Mandoric posted:

I've put around 200 tracked hours into this, and probably twice as much into out-of-engine planning and discussing.

When it actually clicks and you understand and engage with all the systems, it's extremely engaging; as the name implies the game part is essentially an autarkhy simulator, where the goal is to touch the "normal" city builder pay-cash-for-ploppable play as little as possible and instead build out with solely local labor and as many local materials as possible. (Right now there are some points early on where you can't do so, but the next patch is supposed to cover those last few "need a resource to extract more of that resource" blockers.) This does make it a bit slow and deliberate at points.

The catch is that, in the fine tradition of high-quality eurojank, the systems are decently balanced and afford a lot of opportunity for improvement but you've got to figure them out and memorize them yourself. Much of the layout of your towns depends on chains of building going down in a particular order and with particular amounts of free space around them for later expansion; these orders can at least be mirrored but to discover that there's a "mirror building" key you have to pay close attention in the keybinds menu; storages are optional but near-vital and complicate layout further; some buildings push, some pull, and some do neither which is flagged nowhere in the UI; and a number of the services (education, crime, and loyalty in particular) are implemented in a way where they don't gate anything you can see in the UI but the penalties for ignoring them build exponentially and you can brick a start by putting them off a little too long. Some of the services just aren't touched on in the UI at all, orphans are apparently a thing that is tracked but I hadn't noticed the orphanage building tucked away in the ancillary parts of the schools category until my current run. All resource extractors are valid worksites, but some actually require labor and in others any human contribution is overshadowed by machines. The ratio math gets extremely don't-even-try; a logging camp working at full bore supplies, IIRC, 401 chemical plants, for example. And there are of course no general range overlays for anything, just an overlay on initial placement showing connections that will work; you've got to keep in mind, say, that some factories self-heat and will never show a red line to the heat exchanger, while others don't and if they aren't showing a red line on placement will tank their workers' health.
The fairly deserved joke in the thread in Games is that they not only made a communism simulator, but for added veracity they made it unplayable without the tutelage of a vanguard party.

And you definitely have to be able to, psychologically, deal with having slack in a way that the rest of the genre tries to optimize away. Workers prefer to, well, work, and even if you don't need and can't even store any more steel, you'd better be holding hardbass breakdance competitions in the break room every day so those 500 people don't sit at home resentfully unemployed and drinking. Conversely, you're going to need steel to build a lot of things, so even if you only have the people to put 50 to work building the full-sized steel mill is often better than trucking it in from the border. Commutes need to be short enough to deal with winter snow slowing traffic. Factories almost require added storages for their inputs so a single missed shift due to illness at the daycare doesn't result in a refinery worker staying home to watch the kids, resulting in a fuel shortage, resulting in a bus waiting at the gas station, resulting in the whole coal mine missing a shift, resulting in the district heating plant shutting down, resulting in the entire town freezing to death.

So that 200 tracked hours is, to be fair, around 1 in 2019-2020, 5 in 2020-2021, and the remaining 194 in the past year after I put the extra discussing and planning in. But once I stopped having to fight the game, it's quite rewarding, with the pace meaning there's always something to plan around or watch being done rather than the SCitis of eventually just slopping extra zones on and tweaking later.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Caesar III had the basic formula down, but it didn't have roadblocks, which were such a critical aspect of how the game worked with its randomly-wandering service providers that you can never go back without it. Further, the victory conditions were all basic prosperity metrics, which were fine, but could have been better.

Frosted Flake posted:

Frosted Flake posted:

Egypt: Old Kingdom is on sale right now,

Frosted Flake posted:

Other than that, I haven’t tried any of the Anno games so if someone could fill me in on those, I’m curious about them.

Pryor on Fire posted:

Workers & Resources is great, it's sort of Rimworldy in that there are a ton of ways to fail and collapse your city, but if you enjoy that style of game and figuring out all the systems it is pretty fun. Once you get to the point where you have an army of trucks rolling out to pave a runway or all the factories to manufacture your own cars you feel like you really accomplished something.

gradenko_2000 posted:

trip report on Augustus:

* it's dead-simple to download and install

* yes, it has roadblocks. Holy poo poo. You can construct fully contained housing blocks now! incredible!

* it even has global labor pool, that thing that even Pharaoh didn't have that took until Zeus to be implemented. fantastic!

* there are overlays for the range/reach of wells and reservoirs for the water supply. wow!

