Greg Recommends City Skylines

Website: STEAM / Paradox Interactive

As of the writing of this article (October 2017) Paradox Interactive's "City Skylines" is the best city builder on the market. It's basically Sim City except bigger and better in all the ways that matter. It's a relaxing "go at your own pace" ginormous sandbox of opportunity that layers a multitude of systems on top of each other to create a city building experience that keeps it simple enough for beginners but with enough depth and mechanics to keep the expert city builders occupied for hundreds of hours.

Image from the Steam Community

Anyone who has played a Sim City game will immediately be familiar with the 'zoning' system whereby you designate what types of buildings can be built in different parts of your city. You start out every city by laying road down off a preexisting highway into whatever layout you like and then designate different zones (residential, commercial, and industrial to start). Virtual citizens will then start flocking to your tiny town and start building houses and businesses for themselves. The amount of each type of building as well as their location relative to each other matters. Residents will need jobs to work at and shops to frequent and the various industrial and commercial businesses will require workers to run. You need to keep a balance so that your city can keep growing. Keep on eye on the RCI panel to see what type of buildings are needed.

As mayor you're responsible for providing your citizens with basic utilities and so you'll also start off by laying down some water pipes underground and then connect them to a clean source of water for drinking and somewhere else (hopefully down river) to dump your water waste. (Don't worry, you'll eventually unlock more environmentally friendly ways to dispose of your raw sewage). You'll also need to provide electricity via a power plant (cost effective but makes lots of pollution) or wind turbines (expensive but eco-friendly). More options are unlocked later.

As your town grows you'll begin to reach population milestones that unlock more features for you to play with. You'll be 'plopping' down schools, parks, police stations, fire stations, clinics, and public transport buildings that will increase the value of your land so the buildings on it will upgrade themselves while also preventing danger and injury to your little people.

All of this is pretty standard and almost a direct copy and paste job from previous Sim City games. Where City Skylines surpasses Sim City in the basics is in its pathing logic, customization, and logical infrastructure. In Skylines your little people actually live and work in specific buildings while in Sim City your sims take the first vacant building / working spot they can find on their commute to and from work. In Skylines the traffic has always made sense while in Sim City the traffic only kind of makes sense after years of patching to try and fix what was originally a nightmare. In Skylines the relationship between residential / commercial / industry matter, you need to have a good balance to thrive while in Sim City your sims will be happy to live in a city with no stores, no schools, and no jobs.

A traffic solution I build myself!

As your town grows and becomes a city you'll run into problems with traffic. This is normal as the types of roads you had access to at the start weren't designed to accommodate the vast amounts of people who now want to live in your community. The question (and the fun) in this game is 'what are you going to do about it?' How are you going to fix the traffic problems?

Skylines gives you some powerful options for dealing with traffic. You can increase the number of lanes, you can make a road one-way only, you can build ramps and tunnels, but most importantly, you can place roads pretty much however you need to without the game telling you 'you can't do that' or auto-snapping your roads to where it 'thinks' they should go (like a certain other city builder series). There also options for mass-transit (buses, trains, ferries, metro, etc). You can even place or remove individual stop lights and stop signs at specific intersections if you want to really micro-manage traffic flow throughout your city and it will make a huge difference when you do.

Here's a story from my own city. At the entrance at the edge of the map I had a super busy four way intersection. North connected to the highway. South went into the downtown. East went to my farms. West went to my lumber industry. Everyone coming in and going out had to compete with heavy freight traffic wanting to go east, west, and north. Everyone had to stop at the lights and there was always a lineup on all four sides. At first I replaced the four - way with a roundabout so there would be no stoplights. This worked for a while but the traffic didn't flow as nicely as I wanted it to and lineups still happened. I did some brain storming and thought about real life overpasses and then tried to build one myself. It took a little trial and error but I eventually did it, I built my own overpass so now the traffic flows smoothly from every direction, no more stopping, no more slowing, it was a very satisfying feeling when I had finally gotten it to work.

As your city keeps growing it will become beneficial for you to separate it into different sectors. This is easily done from the HUD and costs you nothing to do. Sectors are areas of your city that follow specific rules that affect what your little people can and can not do, how much they pay, and how much they produce. You may want to put pollution restrictions on an industrial zone but also give them permission to double their production by cutting corners on safety. You may want to make an especially high value part of your city pay higher taxes and restrict pets and freight trucks to keep it as desirable as possible. I was especially pleased with the sector option that made large commercial buildings double their sales which ended up doubling my income per month in taxes even for my small city.

