I've played/enjoyed a few City Building games, and I'm considering building one now. What do you think makes a good City Builder?
Here's a few basics I can think of, what do you think should be added or edited? Or just in general, what have you really enjoyed?
1) Simple rewards over time, Money for doing things.the question is how fast.
2) Tasks lists. Can do more than one thing.
3) Tech trees. I.e. can't have an armory without a black smith. Need farmers before making a farmer's market.
4) Need resources: Coal, Wood, Iron, Food, Soldiers, Weapons.
5) Prepare defensive military: soldiers, etc...
I thought you were making an RTS?
The game is intended to feature a stand alone City Builder as your Home city. Safe, constantly improving and give benefits to the other parts of the game. However, I want to make sure I'm really hitting good things about this area by itself. It should be self sufficiently fun on its own, and I'm hoping for good ideas to shape it.
There is a game with a similar feature, and it's predecessors had a similar mechanic, where your capital city was customization both in upgrades and cosmetics. I'm talking about the Age of Empires Games, more notably the third installment and Age of Empires Online. The third installment was simple and you only had a few buildings to upgrade that influence tech costs. Age of Empires Online lets you place key buildings anywhere on a separate map, essentially letting you design your city and use key buildings to manage your tech tree, unit equipment, and materials for crafting. Both of which are pretty small metagames as opposed to being a major mechanic as all it is essentially is an over-dramatic menu system.
One city builder I found to be pretty good was Cities XL. The game itself was okay but the ideas in it's mechanics promoted strategic play due to it's economics, where you have to manage the trade of surplus between cities to influence their economies differently.
(I.E. City A has a bunch of farms so they produce more Food and City B has more Office Labor since it has more offices and trade between each other)
If you're going for an RTS kind of game like AoE online, I would personally like to see a city builder like Simcity or Cities XL for my capital city. But, it needs to be able to interact with the game world constantly. Let the things you do in the RTS element influence things like trade and bonuses to certain areas like completing a mission gives you a surplus of industry good which gives a bonus to commercial demand or simple cash rewards that allow you to build more housing developments.
