Colony Simulators/God-Games

[Jarhyn]

So, I'm curious at this point whether anyone else here, in their desire to either waste time or understand simulations and logistics has ever played any of the common 'settlement simulators', anything from broadly abstract large-scale simulations like Cities Skylines/Sim City to granular "pawn-support" style simulations like RimWorld or Dwarf Fortress, and what accomplishments and failures you all might have to share on the subject, and perhaps this might serve as an encouragement to check out titles like these.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

I've played Dyson Sphere Program, it's pretty complicated but was fun from what I played. I hadn't gotten to the space stage yet though, but I was getting close. I have too much else to play/do so it's on the backburner at the moment.

 

[unapologetic]

I played Sim City for a week several decades ago.
I left out churches, but the program generated a few.
I knocked em down, others poped up. It stoped beind fun.


Edit: IIDB does time travel.
The time stamp on this post says "Tomorrow 12:45" (will change by the time you read this)

 

[Politesse]

I've been a committed player of city simulators and the like since I was a child. My first was the original SimCity, which a mathematician colleague had gifted to my grandmother as a curiosity; the authentication codes to log into the game were a bad xerox job, so it often took a few guesses.

My proudest achievement in simulation is a scale model of the Micronesian island of Pohnpei, streched across four maps in Cities: Skylines. I made a perfect reproduction as near as I could, including all roads, land features, and significant settlements. Then I made a few.... recommended improvements, bringing my modeled Pohnpei into a slightly improved ecological and economic situation as I would define those.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I played Sim City for a week several decades ago.
I left out churches, but the program generated a few.
I knocked em down, others poped up. It stoped beind fun.

They poped up? You mean Rome reached out and placed them?

I think the inhabitants of Sim City have some autonomy to decide what they want. Haven't played in ages. My general experience with city-builders is that I end up having to optimize around the totally stupid behavior of the inhabitants and come to dislike it. Please, give me some halfway intelligent inhabitants that can actually find something! Or else give me explicit ways to get the something to where it's needed. (Factorio--later in the game you have bots that can act with at least a bit of sanity, but otherwise you explicitly move things to where they should be--but you have a lot of tools to do that moving.)

 

[Jarhyn]

I've been a committed player of city simulators and the like since I was a child. My first was the original SimCity, which a mathematician colleague had gifted to my grandmother as a curiosity; the authentication codes to log into the game were a bad xerox job, so it often took a few guesses.

My proudest achievement in simulation is a scale model of the Micronesian island of Pohnpei, streched across four maps in Cities: Skylines. I made a perfect reproduction as near as I could, including all roads, land features, and significant settlements. Then I made a few.... recommended improvements, bringing my modeled Pohnpei into a slightly improved ecological and economic situation as I would define those.

That sounds like a lot of fun.

In my current board on RimWorld, I have constructed a ship with most of what I need to be functional, however I find my power situation to be continually unstable, especially since most of it is satisfied with generators that require the game version of gasoline, "chemfuel", and there's no good way to get that in space.

Currently I have been building up my potential solar capabilities, but this is slow going as it eats a large amount of the surface area of my ship, surface area that I need for growing crops on for food. It also makes it slow because I need to manufacture the components for the foundation, too.

ETA: I now have a ship that can function in orbit just so long as the batteries don't short out.

I played Sim City for a week several decades ago.
I left out churches, but the program generated a few.
I knocked em down, others poped up. It stoped beind fun.

They poped up? You mean Rome reached out and placed them?

I think the inhabitants of Sim City have some autonomy to decide what they want. Haven't played in ages. My general experience with city-builders is that I end up having to optimize around the totally stupid behavior of the inhabitants and come to dislike it. Please, give me some halfway intelligent inhabitants that can actually find something! Or else give me explicit ways to get the something to where it's needed. (Factorio--later in the game you have bots that can act with at least a bit of sanity, but otherwise you explicitly move things to where they should be--but you have a lot of tools to do that moving.)

I mean, the entire theme of the game is "get shit from here to there, and sort it along the way."

 

[Politesse]

That sounds like a lot of fun.

Sometimes. The end result certainly LOOKED gorgeous, as long as one didn't look closely. But it was never truly a "simulator" as I would define it. At least not a simulator of our real world. The more closely you look at the mechanics of the game, the less natural they feel.

 

[Jarhyn]

That sounds like a lot of fun.

Sometimes. The end result certainly LOOKED gorgeous, as long as one didn't look closely. But it was never truly a "simulator" as I would define it. At least not a simulator of our real world. The more closely you look at the mechanics of the game, the less natural they feel.

That's one of the reasons I like Dwarf Fortress more than surface level sims.

The only "mechanic" happens to be that the decision processes involved are more primitive and just-so; the magic of real living and accomplishment is replaced by dice rolls, and the discoveries that are made tend towards trivialities.