Sectors also allow you to customize what specialization your industry will have in that area. Farming (if on fertile ground), forestry, mining, and oil are all options that will produce needed goods for your city as well as a lot of freight traffic to import and export needed materials. It is usually worth thinking through how you will keep your freight traffic smoothly going where it needs to go and away from your busy commuter routes.

You'll also need to set up a garbage disposal system, a 'death care' system, public transport, put down more schools, and experiment with new zoning types (high density residential / commercial and offices). If you have the 'Night Life' DLC then you'll also be wanting to look at the entertainment industry to bring in tourists and the potential for lots of crime.

Underneath the hood of this game there is a lot going on. Your city actually has specific needs that your little people will try to fill. Businesses require workers of varying education levels as well as specific materials to function. Your stores need specific freight of varying types which can be produced by your industries or imported. Your industries require specific materials to make their products. Home and business owners will expand if all their needs are being met so even more people can live and work there. Your little people will drive, bike, walk, and jump between all manner of public transportation to get to work, go to school, go shopping, and go home. Each of these things affects your city and Skylines provides lots of tools to track these analytics. You can see at a glance how effective each of your systems is, and which areas of your city are being overlooked.

As you keep growing things keep changing and the old systems and infrastructure that used to work fine will need to be upgraded, changed, or removed and replaced with something else. The result is an organic city building experience that moves at the pace you set for yourself.

After a while you will start rubbing up against the sides of your portion of the map. That's ok, you're allowed to buy more sections. You can even download a mod that lets you use the entire 5x5 grid to build a massive metropolis provided your CPU can handle it.

Two bus routes and two metro routes combine at the center of town to take everyone where they need to go.

The fun in this game is definitely in the building, the problem solving, and the watching. Planning out how I want my little people to meet their needs and move about smoothly is fun and the Skylines has enough options and more than enough depth to make the planning phase a stimulating endeavor. The robust mechanics ensure that there will always be things to do and problems to solve as well as a multitude of ways to solve them. This game respects you and gives you free reign to use all the tools a real city planner would have and lets you make mistakes so you can learn from them.

The game is also beautiful. It may not be as polished as Sim City (Maxis loved to polish all their stuff) but it still looks great. I sometimes lose track of what I wanted to do just looking at the busy streets and all the traffic flowing like life giving blood through the arteries of a living thing.

screenshot from Jonathan Bolding's review on The Escapist Magazine

It gets better though. The game is fully supported for mods which means the community has put together a very large body of easily added buildings, vehicles, people, utilities, and much much more to grace your city. Simply visit the City Skylines Steam Workshop and start subscribing to whatever content you would like to have access to for free.

The only things I can say that could use improvement in Skylines would be if they had in-game tutorials, campaign or, challenge maps. There are plenty of tutorials online, which are good, and you can download player-made challenge maps, but these tend to be unrealistic.

The game is a bit expensive if you're purchasing the base and all the DLCs at regular price. As is common with Paradox games the base game is always being added to with free features as new DLC is being created while the DLCs themselves still really add a lot to the base and it is worth picking them up if you enjoy the game. Here is a list of the current DLCs and what they do.

After Dark - Adds 'Leisure Specialization' which makes your commercial buildings extra active at night and 'Tourism Specialization' which makes your commercial buildings near the beach a hotbed for tourism.

Snowfall - Adds the option to have a winter city with snow removal being another system to layer on top of your city. Unfortunately there are no changing seasons (yet).

Natural Disasters - Adds the ability to afflict your city with a variety of natural disasters.

Mass Transit - Adds a variety of new mass transit options to get your citizens from point A to point B without clogging your roads.

Green Cities - Adds a bunch of specializations, buildings, vehicles, parks, policies, and scenarios of the eco-friendly variety.

Concerts - Adds the ability to get live performances in your stadium(s) to generate money, traffic problems, and maybe crime.

Cosmetic Packs - There are a variety of packs that add extra buildings from the top of the modding community.

On a final note perfectionists may need to just relax and mentally prepare before playing this game. It is entirely possible to build a perfect city with a perfect grid and a perfect balance of all types of buildings and services. however, I would advice against this and I think that it is far more interesting and freeing to not try and build a perfect grid. Allow yourself to make things unsymmetrical and even (dare I say it) mistakes on purpose. Let your city have some personality. If you try for the perfect grid every time then you'll be frustrated as you run into new options you hadn't considered when you first started building.

