as grasslands, Forests, Deserts, Oceans, and the such. Each prividing different resources for little humans who live grow and die all on their own.
The game is still being developed and will continue to get better as the dev Myron continues to expand and advance the game.
Simply put, this is the first real God game!
– Real player with 31.0 hrs in game
It’s neither Black and White nor Populous, but that’s okay because Deisim actually manages to carve out it’s own identity as a God game somewhere in between. Actually, on the surface Deisim kind of makes me think of Godus, except this is actually a good game. And in fact, one mind blowing consideration is that even in its current Early Access stage, Deisim is already a better game than Godus, despite being made by just one guy.
So anyway, the emphasis is on the placement of land tiles that you use to shape the environment, which then leads to tribal villages popping up. The villages will then use the environmental resources you’ve placed to grow and prosper, and eventually evolve into small towns, leading to more believers and more mana. Although indirect interaction is mainly how you grow your world, direct interaction is possible too, such as picking up villagers and buildings, or casting spells directly on things to either help or hinder the villagers. Towns will inevitably begin to spawn heretics who if given too much leeway, will convert their town into a heretic faith, eventually causing them to wage wars of conquest on their neighbours. To deal with this, a good old dose of fire or locusts can convince the heretics the error of their ways and show them that yours is the true faith.
– Real player with 10.9 hrs in game
Restaurant Manager
Great game to spend 1 dollar and 3 hours Good job!
– Real player with 4331.6 hrs in game
It takes you 10min to finish the game if you know what you are doing. The least developped game on steam. Save your money..
– Real player with 5.8 hrs in game
Ruinarch
A fun game that is definitely in early access.
Edited: 7/30/2021. The game has been significantly changed since I posted my first review, and its' unfortunately not all for the better.
The Good:
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Villagers have been overhauled significantly, and their interactions with each other and the world are much more interesting. They earn money to buy resources, have more robust individual trades, craft items, and all sorts of other fun stuff.
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The way monsters are used has been vastly improved. Rather than just spawning them next to a villager and letting them have at it, they are formed into parties, led by one of your demons, to accomplish a specific purpose. Marauder parties from the marauder building break stuff and attack villagers to sow chaos, snatching parties kidnap villagers or monsters for imprisonment, and defense parties protect your base full-time. It’s a bit monotonous to reform the parties repeatedly if you make heavy use of them, but this alone has made Ravager a lot more fun.
– Real player with 36.0 hrs in game
UPDATE: hot damn, that’s one hell of an update. 10/10 guys, very cool.
At first, I thought this was the “Devil Simulator” I’ve always wanted. But the longer I played, the more frustrated I became with this game. I’ll start with the Good things, follow up with the Bad, and leave you with my suggestions for improvement.
The Good
-The AI is tremendously well made, just as advertised. Each NPC has different traits, different relationships with other NPC’s, and adjusts it’s behavior over time as it interacts with the other NPC’s. The level of care and attention that went into this facet of the game is dumbfounding, considering this is, at it’s core, “God Simulator meets Sim City”. As an example, if you turn enough villagers into vampires or cultists, they can split off and form their own societies.
– Real player with 23.7 hrs in game
GolfTopia
This is an early review. At review time, I have about 2 hours of gameplay, and about 25 hours of watching YouTube video.
I have sufficient knowledge to give a good review..so bear with me.
First, I am a life-long golfer, and first played in 1974. I am also a lifelong PC and X-Box golfer, having played just about every golf game ever made, from PGA Tour golf for my Pentium 1, up to all the Links series golf games, all the Tiger Woods, and especially every game that ever sported a golf course designer.
– Real player with 42.4 hrs in game
GolfTopia is the spiritual successor to Sid Meier’s SimGolf (2002). That’s high praise from someone who spend probably about a hundred hours developing the perfect golf course in that game. Then again, it’s been a bit of a hobby of mine over the years. I used to publish JNSE courses back in the early 90s and I still sometimes catch myself looking at terrain and figuring how a golf hole would lay on it. So I was pretty excited to see this title and I can say I’ve been enthralled with GolfTopia.
For those who aren’t as old as Methuselah and may have not played SimGolf, here’s a brief rundown of the game play loop. You have a top down view of the land (randomly generated) and you start designing golf holes. Your guests will be happy, or won’t, depending on how interesting, difficult and fun the hole is to play. Make it too easy and the golfers won’t like it. Make it too difficult and they’ll storm off the course after punching someone. Make it too much like another hole and they’ll get bored. The more interesting the holes, the more money you make. That allows you to upgrade your facilities and build more golf holes with higher fees.
– Real player with 39.0 hrs in game
King of the Universe
In the 24th century BC, the Sumerians have turned the land of Mesopotamia from a simple Cradle of Civilization to the home of empires. It is your mission to take control of the kingdom of Kish and conquer your enemies, in order to become Lugal Kiški, King of the Universe.
The Sumerians, or “the black-headed people” (Sag̃-g̃i-ga in their native tongue), were the first people to invent both civilization and writing. Their well-organised and state-run societies make the perfect setting for a strategic video game. In King of the Universe, you will not only try to conquer your enemies, you will also have to take care of your own people.
Through military means you gather land and slaves, and through economic means you build new structures for your people. If your citizens do not produce enough supplies to quench your war machine, you will fail. If you do not protect your citizens from foreign invaders, you will fail. This game is about balance, and only by finding it will you become King of the Universe.
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Tiles
Claim tiles and build or destroy structures. Watch your people go about their day-to-day lives.
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Wealth
Garner Silver and resources, such as Food, Metal and Tools.
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Troops
Build an army, and order your soldiers around. Follow your individual troops with the camera.
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Slaves
Collect slaves when conquering foreign land, and use these to build new structures in your kingdom.
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Citizens
Keep an eye on the hunger and health of your people. Make sure every class in your kingdom has enough money to survive.
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Pricing
Decide the prices of wares in your kingdom, to control the economy to ensure profits for your state.
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Trade
Buy and sell with the other empires, to build relations and gain an extra income for your war machine.