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[EuchreJack]

Microlandia: The city sim that inspires you to understand why most cities suck

PC Gamer review:This 'brutally honest' city builder features greedy landlords, cutthroat corporations, and a newspaper that gives you 'a constant reminder that your citizens' bad luck is perhaps your fault'

The game: https://explodi.itch.io/microlandia

Haven't played it myself, but seems interesting.

[coolguy1351]

Sadly can't get it to load/start a city, but I do like the graphical style and the idea of a brutally realistic city sim sounds fun.

[EuchreJack]

I've gotten a chance to play this game. Reminds me of the original SimCity, but with a different underlying economic model.

I got a city with a police station, hospital, and fire department, but we can't afford a high school. At least the budget is mostly balanced. Population: Around 650.

For anyone interested in play testing for a free steam copy, the developer has a topic in Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CityBuilders/comments/1oamgzp/its_happening_microlandia_10_lands_on_steam_in/

[Uristides]

The graphics/art are a tough sell, not gonna lie, but it seems really interesting, especially things like:

Roads cost thousands of dollars per kilometer, and it's a huge investment for the city.

I really hope it also implements some measure of modeling NIMBY-ism and just how hard and expensive it is to plan building something over things that already exist. I always found it a bit lame how in most city simulators bulldozing a whole neighborhood for your new highway usually costs relatively little in terms of both currency and reputation.

[EuchreJack]

The graphics/art are a tough sell, not gonna lie, but it seems really interesting, especially things like:

Roads cost thousands of dollars per kilometer, and it's a huge investment for the city.

I really hope it also implements some measure of modeling NIMBY-ism and just how hard and expensive it is to plan building something over things that already exist. I always found it a bit lame how in most city simulators bulldozing a whole neighborhood for your new highway usually costs relatively little in terms of both currency and reputation.

The ability to build housing is limited by your cities residential desire, which only goes up when you have 80% of residential capacity filled.
To what degree that influences your building habits, its a start.

[explodi]

Hi all! Developer of Microlandia here. I'm excited about the ideas in this thread

* On NIMBY-ism: I just started building this mechanic, right now there is the Techno Club building (a reward build) which will trigger citizen discontent when placed near residents. Right now they just call reporters of the newspaper and eventually leave the city, depreciating the value of the property but I want to explore this further when I introduce lawsuits.

* On real state demand: This is one of the more complex parts of the simulation and I don't actually try to represent the residential desire of people, but of real state developers, who often have conflicting interests. Right now it's still too simplistic but already emerges interesting dynamics (like, for example, scarcity can be a good thing for both real state developers and the city but totally sucks for low income folks). I plan to spend a long time in making it gradually deeper and economically accurate.

* On costs of rezoning: This is something that absolutely sucks in SimCity where you can magically bulldoze people's residences and company headquarters with no consequence. In the latest build I'm introducing costs of expropriation and repurchase of land. As the real state economic simulation improves, I expect this costs could get astronomical for some cities.

* On graphics: I'm now teaming up with artists to make the game not absolutely ugly, however, the main focus is having a deep simulation with practical enough graphics to be able to run big cities without a dedicated GPU

Version 1.0 is gonna be out on December 3, but my plan is to update it indefinitely, with deeper simulation and the features that are required for that, until I go insane. Feel free to DM me and ask for game keys

[Starver]

* On graphics: I'm now teaming up with artists to make the game not absolutely ugly, however, the main focus is having a deep simulation with practical enough graphics to be able to run big cities without a dedicated GPU

Oh, come on... Rough and ready visuals over an increasingly complex reality-emulator, only later letting others create better art-style? Since when has that been an award-winning game-development approach?

(Oh, hi Tarn! Didn't see you there!  )

_{this might basically be a PTW}