City Skylines - Easy to get into, difficult to master, organic, vibrant, deep, mod and community friendly, this is the best city builder in a long time.

Greg Recommends The Anno Series

UBISoft / STEAM / GoG

Dirt Cheap to $50 depending on the title.

The "Anno Series" are real time strategy games that blend city building with business and resource management. The first title, Anno 1602 launched in 1998 and the most recent title, Anno 2205 launched late 2015. Each of these titles is good and you can start with any one of them.

1601 - Tobacco Plantations. Good graphics for 1998.

Your goal in each of these games is to go out and locate a new home to settle, build up, and 'conquer'. I put conquer in quotations because the game is 98% settling, building, and perfecting. These are peaceful and often slow strategy games with a heavy emphasis on building placement and resource management over and above combat.

1503 - An army lies siege to your city! Graphics upgraded from 1602.

One of the core mechanics behind the series is that your citizens will require (demand?) certain things according to how fancy their house is, similar to the old Caesar classics but far easier to control. So taking the first game, 1602, when you create a new house the residents require that they live within a certain distance from the town center building and that your island inventory contain enough food to feed them. If you don't meet these basic demands the people will eventually leave and the building will collapse over time. Alternatively should you go above and beyond the basic requirements and provide some of their requests like being a certain distance from a chapel and have access to wool cloth, they will be happy to pay higher taxes and even improve their residence should the appropriate resources be available to them. These upgraded houses represent an entirely new class of resident with the former demands and requests now becoming the baseline to maintain them and a new list of requests being presented. So now instead of pioneers requiring community, a chapel, cloth, and fish you now have settlers who require all these things but now also request alcohol, spices, education, and tobacco. The higher the tier of housing, the more people live therein, the more money you can tax, but the more they require to stay happy.

1701 - Zooming in close to one of your ships. Large graphics upgrade from 1503.

As the population of your settlement(s) grow you gain access to new buildings that you need to keep growing or just make your existing infrastructure more efficient. To ensure that you branch out from your original island home no one island will have everything that you need to keep growing. Once you are established on your home you will find yourself loading up a ship in hopes of finding more new land, hopefully containing the right conditions to grow your own grapes or spices or whatever it is that your people need before they upgrade their houses again.

1701 - A lively port city!

The result is a game of mostly peaceful building with ships sailing this way and that delivering goods back and forth as you slowly add more layers of complexity to keep up with the needs of your people before meeting the map's win conditions. Later titles after 1602 add a few interesting twists like different types of resources, expanded diplomacy with other players, lesser NPC nations that hold exclusive luxury goods, tech trees, going underwater, additional society factions, or landing on the moon, but the core premise and game-play fixtures are always the same.

1404 - Everything is somehow bigger and crisper than 1701.

The graphics are always good for the time in which the game was released. Anno 1602 graphics were quite good for 1998 and Anno 2205 has great graphics for a 2015 game (read: beefy video card and processor required), but I have always found the details limited. Everything looks good, but it all starts to look the same after a little while. If you've seen one block of housing you've seen every block of housing and your cities tend to feature lots of blocks of housing. You can zoom in to see your people milling about in the newer titles but your people do little more than just mill about. This isn't like Tropico where every person is busy doing things on the island, the 'people' you see in Anno are just eye-candy and while the buildings and the countrysides look beautiful they are just representative of the real game of supply and demand and expanding your infrastructure to make your city bigger. I think that, in a strange way, the beauty of the game works against itself in that people expect to find a higher level of detail and personality in the graphics of a game that looks so good.

2070 - Welcome to the future. Everything is much bigger here.

One thing I have always appreciated about the Anno series is the music. Orchestral and dynamic right from good old 1602 onward. Many of the songs are downright gorgeous and make the game a joy to play. Here's a link to some good music from 2070 to show you what I'm talking about.

As for the combat it is minimal and the least interesting part of the Anno series. Should your expansion for more resources get blocked or if you're just greedy or a jerk then you build warships of varying sizes to go sink your rival's boats and blow up their coastal buildings. In the pre-2070 titles you can also build a handful of soldier types to land on your rival's island and take it over one warehouse at a time while the new titles employ airborne drones with which to bomb things. The defense against ships, soldiers, and drones is to build static defense towers to shoot at enemies within range in addition to having your own ships, soldiers, and drones. There is no strategy beyond 'attack as a big group' and taking out an opponent is a long and boring task.

2070 - An underwater base. Very important for producing algae, oil, and many rare elements.

