PopTop. Railroad Tycoon 2&3 and Tropico 1&2. They got bought by 2K, which eventually killed the studio. The Railroad Tycoon series is dead. Tropico is still around, but I’m not excited about the latest interation. Some of the guys tried to kickstart a new Railroad Tycoon but it didn’t fund. Phil Steinmeyer was an underrated developer, though I believe he’s retired today.

It’s too bad it worked out that way. I think they could have been on the level with Paradox as far as strategy games are concerned, but focusing more on economic games, city builders, and the like. On Steinmeyer’s blog he said he didn’t think there was demand for heavier games anymore about mid 00s. That might have been true then, but so many games out now prove that wrong.

Intrinsically, definitely. Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, Victoria 2, and etc.

Warsim deserves love. It’s a real passion project: a text-based kingdom management sim with lots of things to do and nooks and crannies to explore.

I loved John Deere American Farmer back in the day. Unfortunately it doesn’t work on modern machines. The menus don’t display right. If it wasn’t for that, it would be half-playable. The deluxe version might not have that problem, but I never got around to trying it.

One funny quirk was that family members would gain happiness from certain items (housing, bbq, pools, etc) and lose it from working. If happiness dropped too far for two long, you’d get an event about them leaving to join the French Foreign Legion or some other nonsense (there were a handful of variants.) The thing is, though, the happiness gained from these material possessions would degrade over time, meaning that it quickly evolved into a materialism simulator as you built pools to replace the pools that no longer where providing happiness.

You could also just hire people. That was usually the way to go if you wanted to get any serious work done. As long as you could pay wages, the hired help would stick around.

Don’t overfeed your cats people, especially not for internet points.

Can you imagine a world without Reddit?

Cautiously excited. I won’t preorder, of course, but I’ll keep an eye on it once it’s out.