Recent from talks
City-building game
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
City-building game
A city-building game, citybuilder or town-building game, is a genre of simulation video game where players act as the overall planner and leader of a city or town, looking down on it from above, and being responsible for its growth and management strategy. Players choose building placement and city management features such as salaries and work priorities, and the city develops accordingly.
City-building games such as SimCity, Cities XXL or Cities: Skylines are considered a type of construction and management simulation.
The earliest city-building game was The Sumerian Game (1964), a text-based mainframe game written by Mabel Addis, based on the ancient Sumerian city of Lagash. It was subsequently adapted into The Sumer Game (1968), later known as Hamurabi. The first sim game, Utopia (1982) developed for the Mattel Intellivision console system, covered many of these same elements, but was limited by the primitive screen resolutions of its era. Unlike the thousands of individual spaces possible a few years later in SimCity, each island in Utopia held only 29 "buildable" spaces for schools, factories and other constructions. The player's score was based on the well-being of his people.
The city-building game genre was established in 1989 with SimCity, which emphasized continuous building rather than a set victory condition. Players followed personal preferences in design and growth. Indicators of success were maintaining positive budget balance and citizen satisfaction. While "SimCity" was independently developed by Will Wright, beginning in 1985; the game was not released until 1989. Because the game lacked any arcade or action elements that dominated the video game market in the 1980s, video game publishers declined to release the title for fear of its commercial failure until Broderbund eventually agreed to distribute it. SimCity was a financial success, selling one million copies by late 1992, including 500,000 for home computers and another 500,000 for the SNES. In the United States, it was the ninth best-selling computer game from 1993 to 1999, with another 830,000 units sold. The SNES version sold 1.98 million units worldwide, including 900,000 units in Japan. Subsequent SimCity titles such as SimCity 4 soon followed when high sales of the game demonstrated its popularity. SimCity inspired a new genre of video games. "Software toys" that were open-ended with no set objective were developed trying to duplicate SimCity's success. The most successful was Wright's own The Sims, which went on to be the best selling computer game of all time. The ideas pioneered in SimCity have been incorporated into real-world applications as well, as urban developers have recognized that the game's design was "gamification" of city planning by integrating numerous real-world systems for a city or region interacted to project growth or change. Several real-world city improvement projects started with models inspired by SimCity prior to implementation, particularly with the onset of more connected smart cities.
1992 and 1993 saw the release of various games. Impressions Games was a British video game developer which created a series of historical city-building games starting from a blockbuster game which modeled cities in ancient Rome: Caesar. These games swapped radius-based “coverage” for agents (“walkers”; market ladies, priests, barbers, who physically deliver services along streets. The focus was now on street topology (loops, gates, choke points) and housing evolution (meeting tiered needs). Those games followed the style of Sim City over historical accuracy, such as including schools and hospitals, but not slavery.
In 1993, The Settlers, which is set in medieval times and simulates a complex settlement and commerce system, which was revolutionary at the time. The Settlers turns the commerce into a watchable machine: woodcutter → sawmill → planks → building. Later entries add territory control and quality-of-life dashboards, but the core feature was observing supply lines.
The PC game Stronghold developed by Stormfront Studios, also appeared in 1993, and was advertised as "SimCity meets Dungeons & Dragons in 3D". Elves, humans and dwarves each built neighborhoods with unique architecture within the player's town. The title also had elements of real-time strategy games when enemies attacked the city, and the line between city-building and RTS games has often been blurred with this kind of hybrid title. True 3D graphics were not yet possible at that time, so the advertised 3D was actually a clever use of 2D graphics (an isometric projection) with mathematically generated terrain and overlaid bitmaps and sprites.[citation needed]
The Anno series started in 1998 with the release of Anno 1602 and established a high level of detail in graphics as well as an intense commerce simulation and a distinct gameplay. Players juggle multi-island networks, shipping lanes, population classes with escalating needs, and specialization pressures (expeditions, influence, diplomacy). It blends resource micro-management with macro-level logistics, evolving over time to incorporate futuristic and industrial-age settings.