The fun of this game is definitely in building a big city and setting up the supporting infrastructure. Whether that's lumber camps and clay pits in Anno 1602 or Oil Rigs / Processing plants and mass produced fast food in Anno 2070. Some of the production chains to get desired items can be quite involved; like creating service bots in 2070 which requires sand from a river, copper from a mine, corn from a farm, seaweed from an underwater farm, a chip factory, a biopolymer factory, and a robot factory. Getting the balance of lower tier resource gathering buildings to higher tier refining buildings mixed with the ever growing demands of your population can be a daunting task after a while, but this is part of the fun.

2205 - You thought things in 2070 were big? This is REALLY big.

There is also fun in just sitting back and watching a well oiled infrastructure servicing a city. All those ships coming and going and, depending on which title you're playing, either delivery people carrying wheelbarrows of goods this way and that or airborne drones ferrying cargo all over the skies.

The Anno series is about long term gaming. You can't really just play through it in a week and be done, completing a map takes a long time and there are lots of maps to play through should you desire them.

There is multiplayer, although I have never tried it outside of building peacefully with my family in 1602.

2205 - Building on the moon.

The one caveat I have on this series is that the DRM on Anno 2070 was so stringent that I couldn't actually play my legally purchased version of the game for years and their customer service team eventually just threw up their hands and said "we don't know how to help you." I eventually found the answer in a steam forum about which setting was off in my network that made the game impossible to play.

Other than that I think the games hold a lot of merit. They make infrastructure fun, they look and sound fantastic, and they are primarily a peaceful building game which we probably need more of in our violence obsessed culture.

Greg Recommends Sunless Sea

Website: Failbetter Games

Price : $18.99

The Sunless Sea is a stand alone game in the same universe as the Fallen London browser game. The year is sometime during the reign of the Empress Victoria, London was stolen by bats and now rests a mile under the surface on the shores of the Unterzee, that strange, dark, and ancient subterranean ocean full of mystery, adventure, and horror. You play as a Zee Captain in a setting that goes from refreshingly odd to unsettling to horror filled and back again as you explore the environments and narratives Failbetter Games lovingly crafted for you. The mood at zee is similar to Fallen London, dark, haunted, mysterious, Lovecraftian, and some dark dry humor. Instead of exploring and interacting with a handful of districts within Fallen London you have the entire unterzee and all of its ports of call to zail and explore. A word of caution though, death is a very constant (and often brutal) companion. This is what you might call a narrative / environment driven rogue-like exploration game. There is combat but you would be well advised to avoid it until later in the game. You make progress by exploring and advancing story arcs and the zee itself will prove a most formidable adversary even if you do manage to avoid the denizens who want to take a piece out of your ship.

The general formula of a voyage is presented thusly:

Every voyage begins at Fallen London. You'll spend 'echoes' (currency) to purchase food, fuel, crew members, upgrades, goods to sell elsewhere and other such things. You'll also check with your contacts in London to see if there are any story arcs or missions available should you perchance happen to be zailing in that direction or stumble upon interesting things in your adventures.

You pull out to zee way from the warm lights of the fallen city into the perpetual darkness of the unterzee with only the occasional beacon and the light of your rusty old zeeship to dispel the gloom. As you explore the unknown it will be recorded on your zee chart (world map) and for every island, reef, settlement, and strange thing you find you gain fragments (experience) which will enable you to level up and increase your captain's base stats. The unterzee is mysterious and unpredictable and so the islands rearrange themselves every play-through. Scattered about the islands you will find locations to land and interact with whoever (or whatever) is of interest there. You'll often be presented with story arcs and challenges similar to Fallen London (the browser game). You are given the odds of success as calculated according to your stats with something good happening if you succeed and something 'less good' happening if you fail. Depending on the nature of the challenge 'less good' may be anything from receiving a lesser reward to dying a horrible non-reloadable death. Typically though failure is rewarding and often gives you the chance to try again without consequence thus encouraging you to attempt challenges even if your chance of success is low. Between chance encounters and pre-defined story arcs and missions you can rack up a fair bit of experience and the potential for a lot of echoes by pursuing these island activities. I say 'potential' for a lot of echoes because most of the treasures you uncover really only have value if you survive long enough to turn them in / sell them back in Fallen London.

The game has a lot to do with choices where the consequences aren't obvious but are nonetheless foreboding. The almost dead 'Tomb Colonists' invite you to a feast and they look to be extremely hungry, do you go with them or decline? A wistful demoness wants to purchase your soul, do you sell it to her? The criminal underground wants you to pick up and bring back a package for them and will have "something sharp to say" if you return empty handed but will pay very well if you can smuggle it in, do you accept this job? The first few times I played I was very conservative and tried not to take too many risks. Then I began to understand the game in terms of exploration and narrative and I realized that the riskier choices were almost always more fun (and rewarding) even if I did fail.

