Your fav city/empire-builders and why

[Player Character 0]

I'm just wondering what your favorite city or empire building games are and why. What features did you like the most and the least? What would you add or tweak if you could? That sort of thing.

I haven't played many city building games since the 90's so my favorite would've been Pharaoh. It's limited and repetitive, I would've loved to see more variety but it was also very addictive and I enjoy games with non-modern/futuristic settings. Most of my other experience was with very old Simcity games (like the first one release for Playstation) and I found those to be much less interesting. I was also a bit young to be playing that game and I don't think I had a very good handle on it.

In other news; I'm sure a thread of this nature has been done before but a) I don't want to search through 21 pages of threads to find it and b) the more up-to-date the better. You could call this market research I guess, seeing how I've been out of the game for 14 years...

[AkemiAzula 280]

Well i tend to prefer modern twentieth century cities so Simcity and by this i mean the old Simcitys is at top for me. I havent played an empire builder as they all seemed too gridbased and unrealistic. Agent based is the way to go imho.

[fan o SC4 128]

For city builders it's SC4, duh, I love the customization, don't change nothin'

 

For empire builders gotta go Europa Universalis 3 , the ability to mess with history and build global empires is very fun, and the level of control is superb.

 

Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai deserves an honorable mention, IMO it has the best real time combat graphics,and I love the 'old meets new'. The traditional Japanese themes sold me aswell, from the style of the map, to having samurai confront gatling guns on the battlefield. Still beats Empire and Rome 2 if you ask me.

[Player Character 0]

Mark, what does agent based mean?

[GMT 389]

I think he's refering to the way SC2013 simulates the exchange of goods and inhabitants. it's not an arbitrary calculation scheme but actual "agents".

previous titles did a hell of a lot of statistical calculations in the background and then put it onto the graphical interface. SC2013 in turn uses socalled agents instead of such statistical calculations. These agents represent goods like water, power but also the inhabitants. These agents actually travel around the map on their dedicated networks so e.g. if you see a traffic jam, it's not the visualization of a statistical calculation based on defined network capacity and other statistical figures, instead it's the result of too many agents traveling along the road on their way to their destination.

As such, it is a gameplay implementation of the MAS (multiple agent system) which is a computation method of using dynamic ai capable of independant problem solving within it's environment, helping to solve model problems that most likely can't be solved with usual means of calculation because some sort of individual reaction must be considered.

Since this technique is a very common way of simulation and coordination routines it's fairly justified to consider agents as the way to go.

 

As for the initial question, my favorite city builder is SCS.

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......

of course not.

It's all 2d SC titles, 4 the most used of them and to a certain extend I even like SC2013.

My favorite empire builder must be the settlers series followed by the anno series. I never liked civ games tho but I also didn't really dig into them as I'm more into the rts-scheme

[Player Character 0]

Thank you for clarifying GMT. It seems I have much to learn. 

[counting 0]

Impression's ancient city builder games, from Caesar IIi, Pharaoh, Zeus, to Emperor all have the basic walker-type agent mechanism. Strictly speaking it's also use a type of agent-based approach, since each unit of goods(cart pushers), walkers, have their own behavior logic and rules. However, it still uses some statistical approach to handle certain aspect of the city simulation, like population/census. Generally speaking, city building games rarely built with pure agent-based approach, otherwise it consumes too much computation resource (pure agent based simulation is mostly for academic studies, or "peculiar games" like Dwarf Fortress ).

 

Also, Agent-based approach alone is not enough if you want some REALLY interesting results. In order to make agents interact with the "environment", and actually shape their "surroundings", you need to use adaptive strategies or learning mechanism on agents, so they can genuinely exhibit complex behaviors (A lot of the games only apply "dumb agents", who's behaviors are predictable regardless when and where with limited conditions, like walkers in Impression's city builder games if you know the rules well, even agents in Simcity 2013) 

 

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BTW Grid-like system is easy to implement with city simulation, even Simcity series themselves use it (until Simcity 4) with great success, and coordinate system is still fine-grid, albeit very tiny sparse grid. Also this has nothing to do with agent-based approach.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

For modern cities, SC4 Deluxe.

 

I don't play empire builders.

 

For primitive situations, Banished.  It crawls slowly on my system so I have to run it at 5X.  Believe it or not, 10X is too fast.

[Player Character 0]

These are some interesting thoughts, counting. I'm definitely keeping resource limitations when it comes to the complexity of a game (as I am currently working on a city building. Design only for now, my programming skills are quite lacking) but since I have no idea what those limitations would be I'm letting myself dream big.
Learning mechanisms would definitely be interesting. I think I could apply them to some entities and not others. I like the way Clockwork Empire handles it's population (or how I've seen it described, at least). Apparently they have personality traits that determine what jobs they prefer, how they react to situations, ect, and they're able to remember past experiences.

[MrMayor2014 0]

Emperor, Pharaoh, tropico 4, simcity 3000

[counting 0]

For an agent-based approach, or just multi-agent system, you don't actually need a complex structure, or even full profiling. The adaptive ability only requires certain internal (private) variable(s) for each agent, in evolutionary programming term, like a software gene. You can randomize it, mutate it, swap it, change it, etc. The base code/gene will then "present" itself and grow into different agents. Agent also doesn't need to be at individual level, it can be a house, a cart, a grid, a group of the same age bracket, even a whole sector of concept, and all the combination you can think of. The keys are letting agents to have enough freedom (autonomous), each agent is bounded by its local variables, and interact in parallel cooperatively.

 

Using Pharaoh/Caesar series as examples, an agent isn't just a walker, its an entity of its building, the walker, the associated services/goods, and it's location, connectivity to the road. Each agent has its "local variables" (profile if you like) stored as its current labor level, its current placement, and the type of building it is, etc. They interact with each other via walker travelling, any change of the road system, walker will adapt to the change without player's direct control (degree of freedom). Generally in agent based model in academic research we let the emergence behavior evolve on their own, with some randomize process to find the right combination. But used in game design, it's players who are doing the trial and error and trying for different permutation arrangements (like human randomizes). Sometime players success and get interesting builds, other times they fail catastrophically with all the "FUN".