I've been playing a lot of city builders this year, the double A kind of city builders. I will write about a couple of them itt:

 

Farthest Frontier - It was fun, but desperately needs more content. Cozy,. not too hard, micro'ing your soldiers was funny. After my first playthrough I feel like I need to wait a year or more for more content to be added, no pull from this one but it seems to be promising. Your classic open sandbox neverending city builder that doesn't really have that much sim element to it.

 

Against the Storm - Absolutely charming graphic design, reminds me of a more tame version of warcraft 3 on steroids. The basic gameplay loop is as follows: You build a smol city from a pool of random buildings you get, you complete the random objective, go back to your hub, spend victor points on flat upgrades or new buildings for the random buildings pool, rinse and repeat. It's kind of weird, it feels too basic to me, it seems as if the whole crutch of the game is figuring out which mixture of buildings to select from the random pool, most buildings can create 3 things, and you just have to figure out what you're missing and what works best for the objective you got. Every draw you get to choose one building from 3 random ones. I've completed 5 cities but it didn't scratch my itch. I want to build big cities, the game feels somewhat like a Sudoku, cities are not self-reliant but are only needed for you to complete the goal as fast as you can.

 

Surviving the Aftermath - Paradox apocalyptic city builder, that one was fun. It kept me occupied for a week or so, classic city builder with a spin. You get heroes, send them on expedition on global map where they walk on tiles and gather resources or find other villages you can trade with. Very solid and fun. The world map get's cleared quite quickly though and there's just not that much to do in end-game except growing and growing. In my opinion the game has exactly the same issues as Farthest Frontier has, but at least it has the global map element which makes it a bit more interesting.

 

Ixion - Now this game is the reason why I wanted to start this thread, it's a very good looking city builder where you're basically building up humanity's "Noah's Ark" in space with which you can travel around galaxies. You either fly through the galaxy to complete the main quest and any side objectives, and once you're done you jump to another galaxy. It's very fun and annoying at once, you unlock next sectors as you grow and the sectors are like different districts, you need to create flows of resources between sectors to make sure everyone is getting everything because workers from sector 1 won't be able to automatically go to a stockpile in sector 2. You can either accomplish this by setting up required industries in sectors or having your stockpiles limited to a certain number and exporting any resources above that number to others in need, which if not set properly and with fluctuating income creates A LOT of micromanaging. The game is heavily narrated and the story keeps pushing you forward, as you travel through next galaxies you run into remnants of others who made the same journey as you travel through stars to unravel what actually happened and if there's anyone else out there alive except you. A LOT of micromanaging mid-game if you don't set up your sectors right, it seems I digged myself a hole by maxxing out every galaxy before continuing and I'm waaaay too overpopulated and barely able to sustain myself and I'm only about to leave the 3rd galaxy ;_; (you can't go back once you make the jump). The game is great and has the perfect depth for me, not too autistic like let's say Factorio (which is great btw) but also retains all the elements of a proper story-telling driven progression (unlike open-ended farthest frontier or rouge-like against the storm). I recommend, it's great.