Any good alternatives to SimCity?

[Nials]

Tropico is on sale right now on Steam. I have it and it's pretty fun, but it gets kind of repetitive after a while since each new island is more or less played in the same way. Once you get the basics down, it's not that challenging either. Still, for €7.49 I think it's worth the money. A lot of the DLC is very sparse though.

I have mostly played T4, but T3 really isn't that different. In all honesty, T4 feels much more like an expansion pack to T3. New buildings, new edicts, new traits (I think?), but not much else has changed.

 

[warpus]

I already got all those games for under £10 each

I only tried out Towns though and had no idea what to do so gave up on it, its like minecraft and sim city and apparantly diablo as well, I should try it out again with a guide.

I bought Towns this weekend too, but the tutorials don't seem to be working, so I moved on to something else. The 1 gameplay video looked very promising, innovative, and like a cool gaming experience, so I bought it. The more crap games get released by the big studios, the more I want to support smaller ones.

I've never played them but tropico and anno look awesome. Was thinking about buying tropico 4 during this sale but I have so many unplayed games already. On a mac though? No idea. Sim city 4 is also really good and there is a fix to put it in 1080p resolution. It looks pretty good too as long as you don't zoom in max.

Anno is very fun - I enjoyed the last release more than the current one (So.. I enjoyed 14xx more than 2070 or whatever). After a while the micromanagement kind of spins out of control, at least from my experience. Maybe I was doing it wrong, but I got overwhelmed and it wasn't really fun after a while. Setting up your town is very very fun though.

 

[peter grimes]

I've never played them but tropico and anno look awesome. Was thinking about buying tropico 4 during this sale but I have so many unplayed games already. On a mac though? No idea. Sim city 4 is also really good and there is a fix to put it in 1080p resolution. It looks pretty good too as long as you don't zoom in max.

Just bought the Tropico4 bundle on steam. Then I noticed that it was not mac compatible. Arrgghhh!

Luckily I keep a windows partition

Graphics seem a bit off, but so far I really like the feel of the game. I've only done the tutorial, will hopefully start a campaign in the next few days.

For $10 it's already worth it.

 

[Ailedhoo]

Tropico 4 is quite funny. I enjoyed it. Confessingly I have not played Tropico 3. However I do enjoy what I played!

 

[Joecoolyo]

Tropico 3 is basically the same thing sans the more story based missions.

Tropico 4 is fantastic though, such a funny game.

 

[Leonel]

I personally prefer Tropico 4 because you can get the Modern Times DLC that'll let you update the buildings to a more modern look instead of having exclusively stucco apartments into the 21st century. I think I posted screens of one of my islands in the Screenshots thread that shows the Modern Times buildings.

 

[NBAfan]

I haven't played a Tropico, need to try it some time.
Anno 1404 is definitely a great game though, very very pretty as well. Anno 2070 is fine, and actually has some better gameplay additions, but I don't really like the setting as much as 1404's.

 

[cybrxkhan]

SimCity 4 is probably the best alternative to the current SimCity, in my opinion. It still looks great even after a decade, and I'd say it's aged pretty well and is still playable and enjoyable. Not to mention there's crapton of mods and stuff available that make it even more awesome.


On that note, I've been considering Cities XL, but I've heard there's some serious bugs, particularly when cities get too large.

 

[warpus]

Are there mods for SC4 that allow you to have curvy roads and such? Cause the blocky aspect of SC4 is what started annoying me the most, when I went back to that game. Don't get me wrong, it was awesome, but in light of what's possible.. it seems incredibly restrictive now.

CitiesXL has some.. incredibly bad UI choices, not to mention a somewhat broken or at least incredibly cumbersome trading system. Having said that, I've put many hours into the game, and there are a lot of very fun aspects to it. It can be quite engrossing, if you overlook the bad UI, which I was somehow able to. I never got my cities past 1 million, possibly due to the bugs everyone's talking about. It probably has to do with you having to specialize each city so that you can sell things and buy others (i.e. sell office space and buy water, or whatever) and a broken trade system. I never thought it was broken, but I always found it quite.. odd. I thought I just wasn't getting it, but from what I've since read, there's apparently some issues with it. Still, if you see it for $5-$10, t's probably worth a buy.

 

[cybrxkhan]

Are there mods for SC4 that allow you to have curvy roads and such? Cause the blocky aspect of SC4 is what started annoying me the most, when I went back to that game. Don't get me wrong, it was awesome, but in light of what's possible.. it seems incredibly restrictive now.

