If you are searching for a game that lets you design and build your dream city by planning out every little detail yourself, this list might have something for you. Starting from the middle ages to terraforming other planets, we have listed all kinds of town-building games for you.
Best Town Building Games
Cities: Skylines
If you have a fantasy of building a dream city by planning out every single detail to perfection, this game is going to blow your mind. Cities: Skylines offers an unrivaled amount of customization and freedom when it comes to a town-building game. At the start of the game, you are given barren land and a fixed budget to build yourself a thriving town. You can then use this budget to build infrastructures such as roadways, water, and power supplies, as well as allocate lands for buildings. When you have allocated the minimum resources needed for civilization, people will start to build residences and start businesses. When you have enough people in your town, you can expand your profits to expand your territories by buying more land. These lands will be used to start more businesses which will, in turn, make you more profit and increase the number of residents as well. But the game is also full of challenges, as maintaining a city takes a lot of effort and planning. If you make a town without any planning, you’ll be facing problems regarding waste, power, and water management, and fixing them is no joke. However, carefully planning your city does the complete opposite, and you’ll be swimming in money your residents made for you. So, taking a break once in a while to view your progress and assess the situation to figure out what your city needs is also an important aspect of the game.
Age of Empire IV
Age of Empires IV is an epic RTS game in which you will be able to play as some of the greatest civilizations to ever exist on Earth. It requires you to increase your military by building structures and battling different enemies on the map. The concept is simple; you need to build a civilization by collecting different resources and attacking enemy nations to take them down. But be careful as they can also fight back and take down your base pretty easily. You need to constantly think and strategize about the ways to take down your enemies. You can build different buildings by collecting resources such as wood and stones. Each of these buildings serves a different purpose. You can also make an army of various types of warriors and go into a full-scale war with other nations. Each match will be completely different in this game, and you may need to form completely new strategies based on how well you’re doing in the match. Age of Empires IV has various maps with different weather conditions and terrains. From snow-filled regions to completely barren lands, you can form your civilization in all types of land.
Civilization VI
Civilization is a turn-based strategy game where you’ll be using all kinds of tactics to conquer the world. It also has some elements of a board game in it. You need to progress your civilization all the way from the stone age to the powerful information age. At the start of the game, you can choose a civilization that you think will carry you to victory. There are different types of civilizations to choose from, and each of them has a different playstyle. You’ll progress through different ages by completing the research in tech trees to get better weapons and buildings. The game has different ways you can win the game, and you can complete any one of the objectives to be the winner. It doesn’t always require you to fight, but when you meet other civilizations, it will almost end up with one of the sides getting wrecked. You can also choose to be completely peaceful if you want. The combat in this game is turn-based, where each party takes turns attacking their enemies. As you progress through the game, you’ll encounter various difficulties such as management of fresh-water, tile improvements, and global warming, which requires you to make strategies to deal with them. You’ll also need to manage the foods and productions of your civilization to ensure that you’re not falling behind in terms of progress.
Frostpunk
Frostpunk is a survival game that requires you to lead people and manage them in order to survive in harsh cold environments. This game does a pretty good job of delivering nice aesthetics and steampunk vibes to the players. It is set in a post-apocalyptic environment in which the world has been frozen cold due to various reasons. You start your game with a few people and allocate different jobs to them. The jobs may be collecting resources such as coal, woods, and steel that are important to keep your survivors alive. You are given a large reactor at the start of the game, and you have to build different buildings around this reactor to ensure that they receive enough heat and insulation. You can send your survivors to explore the areas and hunt animals for food. You may also discover some survivors once in a while. In this game, you have a limited number of survivors and cannot generate more of them apart from the survivors you’ve found in the wild. It also becomes much more difficult to manage your base once you have more buildings. And things can spiral out of control pretty quickly if you’re not doing your job properly and may cause you to lose the game.
