RTSC Sim Management Games List

Sim Management
a.k.a. "City Builders"
Tactical battles and military hardware take a back seat to economic management and some serious building. Its one of the few ways strategy gaming offers you the chance to be creative without the need to impose short term, hair brained militarism on other people. The classic example of this genre is the legendary Sim City, which spun off a million Sim games, the latest of which were The Sims. In the City Builder genre, you play the part of an omniscient mayor or governor, making decisions about how to grow your realm, while the population actually buckles down and does all the work. Its close cousin, the "God Game", also has the same omniscient view, except you play the part of a God and everything is driven by your Divine Will. Strategy here is all about the smooth running of your administration; tactics are virtually non-existent, and conflict is but one of a myriad of problems that you have to manage and overcome in order to triumph over your day. Supply chains, customer relations, trade, diplomacy and running a market economy (or a centrally planned communist one) is your job description. Often, these games will be open ended and come with their own speculative "sandbox" mode, where you simply play with your city or nation or space station like LEGO, tinkering away forever on your simulated creation.

Caesar III (1998)

See Great Empires Collection II.

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom (2002)

The latest installment of the Ancient City building series by Impressions, which included games like Caeser III abd Pharoah. (See Great Empires Collection II) Finally moving away from the Mediterranean, this game transplants itself into Ancient China. The Middle Kingdom was the name the Chinese gave to their great country itself. As they saw it all those years ago, China was the beacon of culture and civilization in a sea of barbarism - a parochial view which probably wasn't that far of the mark, all things considered. China comes across as monolithic to outsiders, simply because it went through the process of national consolidation and cultural unification thousands of years before anyone else. This game starts in 2100BC to progress through several thousand years of history before coming to a stop when the Mongols, led by Ghengis Khan, effectively ended it 1211. There's seven separate campaigns which take your single player experience right through this long period of history. Apart from the usual economics and infrastructure, you also have to accomodate Feng Shui, the Chinese Zodiac (e.g. Year of the Monkey, the Rat, etc.), Confuscism, Daoism and Buddhism. Of course, you also get to build the Great Wall, the Terra Cotta Army and a host of other great works.

Great Empires Collection II (2002)

This is a long series of loosely connected city building sims set in Ancient times, sometimes referred to as the Impressions' Ancient City series, all bundled together in a single collection. Impressions seems to have vanished off the face of the earth, or rather, been acquired, absorbed and then dissolved by corporate publishers. In fact, you can only get this strategy compilation package from either Sierra or VUGames; the original games themselves no longer have any real official Internet presence anymore it seems, and any attempt to trace Impressions simply redirects you back to these megapublishers' front doors with the additional note that they have no idea what you're talking about.

The emphasis of all these games is the building and developing of a string of city states, with combat taking a back seat to some serious economic management and civil engineering. These SimCity variants lovingly cover the minutiae of historical details, emphasising economic management and civil engineering over military combat. Missions and campaigns centre around building or managing your cities around different restrictions and obstacles. Some of the earlier games citizen AI's can be a bit rudimentary, but the series has evolved some considerable depth and detail ove time. The collection includes:

Caesar III (1998)
The last in the Caesar series, a trilogy based on the heyday of the Roman Empire. Caesar III was more of an update its predecessors, Caesar (1993) and Caesar II (1996) - which aren't included, incidently - as they pretty much cover the same ground. You are commissioned by Caesar to build a provincial city worthy of Rome. Back then, issues such as water supply, sewerage, fire prevention, grain spoilage, hygiene and keeping all those Gods happy were serious obstacles. Keeping your population happy and the barbarians out are ongoing headaches for a fledgling Administrator. You connect a number of small villages together and build up a small province to become a new city. Once you have a completed metropolis you can see if it can withstand invasion or become the new centre of the world, and then its on to a harder province to repeat the whole process again.

Pharaoh (1999)
This time you're developing a settlement into a major city for your Pharaoh in Ancient Egypt. The mighty river delta of the nile provides you with surplus agriculture to build a great civilization of monumental works. Its expansion, Cleopatra extends the game by adding more buildings, industries, units, enemies, and difficulties, and places the game in the Roman Age, where there's more interaction between the two great empires. Along with building the Valley of the Kings, you also have to keep the grave robbers at bay.

Zeus: Master of Olympus (2000)
In the same vein as Pharoah and Caesar III, except this time we're in Ancient Greece. Zeus continues the evolution of city building developed in its earlier titles. As you grow you city, you attract famous heroes of the day to vanquish the odd monster, defend the city from its rivals and even draw down the odd Olympian God to lend a hand. You'll have to keep your temples, trading and infrastructure in good order though! The package includes the Poseidon expansion.

The latest entry in the series, Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, is a seperate, standalone game and moves the city building eastwards to Ancient China. Back

Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile (2004)

Impressions' leading light in the City Building department has gone and established a new studio called Tilted Mill Entertainment, with the ambition of making some serious City Building, roleplaying and strategy games. Their first outing sounds like the start of a new city building series: and Children of the Nile kicks off by updating the historical city building genre and propels it into the immersive 3D environment. At last, not only can you build your city up from nothing, you can stroll around with the virtual citizens late in the afternoon and watch the sun set over your palaces and fields.

Majesty (2000)

CyberLore's fantasy kingdom simulator, where you function as King in a world of heroes, monsters and magic with elves, dwarves, orcs and the usual gang of suspects. Like many sims, you don't control units directly so much as commission missions and buildings, setting appropriate rewards to achieve your goals. Heroes then sally forth and complete these quests for you. The more you develop your kingdom (building taverns and markets, say) the more likely you'll attract better bonuses and keep better characters. Its imperative to keep your kingdom running efficiently in order to be able to complete the missions, but you might find the game's Sean Connery impersonations a bit much.

