I’ve had this massive itch for city builders for several years, but could just. never find ‘the right one’ for me.
I had been looking for a lighthearted and cozy builder with an initially gentle learning curve and so far it’s exceeded my expectations. Thus far, Against the Storm thus far feels absolutely incredible at 21 hours invested.
What’s really won me over with the games formula is that semi-RNG determines not only what resources the map has, but also what buildings you can craft. In addition, selection between RNG options determine which items you deliver and which rewards you receive: if I don’t have any source of wheat… is this potential reward with a very beneficial passive worth it? Very rarely does anything go according to plan and the name of the game is adjustment on your path to victory.
The game features zero ‘rts-like’ combat and no troop management. Instead, your enemy is an increasingly hostile forest, a cyclical seasonal storm, and a tug’o’war with maintaining the happiness of your civilians." All while juggling time sensitive delivery of goods to ‘quest’ locations.
But the best thing? All games are under one hour of unpaused gametime and in that time you’ll be faced with almost constant RNG, improvisation, risk/reward, and rogue-lite decision making. Given that gameplay loop, it doesn’t feel like the end of the world starting over and suffering through the early-game again.
Yes it looks complicated: but I started blind and have no desire to do anything but learn on my own. At higher difficulties, I’m sure it gets even more crazy. But everything, thus far, has been extremely intuitive.
(((As the many fine games that I’ve tried to replicate that AoE/The Sims 1/Roller Coaster Tycoon/Civ III feeling from my youth? Oxygen Not Included, Rimworld, Prison Architect, They Are Billions, Banished, Timberborn, I suppose Endless Space/Legend, Shadows of Forbidden Gods. Against the Storm just nailed everything for me and I’m only on 2/5 difficulty.)))
You might like Ixion, it’s a pretty tight city builder that’s story driven. People’s main gripe with it is the difficulty, but they added a difficulty slider that should fix that. I found the original difficulty just right, but your mileage may vary.
I finished ixion today amazingly, glad to see it get a mention.
Ixion is fantastically fun but definitely a longer time sink compared to what is described here for against the storm (which I haven’t played but am interested in).
Ixion has multiple chapters and if you fail, the game restarts you at the chapter start or a manual save. I liked that mechanic although as a new player I made some design decisions that I regretted later on which were somewhat challenging to completely fix. Those slightly hindered me later on in the game.
Literally bought it five days ago and I’m having a blast!
It looks fantastic, thank you for the recommendation.
I’ve been playing this lately, it’s real good. I’m bad at it tho but I’m getting better.
Yeah! My first several settlements took a long time until I figured out some very minor adjustments. I’m completing settlements in a fraction of the time that I was on my first couple and am beginning to learn my resource priority, but there’s still room for improvement. As I said, I’m totally still playing on pioneer mode 'cause it feels cozy and exactly what I wanted.
In my first few settlements, I totally snowballed out of control before reaching the victory conditions. There’s been a couple lately that feel like I achieved victory as soon as my resources allowed, so it was pretty satisfying crossing that threshold for the first time! I had a pretty brutal multiplier (double the yearly hostility increase, but hostility decreases by xxx when a villager dies) in that playthrough and had I waited another storm, I may not have survived.
I have a few very basic early game hints that I overlooked. I will say that the tutorial did an incredible job at drastically overhyping the danger of ‘dangerous groves’ by making them seem like “final battle” that is “too dangerous” to enter.
I decided to spoiler further beginners information, but all tips are fairly basic and would be learned in probably less than 5-10 settlements.
'When to' dangerous grove and an embarkment supply tip to make it easier
Pay attention to what dangerous groves require and figure out what embarkment supplies may help you
Concerning planks/bricks/fabric, gears, and your warehouses.
Rush planks and build whatever star improving plank/brick/fabric buildings you can ASAP, in the order that makes the most sense or addresses your biggest shortage. Priority number one should be getting the most out of these. It might not seem big, but two and three star buildings makes less go further. Feel free to build a second warehouse ASAP in your first dangerous grove and abuse them for other resource caches. Gears that are spent can always(? - pending level handicaps) be recovered by destroying a building that uses one, including warehouses.
The last tip concerns when to build a specific, valuable early-game building, which opens a lot of strategy options.
Trading outposts are extremely cheap (5 logs?) and should always be built ASAP. I always throw it up as soon as I have my first grove room. I wont say much more, but explore what it opens up and which shortages it can address.
It had a demo recently on steam that I played - was pretty fun!
This game is truly a masterpiece. When I found it, I dumped so many hours into it.
The progression is so satisfying and gameplay is so relaxing.
Absolutely agreed! I really hope it succeeds exceptionally so the developer keeps pushing out new content: they deserve it. Vanilla already feels more than complete and has an incredible foundation for more. As I was falling asleep last night, I was thinking about how cool and well things like rivers obstacles, bandits requiring seasonal ‘tithes’, trove-to-trove quests, possibly ‘hero’ characters or specialists for buildings, stat-improvement via education/training, hearth upgrade paths, and even events that would force you to wall off the trove. The gameplay loop already feels complete, but it also has so much room for “optional ‘extra’ decks”.
Heck, they could even add different gameboards to the bread-earning overworld and do some cool grand 4X things incorporating resources gathered inside the city builder aspect.
I’d say I’m probably about 7-10 full maps in and not a single one has felt repetitive or the same (I don’t think I’ll mind it when they start meshing together).
I bought this a while back and it was already great. looks like a lot has been added since i last played! Thanks for the reminder!
You might enjoy Frostpunk. It’s a very similar gameplay loop.
I’ve never played this game but the screenshot he posted looks like a lofi frost punk clone.
That was my first thought! I’ve actually been recommended to try it sometime if I like Frostpunk. They seem quite similar in gameplay from what I’ve seen and heard.
