workers and resources, game design
Recently been fascinated by Workers and Resources for two very different reasons:
1. It breaks *so many* assumptions about how city builders 'should' work, and does so incredibly well.
2. I had avoided it for a long time, expected it to be designed as a very authoritarian game, but to my surprise it turns out to be much less authoritarian in structure than most capitalism-oriented city builders, and gives you a lot more 'policy freedom' (despite what the theme implies).
It's not *quite* where I would want the genre to be (for both gameplay and political reasons) but goddamn does it get surprisingly close.
workers and resources, game design (2)
To expand on the 'policy freedom' a bit: you absolutely *can* play this game in an authoritarian way, it definitely has the mechanics in place. But you can also just... not do that, and still have a perfectly viable city, unlike most capitalist city builders where if you don't buy into the "expand wealth at any cost" gameplay loop, that's basically a guaranteed path to defeat.
The genre of city builders, colony builders, etc. is pretty universally problematic in that they're essentially always built around 'god game mechanics' where you are in some way the ultimate arbiter of whatever happens in the world, regardlesss of the political window dressing that it gets, so it's refreshing to see a city builder game that at least somewhat diverts from this path, and where you sometimes genuinely feel like "I will just have to deal with this, this isn't really under my control", with your task more being that of a caretaker than of a ruler.
There are more games that do this, but they're usually not 'modern' city builders.
workers and resources, game design (3)
Anyway, this still isn't the anarchist city builder that I would like to see (which, admittedly, I wasn't expecting it to be to begin with), but I'm finding it much easier to play this game the way I would want to play a city builder, than just about every other city builder I've tried. And I've been looking for a decade by this point.
Also goddamn, the road/track building system is *lightyears* ahead of that in Cities Skylines. Take note, Colossal Order, this is how you do this.
tangent, re: workers and resources
Tangentially, by this point I should probably just buy the entire back catalog of what Hooded Horse has published, because lately every time I'm like "huh this is a surprisingly different and neat game" they seem to be the publisher, and they definitely seem to be doing something right
workers and resources, game design (4)
(Also, I quite like that you can just turn off the 'police and crime' aspect. It's doing slightly better than most games at modelling it as a preventable issue with causes rather than some fact of life, but I still don't like the implementation well enough, and here I can just choose to disable it entirely. Like you can do with surprisingly many of the mechanics.)