Some recent city-builders compared.

Some recent city-builders compared. These are all games where you place buildings on a map and manage resources.

* Surviving Mars is about Mars colonies that settle and eventually terraform the planet.

Bulgarian developer Haemimont has a long history of city-builders, including some of the Tropico series. (I suspect Tropico, like Cities: Skylines, has seen an enormous commercial benefit from the implosion of SimCity.) The game runs fine and looks clear. A lot of content, including terraforming, is separate DLC. Generally good interface. Essential information tends to be available at a glance or with one click or mouseover. Individual colonists can be investigated in detail, revealing their special traits and the causes of their happiness level. Resource trends can be tracked. There is a tutorial.

The settlement area must be gradually scanned to reveal resources. Water, concrete, and metal are critical for a founding. Place depots to store resources — either general-purpose and highly configurable universal depots, or dedicated single-resource depots. Building and cargo transport are done by drones based out of landed rockets, mobile drone rovers, or drone center buildings. Explorer rovers probe anomalies for research benefits, and transport rovers can gather and transfer materials (particularly surface metal). As your colony sprawls (probably in search of more subsurface water deposits) you'll want to build a shuttle hub so resources can be flown longer distances.

Dust settles on buildings, eventually requiring repair, which involves a resource determined by the type of building. Dust accumulates faster on buildings near dust-producing stuff like concrete plants, metal mines, or rockets landing without concrete landing pads. This is not good Endless Space nanomachine money dust, it's just regular bad Mars dust that you don't want.

Some buildings are automated, but others require human workers. You don't start with a human population and have to build a suitable habitat before people can arrive. Once they do, there's a "founder period" where no more colonists can arrive until your first colonists have survived for 10 "Sols." A Sol behaves like a day and night for solar energy purposes but represents a longer period of time in respect to colonist age, so colonists will grow up and reproduce over the course of the game.

Colonists live in domes, and the buildings where they live are built as substructures inside of domes. The domes need water and air, transported by pipe network, as well as energy from a cable network like nearly all buildings. Many domes can support an additional central structure called a spire. Spires may be more effective than ordinary in-dome buildings or offer effects that you can't otherwise get, but they require research and there aren't as many places you can build them.

Buildings outside of domes that require colonists, like rare metal mines, must have a dome nearby for those colonists to live in. As you'd expect from a Tropico dev, colonists are modeled as figures in the gameworld with specific residences, shifts at jobs, and recreational destinations. Their travel concerns can be taken into account intuitively; you want the places they go to be close together.

Domes can be connected with passageways, and passageways can be bridged so they won't hinder your vehicles too much, but the passageway entrance takes up some dome space on both ends, and colonists don't like to go between domes (happiness sources will be less efficient just for being in another dome than the colonist's home), and it's less travel-efficient. Domes CANNOT be joined airlock-to-airlock to create larger dome complexes, even though it totally looks like that should work.

New colonists have to be brought in on rockets, selected from pools of applicants. Rockets can be refueled (fuel is refined from water) and sent back to Earth, or on special missions on the Mars map (which usually require other things like crews, money, or goods to succeed; rival colonies may attempt them also). Rockets returning to Earth can be loaded with rare metals, which will be sold on arrival. The rockets can also be used to purchase cargo, including certain prefabricated buildings. (This Earth/Mars market is much simpler than the one in Offworld Trading Company, where it's the heart of the game.) This is essential to the early stage when exploitation and manufacturing on Mars are limited and important buildings haven't been researched. Some trade with rival colonies is also possible. Money is principally a resource for trading with Earth; your colony runs directly on resources and people.

Research is unlocked along several parallel linear topics like Terraforming and Social. Anomalies and events can allow projects to be researched out of order. Base research income is from your sponsor back on Earth (chosen at mission start along with landing site and leader type), but you can get more from anomalies and universities in domes. Some research has passive effects, but most allows new buildings or adds options to existing buildings. Later buildings may require a lot of advanced resources, including some when they break down.

Mars has hazards which vary in frequency by settlement site. Dust storms disrupt power and oxygen generation, as well as spreading dust. Cold waves stop your colonies from using stored water. Meteors break things, which is a good reason not to put all your life support buildings in one place. Later on you can build anti-meteor lasers. Your colony will also be hit with one of several endgame crisis storylines. (You may remember the variable endgame crisis mechanic from Stellaris.)

