Good city builders?

[Saregon]

So I've been thinking about getting into a city builder type game, but I don't want the new SimCity for a variety of reasons, always on and Origin among them. Any suggestions? Preferably something availlible on Steam or GOG. The closest thing I've played are RTS games, so I have little experience with the genre, but I have looked a tiny bit into Tropico 4 and Anno 2070.

 

[Pink Gregory]

The Impressions City Builders are a good place to start.

Caesar III, Pharoah and Zeus, all on GOG, the latter two with their expansions.

 

[Weaver]

Unfortunately there really aren't that many.
Tropico and the anno are both fantastic series, but they aren't nearly as focused on the "city" really as SimCity is. They're more "games" if that makes any sense. It's about supply chains, exporting product for money, completing missions, doing the campaigns, etc.

The closest thing to SimCity is Cities XL; but it has its own myriad of problems. The game slows down an immense amount later on when you have a larger city, the UI is fucking atrocious and upgrading roads is a nightmare. You literally have to just demolish huge sections of your city and re-build a road, re-zone the surrounding area then that area has to develop again.

It's pretty unfortunately, but really the best city builder is still SimCity. You might want to play SimCity 4?

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I'm guessing SimCity 4 with a metric shitload of mods is your best bet.

Anno 2070 is a great game, but not really a "city builder" per se.

Same with the Caesar/Tropico games, they're more about supply chain management.

Cities XL is buggy and has a lot of issues.

Simcity is a fucking mess.

 

[lRookiel]

The stronghold series (Yes, even 3)

Medieval city sim with a side of RTS for added effect. It's the only sim game I've ever liked.

 

[Saregon]

The stronghold series (Yes, even 3)

Medieval city sim with a side of RTS for added effect. It's the only sim game I've ever liked.

I have played all of those, loved the first one, Crusader and 3, which I'm currently playing, not a huge fan of 2 for some reason though.

They're not what I'm thinking of though, can't really say I'm too sure what I want from it, it's a bit of an I will know it when I find it sort of thing. Definitely going to check out SimCity 4.

 

[The Madman]

I've been playing Tropico 4 like crazy lately, I'd highly recommend it. Not nearly as large scale as the Sim City games but it's just a ton of fun to play and has quite a few neat tricks of its own.

Tropico is like the Saints Row of the city-building genre. It doesn't take itself seriously and is extremely good at what it does. Highly recommend it!

 

[Zenn3k]

If you enjoyed SimCity 4 and want something more like that, play Cities XL. Its got bugs, bugs that will probably never be fixed, but its 90% functional...even if retail demand is always too low.

I found it fun.

 

[Laughing Man]

The closest thing to SimCity is Cities XL; but it has its own myriad of problems. The game slows down an immense amount later on when you have a larger city, the UI is fucking atrocious and upgrading roads is a nightmare.

If you want something close to Simcity then Cities XL is the game, the slow down in the game engine later on in a developed city is actually shockingly easy to get round, I actually posted a solution on the Cities XL forums around two years ago. Essentially the game is single core and hits the core for 100% ALL the time, set the game affinity to real time and assuming you have a quad core system, set the active cores to 1, 2 and 3 (it defaults to 0) the game load will then be shifted from core to core on the fly never maxing at 100% it helps ease the slowdown considerably.

I may be wrong but I think their is actually an upgrade options for the roads in the game as well, it is just hidden and not very obvious, I would have to double check that. Other than that it is the closest to a pure city builder you're going to get.

 

[Total LOLige]

Tropico is like the Saints Row of the city-building genre. It doesn't take itself seriously and is extremely good at what it does. Highly recommend it!

It's a very funny game, although at times it borders on the offensive. You know with america's "soon to invade" list and arabs not "paying tropico in camels for some time" there were some other ones that I can't remember. The parody of the Iron Lady and Richard Nixon(Dick Richards, classic) are my favourites.

I second all the Tropico 4 recommendations, I had a lot of fun with Atari's Tycoon City: New York when I was a kid. I recently bought Tropico Reloaded on steam for £1.50 I haven't really played it much but Tropico 2: Pirate Cove has a nice concept that might be worth checking out, be a Pirate King what's not to love?

 

[Tom Waits' hat]

The best city building games out there? Unfortunately, it is still the new SimCity in my opinion. Yes, it's a mess and got a lot of problems, but as a long time city building/ management fan. This is hands down the best one out there.

I prefer the new SimCity just a bit more than SimCity 4. But it could be I'm burnt out on SimCity 4 after spending couple hundred hours on it. I guess you can go SimCity 4, if that online DRM really bother you. That would probably be the next best thing in line.

As other had mentioned, Caesar and Pharaoh are good choice too, but it's a bit old though. Anno and Tropico? They're fun, but they're not really city building. Still fun games though, should check them out when you have a chance.