The real danger, the thing that keeps killing me in this game, is not knowing when to turn back. You can stock up on food and fuel in other places than just Fallen London but it will be costly if it can be done at all. Should you run out of fuel you will either have to find something else to burn (food?) or you will be at the mercy of the Imperial Laws of Salvage (you lose your ship, crew, and cargo in exchange for a 1hp rustbucket with enough fuel and food to hopefully get you back home). Managing fuel and food is pretty easy though, its the sanity that can catch you off guard. That's right, sanity. As you float about in the deep dark cavern with the deep dark unterzee below you and God know's what below the surface or on the ceiling your crew starts to get a little afraid. Keeping your ship near shore and in the light halts their loss of sanity but you will not gain any back unless you're willing to pay for shore leave or return to Fallen London. Once your sanity reaches a critical level strange and terrible things begin happening. "The crewman stood near the edge of the ship and a large pale tentacle noiselessly pulls her overboard. You rush to the side but she is gone. Nobody seems to have seen or heard anything. You didn't... you didn't push her... did you?"

But here's the thing. The potential for reward and adventure get larger the further from London you zail. If you turn back too soon you may not make enough echoes to restock your ship, but if you keep going... This can quite easily turn into "just a little bit further... I have to see what is on that island" or "but if I can just fill in that piece of the zee map..." The rewards and adventure are greater, but if you don't turn back at the right time you may not get back at all.

Once you go out as far as you dare you have to make it back home. If you are low on supplies or sanity then you are especially vulnerable and the the shortest course back home may not be the safest.

Assuming you make it home though, limping into harbour with a half mad half starving crew and a cargo hold full of treasures, it's time to cash in, restock, and upgrade. The Admiralty Board pays you for every 'port report' you bring back to them (a reliable source of income and especially helpful for new captains), and fulfilling quests for your contacts also yields a good influx of echoes. Random events may allow you to sell your findings from the unterzee at a higher price than usual and the Black Market will often finance voyages if you agree to do their bidding.

Make enough voyages and you may earn enough echoes to buy yourself a decent house, a new ship, start a family, locate better contacts, and write a will to give your next captain a better start when you either retire or die at zee.

There are other, more subtle, creeping threats that can become a problem if you're not careful. Your sanity may be largely restored every time you return to London but if it had gone too low you will begin suffering from nightmares, and nightmares in a Lovecraftian environment are never a good thing. If you start associating with shady types (as most successful zee captains often do) then the authorities will start to take notice and should they suspect you of treason then searches to your cargo hold may not be the only thing you can expect from them.

The fun in this game is definitely in the exploration and the writing. It is atmospheric but unlike other games that are merely 'atmospheric' it is also challenging and death is permanent. They did a very good job at creating a world that feels like everything has a mystery behind it and even when you manage to solve some mysteries (or just survive them) the writing taunts you that there's more going on then you know.

Here are a few examples of the sort of stories and mysteries you may find zailing the unterzee.

A potentially sentient semi-omniscient coral reef and its many secrets. Why people have a difficult time actually dying in Fallen London. An island of soul devouring apes with warning buoys all around that say "beware of soul devouring apes. Assisting these beasts in any way is tantamount to treason and any that leave the island are to be shot on sight. They know what they did!!!" An island where kingdoms of hamsters and rats rage war for domination. An island where everyone wears masks that determine what you can and can not do. A top secret conspiracy involving esoteric 'science' that may or may not have something to do with the secret of actually dying in Fallen London. The Republic of Fire (Hell). The island of infinite paradoxes. The frightening winter beast Mr. Sacks. And of course there's also political intrigue, crazy religious orders, zee gods, pirates, unspeakable horrors, cannibalism, and all manner of questionable fauna and flora that may or may not be hostile.

I don't think this game is for everyone. I enjoy it because I am a sucker for good stories, I appreciate good horror and an honest rogue-like challenge. It is a slower game, one that requires some methodical thinking, and while some might find the absence of any quick travel options tedious it is something that I rather enjoy and I think the quality of writing and the environment more than make up for it. If you're not sure if you'd like this game then check out their free browser game Fallen London for a similar taste. Until then stay sane my tasty friend, and be wary of anything that appears human but isn't.