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Can Anyone Recommend a Good "Builder"?

Kashmir Slippers

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I have played a fair share of stragety games in my time (AoE 1-3, Medieval 2, EU3, Vicky 2, Civ, etc.), and I must say that my favorite part of playing strategy games is the building/turtling aspect. I love the micro-managing and watching all the numbers go higher and higher as I develop my cities/units/whatever more than I like bum-rushing my opponent in the first part of the game. I have found, however, that a lot of the strategy games I have played tend to reward rushing the military aspect of the game and subjugating your opponents rather than trying to get developed.

Can the "Dex suggest a strategy game that has a reasonably deep and viable development side of the game? One where map-painting isn't the best or primary goal?
 

spectre

Arcane
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Oct 26, 2008
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Hm. Off the top of my head, you can build some epic defence in Supreme Commander (and of course in Total Annihilation). Turtling will most likely get your ass handed to you in multiplayer vs. a good player, but it's viable vs. lower difficulty AIs, for a long as you grab a decent chunk of resources at the beginning.
Rushing is still present and viable in the game, but it's only one of the options.

I also remember having fun in Populous 3, there's not a whole lot to build, but you can take your sweet time sculpting the terrain with spells to make that perfect fort.
 

Father Walker

Potato Ranger
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Apr 13, 2011
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Settlers 2 is the game you need. If you didn't play it back in the day, then you should try it asap. It's pretty light on the military aspect, but other than that, it's all about building stuff and watching your settlement grow and prosper.

Civ series is also a good one. You say you did play it, so perhaps it's not the thing you're looking for. You might also try Colonization. I actually like the original one more than any of the Civ games.

Playing HOI 2/3 with Soviet Union also has lots of turtling involved. I like to play those games with CCCP, since there's lots of planning and micro involved when preparing for the inevitable German rape.

Other than that? I don't know, Ceasar series perhaps? Then again, I didn't play any of the games from the series for too long so I'm not going to say anything more.
 

Telengard

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The Caesar/Pharaoh/Master of Olympus/Rise of the Middle Kingdom series do have a lot of building, but it is as much about being a "mayor" and managing the wants and needs of your people while you set about doing all that building. And the combat is so bare-bones that it almost doesn't exist. Which didn't stop me from playing them all to death, but it seems like it might be too many steps in the direction of management games for what the OP was asking.

My suggestion: I second Supreme Commander. I would also like to add another to the list (if you can accept the way-back machine). It's been a long time since I played it, but I believe the original Stronghold (D&D one) was won almost purely on base building. Like making absolute seas of buildings. You do need to fight monsters/increase levels, but the game is won and lost at the base building level.

If you do want to branch out some, you might consider going with straight-up base-building games. They are admittedly few and far between, so you have to take them as they are, but they do exist. Examples: Evil Genius, Dungeon Keeper, and Star Colony. And, stretching it a bit, Stronghold (new one).
Also what is the best tycoon game?
My favorite is RollerCoaster Tycoon series, for including something besides the usual layout wants/needs formula. For instance, coasters need inertia to make it up a hill (that is, without using a no-fun lift), but you can't make the coasters too fast or people throw up. This is the tycoon game I played for the longest, by far.

Then Tropico is honorable mention, for letting you be a petty dictator doing petty things like embezzling money.
 

Dayyālu

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http://www.listal.com/game/perimeter-pc Perimeter? I have never played it infact can someone tell me if its good? Also what is the best tycoon game?


It's quite good, even with a LOT of strange gimmicks - morphing units, a required 'net' of energy pylons for resources and buildings, 'terraforming', the titular 'Perimeter'- if you find it at a good low price, give it a shot.

It's not a 'building game', however- focus is on crushing enemies or surviving to hostile conditions.

And the universe&plot is kinda weird.
 

ChristofferC

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You are pretty much describing Settlers 2. Play it now! It's one of the best games ever made, although it has some quirks and annoyances.
 

sser

Arcane
Developer
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Mar 10, 2011
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This is gonna sound weird, but everyone else has already mentioned a lot of the good ones...

Black & White 2. I had a fun time building cities in this game. A really good time, even. The overall campaign is generic and repetitive in some way, but it's a lot like Populous with an expanded city-building facet. Give it a try.
 