* the UI panel on the right-hand side has been expanded to include an unemployment indicator

I was able to blast through the first two missions of the campaign in about 20 minutes

KirbyKhan you are a steely-eyed missile man for discovering this reinvigoration of the game

Mandoric posted:

E: Yes, yes, this is it! Your first domestically-produced tower crane, built under license from Czech or DDR plans but where every girder is domestic steel forged from domestic iron and coal, and every gear machined by domestic workers, rolls off the production line and is ready to be hauled to a construction office to start its career of lifting prefab panels into place. There it will do the hard work of 20 men and women who are now freed to pursue more intellectually engaging careers.
If your reaction is "why did I spend the past 3 hours and ₽200k on plans for this when I could have just paid 30,000 of my ten million rubles, or even better just paid 50,000 of my ten million rubles to have Uncle Joe/Uncle Nicky instabuild that apartment block", W&R probably won't hit for you unless you're very into the Warsaw Pact urban aesthetic.
If, on the other hand, you're relishing the idea that your 7th and beyond cranes cost only labor-time now that you've built up the productive forces, or you're already hearing in your heart an orchestra cue up at the ceremony to cut the ribbon and honor the most dedicated workers on the line, then it's a "wait it's dawn already? poo poo" banger.

Takanago posted:

One of the fun things about Workers & Resources is that it doesn't take any shortcuts when simulating personal automobiles which makes them an incredible pain in the rear end. So you might decide to build a fancy automobile manufacturing plant and start handing them out to your most loyal/highly educated citizens, when suddenly you realize "Oh poo poo I need a parking spot for every single one of these things." And then you have parking lots cluttering up your urban spaces. And not only that, but your road system which was built to handle buses and trucks now has to deal with all these personal cars and you go "why did we even decide to let people have their own vehicles in the first place"

Orange Devil posted:

Wanna see a W&R big box store with parking.

Zeppelin Insanity posted:

It's actually really funny how the only way to make a capitalist system in a game is to wave a magic wand and not simulate anything

Incidentally remember that time Sim City tried to make water and power be NPCs that walk around your grid lmao

Danann posted:

I wonder how many economic majors have played Sim City and think that's how economies work.

Danann posted:

I wonder how many economic majors have played Sim City and think that's how economies work.

Archduke Frantz Fanon posted:

sim city’s design is based on some book on urban planning will wright read in the 80s that was influential on the hellscape single use zoning of american suburbs

so in a way

gradenko_2000 posted:

That anecdote about how your game is going to turn to poo poo once you start cranking out cars because the game models each and every car and you'll need to start putting parking spaces everywhere is fascinating to me, because we now have the kind of computational power to render these sorts of simulations at a 1-to-1 level (with enough effort), and when you do that, suddenly all of the "assume a perfect sphere in a frictionless room" bullshit of neoclassical economics goes away and all you're left with is the immortal science.

John Charity Spring posted:

the biggest individual car parks you can place in W&R have like 24 spaces or something lol. I guess you could put a shitload of them all together

gradenko_2000 posted:

here's the full video to expound on the point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_51_YJQpeg0

Slavvy posted:

I'm halfway through the tutorials on w&r and it's easily the best game of this kind I've played. Also very uplifting instead of just increasingly immiserating and stressful.

Danann posted:

Magnasanti (as mentioned in that video) being the extreme example of an ideal SimCity has got me thinking. IRL both parties in America are pretty much cop supporters with the George Floyd protests after all being sparked by police behavior in a Dem city in a Dem state. And in Magnasanti, extreme police funding is how the city is able to sustain itself despite being a satanic charnel house. It would not surprise me if SimCity would have came up in the childhood memories of the middle and lower functionaries of the two-party-for-one-party-state and they have absorbed the assumptions postulated by SimCity into the real world. Magnasanti in that respect would seem like the logical endpoint of what our neoliberal elites would love.

On the other hand, the other necessary city funding to keep Magansanti afloat is public transportation. It has absolutely abolished streets, parking, etc. and hence relies completely on subways to move population around (though apparently underutilized in the simulation). Destroying a high-value industrial sector is too much to ask of our neoliberal elites and SimCity's non-simulation of the movement and production of goods also means that Magnasanti wouldn't be economically viable.

Magnasanti is an extreme example but it does expose what's desirable in an education system that will incorporate SimCity in the teaching of its youth.

gradenko_2000 posted:

That anecdote about how your game is going to turn to poo poo once you start cranking out cars because the game models each and every car and you'll need to start putting parking spaces everywhere is fascinating to me, because we now have the kind of computational power to render these sorts of simulations at a 1-to-1 level (with enough effort), and when you do that, suddenly all of the "assume a perfect sphere in a frictionless room" bullshit of neoclassical economics goes away and all you're left with is the immortal science.

Danann posted:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/529340/Victoria_3/

Victoria 3 up for pre-purchase.

Tankbuster posted:

There's a 4 hour stream on paradox's channel if you want to play hooky at work.