I've played/enjoyed a few City Building games, and I'm considering building one now. What do you think makes a good City Builder?

Here's a few basics I can think of, what do you think should be added or edited? Or just in general, what have you really enjoyed?

1) Simple rewards over time, Money for doing things.the question is how fast.

2) Tasks lists. Can do more than one thing.

3) Tech trees. I.e. can't have an armory without a black smith. Need farmers before making a farmer's market.

4) Need resources: Coal, Wood, Iron, Food, Soldiers, Weapons.

5) Prepare defensive military: soldiers, etc...

I thought you were making an RTS?

Your definition looks a lot like the Stronghold series, but that's a very specific subset of city-builders that are more accurately part of RTS too.

Sim City would be a better definition of a City Builder "by the book".

Measures of the city: pollution, crime rate, richness, happiness, so on. That's if you are planning for a sandbox game.

[quote name='Orymus3' timestamp='1357769028' post='5019646']
I thought you were making an RTS?
[/quote]

The game is intended to feature a stand alone City Builder as your Home city. Safe, constantly improving and give benefits to the other parts of the game. However, I want to make sure I'm really hitting good things about this area by itself. It should be self sufficiently fun on its own, and I'm hoping for good ideas to shape it.

I've played/enjoyed a few City Building games, and I'm considering building one now. What do you think makes a good City Builder?

Here's a few basics I can think of, what do you think should be added or edited? Or just in general, what have you really enjoyed?

1) Simple rewards over time, Money for doing things.the question is how fast.

2) Tasks lists. Can do more than one thing.

3) Tech trees. I.e. can't have an armory without a black smith. Need farmers before making a farmer's market.

4) Need resources: Coal, Wood, Iron, Food, Soldiers, Weapons.

5) Prepare defensive military: soldiers, etc...

I thought you were making an RTS?

The game is intended to feature a stand alone City Builder as your Home city. Safe, constantly improving and give benefits to the other parts of the game. However, I want to make sure I'm really hitting good things about this area by itself. It should be self sufficiently fun on its own, and I'm hoping for good ideas to shape it.

There is a game with a similar feature, and it's predecessors had a similar mechanic, where your capital city was customization both in upgrades and cosmetics. I'm talking about the Age of Empires Games, more notably the third installment and Age of Empires Online. The third installment was simple and you only had a few buildings to upgrade that influence tech costs. Age of Empires Online lets you place key buildings anywhere on a separate map, essentially letting you design your city and use key buildings to manage your tech tree, unit equipment, and materials for crafting. Both of which are pretty small metagames as opposed to being a major mechanic as all it is essentially is an over-dramatic menu system.

One city builder I found to be pretty good was Cities XL. The game itself was okay but the ideas in it's mechanics promoted strategic play due to it's economics, where you have to manage the trade of surplus between cities to influence their economies differently.

(I.E. City A has a bunch of farms so they produce more Food and City B has more Office Labor since it has more offices and trade between each other)

If you're going for an RTS kind of game like AoE online, I would personally like to see a city builder like Simcity or Cities XL for my capital city. But, it needs to be able to interact with the game world constantly. Let the things you do in the RTS element influence things like trade and bonuses to certain areas like completing a mission gives you a surplus of industry good which gives a bonus to commercial demand or simple cash rewards that allow you to build more housing developments.

What makes a good city builder game, or any kind of x builder game, i guess, is when the simulation is rich enough that it exhibits unexpected emergent behavior. This is the quality that made cities in Sim City feel like they were alive. However, by its nature, this is not really helpful advice, because you can't just say, "Almost done ... now to hook up the emergent behavior module."

City Builder game I've always enjoyed was SimCity for the SNES. I liked it even more than SimCity for the PC.

What makes a good city builder game, or any kind of x builder game, i guess, is when the simulation is rich enough that it exhibits unexpected emergent behavior.

This ^ is what, for me, made Sim City 4 (or any other version) a vastly better game than Cities XL or SimCity-Societies, etc -- in the former, your city comes to life indirectly from your outlines/plans, and in the latter group the city is directly built by your command.

That kind of emergent behaviour makes any city builder fun for me. You need unforeseen consequences and fluctuations and interactions of many simple systems leading to larger complex systems that aren't directly controlled. Whether it's central-business-districts appearing in places you didn't plan, because you mis-managed the traffic flows, or whether it's your decree of forced clay-mining and an abundance of brick-furnaces upsetting the local market and causing all the villages to upgrade their houses while starving...

[quote name='Reavermyst' timestamp='1357778032' post='5019704']
I would personally like to see a city builder like Simcity or Cities XL for my capital city. But, it needs to be able to interact with the game world constantly.
[/quote]

That is definately the plan. perhaps not simcity completely, but closer to sim city than Empire . but a bit of both I imagine. I hadn't really considered it to be too close of a clone to Simcity, but that could be nice, to have a bit more feature coverage from there.

[quote name='Reavermyst' timestamp='1357778032' post='5019704']
Let the things you do in the RTS element influence things like trade and bonuses to certain areas like completing a mission gives you a surplus of industry good which gives a bonus to commercial demand or simple cash rewards that allow you to build more housing developments.
[/quote]

Definitely, I'm planning on the tactical games to tie in to rewards and such, and there are some things you only get by completing battles.

Or directing the wars.