Kashmir Slippers

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This is gonna sound weird, but everyone else has already mentioned a lot of the good ones...

Black & White 2. I had a fun time building cities in this game. A really good time, even. The overall campaign is generic and repetitive in some way, but it's a lot like Populous with an expanded city-building facet. Give it a try.

To be honest, I did give Black & White 2 a whirl a few years back. I absolutely LOVED the first five hours of it that I played, but I started to absolutely despise it after one scenario where the other side had it's own titan-thing and would constantly throw troops at you at irregular points. Call me too popamole, but I got tired of constantly having to separate the men, conscript them, and send them + my titan-thing over to kick ass, just to rinse and repeat two minutes later. That and it started to take soooooo long to win by building that conquest seemed like the best way to go.

... sorry. Here I am acting like I know what I am talking about. I did love the building parts of Black and White 2, so thank you for the suggestion. I might have to brush it off and give it another whirl.
 

sser

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Mar 10, 2011
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1,866,661
This is gonna sound weird, but everyone else has already mentioned a lot of the good ones...

Black & White 2. I had a fun time building cities in this game. A really good time, even. The overall campaign is generic and repetitive in some way, but it's a lot like Populous with an expanded city-building facet. Give it a try.

To be honest, I did give Black & White 2 a whirl a few years back. I absolutely LOVED the first five hours of it that I played, but I started to absolutely despise it after one scenario where the other side had it's own titan-thing and would constantly throw troops at you at irregular points. Call me too popamole, but I got tired of constantly having to separate the men, conscript them, and send them + my titan-thing over to kick ass, just to rinse and repeat two minutes later. That and it started to take soooooo long to win by building that conquest seemed like the best way to go.

... sorry. Here I am acting like I know what I am talking about. I did love the building parts of Black and White 2, so thank you for the suggestion. I might have to brush it off and give it another whirl.

I agree with all of this. That said, I managed to look past the faults because I really did enjoy building big cities and spreading out over the islands. You could reliably defend yourself with hordes of archers and a few spells or just sending your big godzilla creature to go stomp their armies. Some levels had devastating spells going off, though, and I never played the last island because the game would bug out during the cutscene. I heard it was nothing but non-stop attacks.
 

laclongquan

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Combat of Startopia is more like building the laser towers to defend your own sector, let them massacre the enemies'-capture force. Retry a few times to attrit their energy reserve. Meanwhile building up a big reserve of combat bots and drop a shitload of them to capture enemies sectors.
 

IDtenT

Menace to sobriety!
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Divinity: Original Sin
Settlers 2 is an absolute beast of a game. The closest you can get today is something like ANNO, yet still completely different. I'd suggest trying out Widelands as well, an open source Settlers clone.

In tycoon games there really isn't anything better than Transport Tycoon and for that there is also an open source clone OpenTTD. I'd go so far as to say that OpenTTD is already much better than the original. There are some really fun tycoons out there like Pizza Tycoon and stuff like that.

I second all nominations for Impression Games style city builders. Excellent games all round. Zeus is probably the summit of the series.

I also second all nomination for Bullfrog-like games.

These types of games were my bread and butter through-out childhood.
 

made

Arcane
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Dec 18, 2006
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Personally I like Pharaoh best out of all Impressions games. Zeus has a weird UI that always throws me off until I spend a few hours on it.

Btw, there are widescreen mods available for both of them, with Emperor and Caesar in the works as well. The games look glorious in HD:
http://www.wsgf.org/dr/cleopatra-queen-nile/en
(Zeus is on their forum, cba looking for the link now)
 

Goliath

Arcane
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Messages
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You are pretty much describing Settlers 2. Play it now! It's one of the best games ever made, although it has some quirks and annoyances.

Agreed but there is a similar (but much less well-known) game which I like even better: Cultures. I think it's the ultimate for (mostly) peaceful, micro-managing builders. You even get to micro-manage the love life of each of your citizens. It's an entire series of games which declined later on but you must play Cultures 1 & 2.

Also the game promotes proper values: females stay home and are responsible for child care and cooking meals for their hard-working men. The campaign story is also way more interesting and motivating than in Settlers 2. I actually finished the Cultures games (something I cannot claim about Settlers 2).

cultures2_4.jpg
 

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