I think NAM (or one of its extra modules) does include curvy roads or the like, granted they're clunkier and not as flexible as the current SimCity. If it's not in NAM there's probably some other similar mod that adds in the ability for curved roads, but again I think that due to engine limitations they aren't as flexible as the current SimCity's.

CitiesXL has some.. incredibly bad UI choices, not to mention a somewhat broken or at least incredibly cumbersome trading system. Having said that, I've put many hours into the game, and there are a lot of very fun aspects to it. It can be quite engrossing, if you overlook the bad UI, which I was somehow able to. I never got my cities past 1 million, possibly due to the bugs everyone's talking about. It probably has to do with you having to specialize each city so that you can sell things and buy others (i.e. sell office space and buy water, or whatever) and a broken trade system. I never thought it was broken, but I always found it quite.. odd. I thought I just wasn't getting it, but from what I've since read, there's apparently some issues with it. Still, if you see it for $5-$10, t's probably worth a buy.

Hmm, okay, thanks for the info. Granted, assuming cities in CitiesXL grow at a pace at how my cities in SimCity grow, I suppose I won't have to worry too much about the issues when the cities grow too big.

It really sounds like a buggier version of the current SimCity (assuming the current SimCity is working perfectly lol) with the trading and all, but I'll look into it then. I'll probably have to wait at least two years before the current SimCity is 66% off (that's when I finally think it'd be worth the trouble).

 

[Maniacal]

I saw some screenshots of the latest version... it actually looks like a real city! The roads, the building layouts, the mountains... if they can fix the game's problems with their next release, they will rake in the frakin' sales.

 

[warpus]

Yeah, a lot of the fun I got out of citiesXL was me zooming around my city and checking it out from various angles. Building roads, bridges, and zoning stuff, was incredibly engrossing too.

 

[Arrow Gamer]

Another game is Zeus: Master of Olympus and its brethren.

 

[NBAfan]

Another game is Zeus: Master of Olympus and its brethren.

The games with the terrible walkers?

 

[sophie]

The games with the terrible walkers?

They really aren't that bad once you understand their logic. That series of games is one of my all-time favorite - I'm still coming back to them more than 10 years later.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Cities in motion is similar but not about city building at all - they give you predefined and unchangeable cities and your job is to set up the buses, subways, streetcars, etc. Really fun but a bit of a different concept.

I'm really curious about the upcoming Cities in Motion 2 game which should be out this spring.

In that new version, cities will be dynamic, which means they will grow and evolve according to the transportation we set up. Furthermore, we can now build roads and buildings in-game, not just in the map editor. According to what I've read, it would even be able to start a sandbox game from a totally empty map which would grow along the street layout we would create.

This being said, the game strictly focus on trafic. Schools, hospitals, fire or police stations don't serve any other purpose than the jobs they provide. But as a matter of fact, this could be okay to me as transportation has always been my favourite part in this kind of games.

Here's a screenshot preview:

Click to enlarge


I've read tons of things which seemed cool about the game. Dozens of different kinds of roads, from pedestrian alley to 8-lane avenues having bus lanes and tram tracks. Maps will be extra huge, about 32 times larger than in Simcity 2013. The game grows regional too and maps are free of any grid layouts, allowing curvy routes as in SC2013.

Here's a link to the paradox forum section for the game:
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?740-Cities-in-Motion-2

I will be curious to see how this will turn out.

 

[warpus]

Wow.. that seems amazing! I am def. picking this up

 

[NBAfan]

They really aren't that bad once you understand their logic. That series of games is one of my all-time favorite - I'm still coming back to them more than 10 years later.

My problem with them is that this led to building arbitrary isolated blocks just so your people wouldn't walk the wrong way. The other thing is that I never played them when they first came out, I had played SC4 and Anno a lot so those older games really outdated design decisions stuck out a lot.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Wow.. that seems amazing! I am def. picking this up

Some new screenshots of the upcoming Cities in Motion 2.

What kinda amazes me is that I learnt the game is actually made by a team of 8 dudes in Tampere, Finland.

 

[cybrxkhan]

Now if that Cities in Motion 2 wasn't so transportation focused I'll buy it (never really enjoyed the transportation tycoon games, as I prefer building my delusional modern utopian dreamlands ala SimCity).

Anyhow I've tried a bit of Cities XL with a friend and I have to say it really is like what SimCity 5 should have been (roughly, despite its own problems). A pity that they don't seem to be doing anything new with that series other than pumping out patches disguised as new games, but I'll see if I can buy it when it's on sale.