i have the brain sickness that craves colony sims. i desire to see little ants scurrying around doing their ant tasks while i lay out the foundations of society. it’s fun for me to see a town develop from nothing into something. i especially like colony sims that lay some sort of pressure on the player, ideally in nuanced ways that are about foresight and planning.
so i played a lot of oxygen not included
(my farming, cistern, and industrial areas)
i really like ONI. it’s certainly my favorite klei game, precisely because all their other efforts are perfectly-engineered puzzles while this is basically taming chaos. decisions you made an hour ago force new engineering, you’re constantly racing against dwindling resources to set up something that is truly sustainable. heat management is particularly important, as all the resources that are technically infinite come out too hot or too cold for easy use, encouraging you to think about how to sequester heat and utilize it for power.
i had a bunch of failed colonies and each time i failed one i learned more and i gradually get better at it, which is the best feeling for a colony game to me. also despite having a creative mode, survival imparts so many strange restrictions or challenges on you that it requires sloppy solutions that you have to refine over time, which is the sweet spot for games like this for me.
(a super-screenshot of my whole settlement)
songs of syx goes in kind of an interesting route for a game like this too. as your city grows and you finally get the manpower necessary sustain an army (one of the few games that really respects the 10-to-1 civilian-to-soldier ratio) you’re put into awkward resource shortages that require redesigning and relocation.
it’s a much grimmer game than ONI though, aiming for a sort of conan-esque fantasy city-state barbarism. for example, the justice line of builds requires you build a dungeon, court, GALLOWS, AND ENSLAVER in order to function correctly. granted, the only crime in this game is murder; your citizens don’t thieve or assault each other, they merely have a % chance to do a spontaneous killing. the dev just added “entertainment” line of buildings which includes a gladiator arena. you know, evil low fantasy stuff.
it does mean the steam community for the game is full of scumsuckers though.
i also played more rise to ruins. still very good. i posted about it… about a year ago! i just tend to play colony sims around the same time every year, huh.