There's replayability. Different mission start options influence the resources you begin with, what you can build, objectives, and various passive benefits. Many maps are available. Some achievements, such as having 200 vegan colonists, require specialized approaches.

Signature feature: Marsdomes.


* Frostpunk is about coal-burning steampunk settlements in Northern England during a global cooling event.

Polish developer 11bit previously did the Anomaly tower defense series and This War of Mine, a management/adventure game about civilians surviving in a warzone. The game runs all right and looks absolutely great, with the visual design dominated by deep blacks and stark whites but accented by a blazing central furnace. Most of the DLC is yet to be released. Interface is a little unconventional, with a lot of emphasis on selecting workplaces to set the number of workers assigned there, but it works once you get the hang of it. The first scenario serves the role of a tutorial, although it is not intended to be won on the first try.

Your colony location is fixed by the scenario. Essential resources include coal, wood, and metal. Some of each can easily be collected by colonist work crews, but larger deposits need specialized buildings to exploit them. Food is important too, generated by hunting and later also farming.

Securing long-term access to coal is vital, because if you can't keep the central furnace lit, everyone will freeze to death. Temperatures vary, and sometimes it will be so cold that if work parties are sent out to gather resources, some will suffer frostbite (but you may have to do it anyway). Workplaces can become too cold to operate; the threshold temperature depends on building type.

The population is divided into workers, engineers, and children. They may also be crippled. (Eventually, cripples can receive prosthetics.) Engineers are more educated and can do some jobs that workers can't, like research. Children can do certain jobs if you legalize child labor. The work shift is organized around a day/night cycle. The timeframe of the game is too short for children to grow up. Some jobs can also be done by giant steampunk spider robots called automatons. Although you can inspect individuals, they aren't as detailed in variation as the colonists in Surviving Mars.

Colonists live around a central coal furnace that generates the heat they need to survive. The settlement is organized radially, with each building being placed on a circle around the furnace. Later it's possible to heat workplaces a bit, and build smaller secondary furnaces too. The central furnace has both an intensity and a radius, each dependent on research and increased coal consumption. The most vital things should be closest to the furnace.

New colonists might arrive as refugees in events, or be discovered on the world map. I haven't seen trade so far, but you can send out expeditions to plunder sites on the map, discover new ones, and sometimes even set up "depots" that will produce a resource in an ongoing way, such as restarting an old coal mine to send shipments back to the city.

Research is conducted by engineers assigned to workshop buildings. Research is needed to tap into the larger supplies of resources (such as coal mines for coal), and to improve the central furnace so that the city can survive as the world gets even colder. Research costs resources, with the cost determined by the technology being researched. There are four technology categories, each with five research tiers to unlock by researching the unlock as if it were a technology.

There is also a system of laws with three trees. The first is about making compromises for survival, like mixing sawdust into the rations so that more meals are generated per unit of raw food (but some people get sick). The other two are the mutually-exclusive Order and Faith paths for managing morale. Pursued far enough, both become spooky cults of personality.

The main hazard is the weather, but there are also many dangerous events. The game is extremely event-driven, and the event chains are not as random as you may be used to from Paradox games. Judging by the first scenario, they're deep and challenging, but in the long term replayability may suffer. I haven't tried the Endless Mode yet, but it's configurable and might give the game more longevity. Some achievements require specialized approaches, such as only sourcing coal from charcoal kilns.

Signature feature: central furnace.

* Cliff Empire is about far-future postapocalyptic Earth settlements on small artifical mesas.

I haven't played any other games from developer Lion's Shade. They seem pretty small and obscure. The game runs fine, but a lot of the English is rough, and the interface feels like it's missing a pass that would have made key information more accessible. It's especially frustrating not to be able to see more specific financial information since import/export balance is crucial. It's a little odd to be building on featureless white panels with detailed terrain far below in the background, but the game is very pretty all the same, with a powerfully imaginative visual style, and the orthogonal display mode is a treat for the nostalgic (although I wouldn't play the game that way). There is a tutorial, but it's very possible to get stuck, because there's no way to rescue a city from certain failure states that are easy to blunder into.

