I’d rather be having bros autistically obsessing over supply lines and infrastructure than the ww2 borders of a fascist yugoslavia. Map painting games, city builders, and political sims all push the same dopamine button in the brain. You give a dude a map of earth and tell him to build communism on it and he will spend the next twenty four hours arguing with similar nerds in a forum about entirely fictional models of resource deposits in Africa being entirely unbalanced. Let’s focus the analytical mind towards coming up with highly unrealistic plans for managing the global economy than making war.
Single-handedly nationalizes the world economy
Proceeds to fumble it like spaghetti
Wait until you find out about Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic. It's a very fun game, can recommend.
Another game I can’t get myself to sit down and play
13 year old me would have loved it
you can turn off a lot of things like energy/water/waste management and set it to unlimited money and easily pleased citizens and play it pretty casually.
I need to give it a fair shake. It's just the neoliberal SimCity ideology and Paradox DLC model that makes it hard for me to get excited
I haven't played C:S2 yet, but in the original, I just turn on infinite money, make all the amenities free for my citizens, and then try to make a beautiful, efficient place where everybody is happy. The mass transit and park DLCs both added a lot to my enjoyment. Every city I make has at least one giant park with preserve areas and accessible trails.
it's pretty fun 😊
Sounds like a blast! I know I picked it up as an EGS freebie, but I have to see what DLCs it included. Cities: Skylines has that too many DLCs problem like The Sims and all the Paradox map painter games
There's a cool video from Polygon about it:
https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/4/1/22352583/simcity-hidden-politics-ideology-urban-dynamics
Cities: Skylines is definitely in the same design lineage
One step futher: something like Ender's Game where they think they're playing map games, but they're actually doing real central planning.
In the USSR, they harnessed ekranoplan autism. Based, of course. But imagine a communist world economy that harnessed the power of excel sheet autism.
I volunteer myself for this job. I can't wait to play Hearts of Project Cybersyn IV. Please go light on the DLCs. And promise a soundtrack that's better than the playlist for the Internationale in Kaiserreich.
You should be aware they had an actual cold war game that got scrapped. We were decently close to this already. It was called East vs West.
Some of the soundtrack was reused in HOI IV. I think the game was 60 or 70% done.
I like citybuilders, but I'm not sure where people find the time for them. I also wish I didn't get so rusty on GIS software. Playing around with maps is genuinely fascinating and fun.
Maybe I made a mistake when I said city builder, focusing entirely on one city would be too micromanaging. Map making games are more macro, city games can be that but they usually don’t have complex supply chains and the general autism that makes map games enjoyable. City builders are mostly “place building model here, it does nothing, maybe it simulates traffic, idk fuck you.” There’s no strategy in them.