Surviving Mars
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to live on a planet other than the Earth, worry not, as this game lets you terraform our own neighboring planet, Mars, and make it suitable for living. The game is all about building resources and researching new technologies on the red planet with the help of robots and drones, and finally, making it suitable for humans to live as well. When you first start the game, you can choose the game’s difficulty, change settings according to your needs as well as choose what country you want to take funding from. After landing on mars, you’ll be collecting different resources and minerals to upgrade your stuff. Occasionally, you can also import necessary resources from the Earth to help sustain your resources. Your job is to create different structures to serve different purposes which will ultimately support human life. When you’ve made enough progress, you’ll get visitors from the Earth who’ll want to explore your futuristic city and live in them. Although that might seem like a cool idea, it will prove to be quite a challenge for you. Your fellow earthlings will have lots of needs, and your job is to basically fulfill all of them.
Frozenheim
Frozenheim lets you build a city and grow it larger while also giving you the experience of some RTS elements. It has beautiful graphics and aesthetics of Norse civilization. The game has beautifully designed campaign modes where you’ll be managing a group of Vikings and keeping them safe by building different houses and structures. You’ll also need to fend off any enemies or wild animals that might pose a threat to your village. As you build different houses and keep making progress, you can unlock various advanced buildings and troops that will help you in your expansion and raids. Your job is to keep your village safe while exploring the vast world in search of runestones. These runestones can give you blessings and perks that will make your game easier. It requires a lot of strategies to grow your village. Sometimes you’ll need to form alliances with other players, while sometimes, you need to take them down and destroy them completely. It is your job to do whatever it takes to ensure your tribe’s survival. You can also participate in raids to earn big rewards.
Kingdoms and Castles
If you want to take a break from playing these games with high-end graphics, Kingdoms and Castles may be the perfect choice for you. Its beautiful and vibrant colors, as well as the use of low-poly graphics, definitely brings something new to the table. On the surface, it’s just another city-building game, but as you keep progressing further into the game, it offers much more than just managing your people and building structures. You’ll also need to defend against Vikings and dragons that will tear your kingdom apart if you don’t have the means to defend. Nonetheless, it offers a lot of fun once you’re invested in this game. You’ll need to manage your people and give them work as well as entertainment. Let me tell you a secret, keeping these people happy is one difficult task because no matter what you do or build for them, they always have something to complain about. You don’t have to be a pro designer to design your kingdom. However, it might affect your economy by putting some structures where they’re not supposed to be. So it might take a little bit of skill and time for you to learn the ways of this game.
Tropico 6
Tropico 6 puts you right in the middle of political mayhem where you’ll need to do everything in your power to maintain your status of “El Presidente” and keep ruling over your nation of a small island called “Tropico.” Your main objective in this game is to stay in power for as long as you can. For that, you’ll need to keep different factions in your nation happy and make sure that you’ll get reelected again. You’ll build different structures to provide facilities for your citizens and progress through different eras. You’ll start your journey from the Colonial era all the way to the Modern era. Each era unlocks different types of buildings for you to build while also increasing the complexity of the game. The factions in your nation also increase as you move forward, and they will come up with different demands to make your life even more miserable. You’ll also need to maintain relations with other nations to ensure your business and trades are not being affected. They’ll also have various ridiculous demands, and not fulfilling them will cause a lot of problems for you. In short words, this game will make your head burst with rage if you don’t have experience in dealing with people. But it will also teach you the way of politicians and how to control situations that are out of control.
Dyson Sphere Program
Dyson Sphere Program is a space simulation that takes on an intergalactic trip to harness the power of stars and build yourself an epic intergalactic empire. You’ll start off on a distant planet, collecting and accumulating resources in order to build a Dyson sphere around your star and harvest its power. You also need to build structures that will process the resources you’ve collected. Little by little, you’ll keep building more complex structures until you’re able to harvest the energy of your star. You can then move to the next star, repeating the same process again.
Simcity 4
Simcity 4 is a city-building game that lets you design and creates your dream city with all sorts of buildings as well as manage them to ensure that it is running according to your plan. When you first start the game, you can choose a region to build your city on. There are plenty of pre-made regions, or if you want, you can make your own custom regions as well. You can then select the region you want and shape them exactly how you want. After that, you can construct roads and other infrastructures to shape your city. When you first start the game, you will have a limited budget, so you’ll need to think of that as well. After making a few buildings, new residents will move into your city and start to live there by paying taxes. You’ll need to ensure that your citizens are getting all kinds of facilities such as water, power, and sewage management. The game only gets harder as it progresses, so you’ll need to be prepared for that.