A new colony is founded by placing a storage depot on one of three clifftops. From there, getting colonists requires power, water, and a landing pad. They arrive in groups of 15 and are abstracted rather than being distinct individuals. Cargo drones ferry resources to and from stockpiles. It's very important to build a town hall to participate in loans, an intercliff bridge for trade, and a trade portal for orbital trade — without some of these, a city that runs out of matter (the basic building resource) is screwed. It would be nice if there was an option to catapult matter over to a neighboring cliff, or supply materials to the far end of a bridge project.

Cliffs have different yields for different industries, not all of which are revealed without research. Some cliffs are better for wind power, others for solar, others for crops, others for water. Only a cliff with a lake can produce fish, which is important because without some of every food type, colonists will get sick and their work efficiency will drop. (Your colonies start with a balanced reserve of food. but it's easy for this to sneak up on you when that reserve runs out.)

The local effects of buildings appear to be applied per cliff, not radially. Your cliff with a house, a garden, and a nuclear plant on it will have the same ecological outcome regardless of their relative placement. Similarly, citizens and their needs for transport are abstracted. You won't see them walking from their house to their workplace. (They do have a generalized per-cliff desire for personal transport shuttles, though.)

Many buildings have upgrade options, often three mutually exclusive ones. It's nice to have the choice between simply expanding housing, or having it generate power. Some of the upgrades look really cool. I'm a fan of the radiation shield on the nuclear reactor. Be careful, though, because upgrades — like the buildings themselves — cost money. It's not like Surviving Mars or Frostpunk where resources are the only issue for building.

New colonists come down from orbit if there's housing space for them and conditions are attractive enough. There's a day/night cycle for solar power purposes. The game models reproduction, but I haven't seen it yet and am not sure what timetable it occurs on. Employed colonists generate taxes, but unemployed colonists collect unemployment, so you have to be very diligent about providing jobs. Intercity trade only shuffles money around, so to make more you've got to generate tax revenue and sell stuff into orbit.

The cities have limited space and different resources. It makes sense for them to specialize and be interdependent. Since you can't set prices directly, you can't just bail out a struggling city, only give it a loan or (more constructively) set up an industry there than the other cities will pay for.

There is no world map, but the orbital market trade portal is more complex and useful than Earth trade in Surviving Mars (except for not including prefabricated buildings or vehicles), though still less involved than in Offworld Trading Company. The game is marketed as also being in the tower defense genre, but I haven't seen enemies yet in what little time I've played.

Research is done through universities. I don't know much about it yet. One project is a geological survey which makes each cliff's strengths and weaknesses clearer.

So far I've seen one disaster event, a heatwave that disrupted wind power production and caused many building fires. Maintenance centers have firefighting drones that can put fires out.

I'm not sure about replayability. The achievements seem to be focused more on general success than unusual styles of play. There don't seem to be separate scenarios, and if I understand the community guides correctly, the cliffs themselves aren't random — you get a random selection of three from a list of 13 premade cliffs.

Signature feature: three interconnected cities at once, with competitive economies you have to balance against each other (unlike Anno, which is similar but more cooperative — last I played, anyway; I haven't played an Anno game since Palle Hoffstein of Blue Byte bragged about using Twitter blockbots on "assholes" like me). Especially impressive to see a small independent developer concepting and executing this better than Maxis did in the last SimCity.

* Games I can't include on this list because they're not city-builders, but that are sort of related — you do place buildings on a map and manage resources.

Islanders is sort of notionally a city-builder, but so minimalist that it's really more of a puzzle game. You get a randomly generated island and your choice of two sets of buildings to place. Placing the buildings creates a radial point score based on the building and what's near it; for example, a woodcutter gives points for nearby trees but loses them for nearby woodcutters, and a sawmill gives points for nearby woodcutters but loses them for nearby sawmills. Hit the score threshold and you get a new choice of two more sets of buildings, and so on. I 100%ed it in 6 hours, but they were enjoyable hours. Bring your own background audio, because Islanders only has one song and you'll get tired of it fast.

Northgard is a modern hybrid of Age of Empires and Warcraft 3. It has sector-based gameplay and a summer/winter seasonal cycle that cripples combat effectiveness and food production in winter (and requires firewood). Most sectors are guarded by animals or monsters that need to be cleared for settlement. Fight monsters and send out viking raiding parties to gain Fame and unlock the benefits of your chosen faction. It's quite polished and the DLC is strictly optional.