Hub AI
City-building game AI simulator
(@City-building game_simulator)
City-building game
A city-building game, citybuilder or town-building game, is a genre of simulation video game where players act as the overall planner and leader of a city or town, looking down on it from above, and being responsible for its growth and management strategy. Players choose building placement and city management features such as salaries and work priorities, and the city develops accordingly.
City-building games such as SimCity, Cities XXL or Cities: Skylines are considered a type of construction and management simulation.
The earliest city-building game was The Sumerian Game (1964), a text-based mainframe game written by Mabel Addis, based on the ancient Sumerian city of Lagash. It was subsequently adapted into The Sumer Game (1968), later known as Hamurabi. The first sim game, Utopia (1982) developed for the Mattel Intellivision console system, covered many of these same elements, but was limited by the primitive screen resolutions of its era. Unlike the thousands of individual spaces possible a few years later in SimCity, each island in Utopia held only 29 "buildable" spaces for schools, factories and other constructions. The player's score was based on the well-being of his people.
The city-building game genre was established in 1989 with SimCity, which emphasized continuous building rather than a set victory condition. Players followed personal preferences in design and growth. Indicators of success were maintaining positive budget balance and citizen satisfaction. While "SimCity" was independently developed by Will Wright, beginning in 1985; the game was not released until 1989. Because the game lacked any arcade or action elements that dominated the video game market in the 1980s, video game publishers declined to release the title for fear of its commercial failure until Broderbund eventually agreed to distribute it. SimCity was a financial success, selling one million copies by late 1992, including 500,000 for home computers and another 500,000 for the SNES. In the United States, it was the ninth best-selling computer game from 1993 to 1999, with another 830,000 units sold. The SNES version sold 1.98 million units worldwide, including 900,000 units in Japan. Subsequent SimCity titles such as SimCity 4 soon followed when high sales of the game demonstrated its popularity. SimCity inspired a new genre of video games. "Software toys" that were open-ended with no set objective were developed trying to duplicate SimCity's success. The most successful was Wright's own The Sims, which went on to be the best selling computer game of all time. The ideas pioneered in SimCity have been incorporated into real-world applications as well, as urban developers have recognized that the game's design was "gamification" of city planning by integrating numerous real-world systems for a city or region interacted to project growth or change. Several real-world city improvement projects started with models inspired by SimCity prior to implementation, particularly with the onset of more connected smart cities.
1992 and 1993 saw the release of various games. Impressions Games was a British video game developer which created a series of historical city-building games starting from a blockbuster game which modeled cities in ancient Rome: Caesar. These games swapped radius-based “coverage” for agents (“walkers”; market ladies, priests, barbers, who physically deliver services along streets. The focus was now on street topology (loops, gates, choke points) and housing evolution (meeting tiered needs). Those games followed the style of Sim City over historical accuracy, such as including schools and hospitals, but not slavery.
In 1993, The Settlers, which is set in medieval times and simulates a complex settlement and commerce system, which was revolutionary at the time. The Settlers turns the commerce into a watchable machine: woodcutter → sawmill → planks → building. Later entries add territory control and quality-of-life dashboards, but the core feature was observing supply lines.
The PC game Stronghold developed by Stormfront Studios, also appeared in 1993, and was advertised as "SimCity meets Dungeons & Dragons in 3D". Elves, humans and dwarves each built neighborhoods with unique architecture within the player's town. The title also had elements of real-time strategy games when enemies attacked the city, and the line between city-building and RTS games has often been blurred with this kind of hybrid title. True 3D graphics were not yet possible at that time, so the advertised 3D was actually a clever use of 2D graphics (an isometric projection) with mathematically generated terrain and overlaid bitmaps and sprites.[citation needed]
The Anno series started in 1998 with the release of Anno 1602 and established a high level of detail in graphics as well as an intense commerce simulation and a distinct gameplay. Players juggle multi-island networks, shipping lanes, population classes with escalating needs, and specialization pressures (expeditions, influence, diplomacy). It blends resource micro-management with macro-level logistics, evolving over time to incorporate futuristic and industrial-age settings.
Recent media