There's an add-on: Northern Expansion (2001)...

...and a sequel in the works: Majesty Legends.

Medieval Lords: Build, Defend, Expand (2004)

Not to be confused with the old 1991 SSI game of the same name, Monte Cristo's Medieval Lords is a city builder set in the Middle Ages that, for once, frees itself of the shackles of a square grid board and produces a genuinely organic looking settlement, albeit a rather primitive, polygonal looking one when you get up too close to it.

Pharaoh (1999)

See Great Empires Collection II.

Railroad Tycoon series (2003)

A Civilization style railroad builder game that runs in slow real time, by those masters of sim management, PopTop Software. Recreate great historical railway projects and carve out your epic transportation empire across some famous landscapes: western USA, Spain, Eastern China and others. At the heart of this series is a sophisticated market economy and stock market that your train system becomes an integral part of. There's dozens of train types from different ears, 150 different buildings, 35 odd types of cargo to haul and your huge railway empire must not only complete the scenario at hand but also fend off or acquire your rivals. You get to build tunnels, bridges and other mighty projects, and this particular edition is giving into the same 3D lark as every other game these days, allowing for birds eye views or lovingly detailed close-ups of all those classic engines in play.

Railroad Tycoon 3 is the sequel to Railroad Tycoon 2 (1998) which comes in all kinds of editions, the best one probably being the Platinum edition released in 2001.

And naturally, Railway Tycoon 2 is the upgrade of the original 1990 classic, Railway Tycoon. PopTop has seen through the development of all these games.

SimCity Series

The original SimCity all but created the simulation genre as we know it long ago at the end of the Eighties... good God, some of you reading this probably weren't even BORN then! This is simulated worlds, not car racing or flight simulators. Since then its developer, Maxis, went on to make a whole swag of sim games: SimEarth, SimAnt, SimLife, SimFarm, SimTower, SimIsle, SimGolf (agh!), SimTown, SimSafari, SimCopter... until eventually, the developers produced finally produced The Sims themselves, who after all those years of simming about as abstract data finally got their own show and became the biggest game on the PC. As for the series, there was:

SimCity (1989) - these days you can play it in your browser.

SimCity 2000 (1995), including a "Network Edition" in 1996 (I'm not quite sure how multiplayer SimCity would work, except as a meditatively themed chat session)

SimCity 3000 (1999), SimCity 3000 Unlimited (the same, except with a few extras tossed in), and now

SimCity 4 (2003), an expansion, SimCity 4: Rush Hour (2003) and SimCity 4 Deluxe that bundles the two together.

The Sim- games are building and management games, not real time strategy as such. A simulated world plays before you and you get to poke it with a stick and edit a few things just to see what happens. The player is an outside influence that alters and changes the conditions of this world for their own amusement. There's no conquering or conflict, and basically, no real end to any scenario you start. SimCity involved building and watching the evolution of a small town growing into a large metropolis, and players could spend forever tinkering and adjusting city policy and then sitting back to watch the wheels spin. If they got too bored, they could always see how they city coped by dropping in a plane crash, tornado or even Godzilla! This is entertainment that only a computer can provide, and the sort of interesting thing you might expect an insanely sophisticated instrument like a computer to be capable and worthy of doing. Any of the SimCity titles is highly, highly recommended.


			Startopia (2001) Tired of blowing shit up? Try galactic reconstruction instead. As Station Administrator, its your job to renovate the Station, opening new segments and providing services, entertainments, spiritual guidance, a bit of Love, and recreating the lost habitats of the planets destroyed in a terrible galactic war. Graphically splendiferous, very droll and quite funny, this is the Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and 2001: A Space Odyssey all rolled into one. Its great! Grab a cocoa and some cheese on toast and start Sandboxing your Station today...

	Tropico (2001) Slightly tongue in cheek island simulation by PopTop Software. This is a Glorious Peoples' Building game with a strong dash of Latin American political intrigue. You are the recently installed dictator of a Caribbean island during the height of the Cold War. Whether you are funded by the CIA or supported covertly by the KGB, its up to you to develop and sustain your revolution in spite of counter-revolutoinary rebels, Generals who get a little too big for their boots, and the hardship of trying to get your island economy and the Soccer team off the ground. The economy goes as far as modelling the lives of your people as they grow up, go to school, get a job and eventually retire. This is detailed and challenging sim management in the same vein of PopTop's other big title, Railway Tycoon. There's an expansion: Tropico: Paradise Island (2002), a different developer, Breakaway Games, when your dictatorial good self tries to attract more tourists, and maybe get to impose new features, like Martial Law! You can buy all this bundled into the Mucho Macho Edition (2002), which also adds a few extra scenarios to play with. The sequel, Tropico 2: Pirates Cove (2003), is by yet another developer, Frog City, and drops backwards in time to the 17th Century where you become a Pirate King. Instead of tourism, you're plundering the high seas, kidnapping people and keeping an eye on those scurvy ridden buccaneers of yours. And breeding those all important parrots, of course.

	Utopia (1981) One of the earliest simulation games ever (outside of the big mainframes of old) can be found on the Intellivision TV game cartridge. It wasn't a stupid shoot-'em'up or some daft puzzle game for the kids: Two rulers on rival islands try to outscore each other on points by managing their island the best. Scoring took into account every aspect of your rule, and like most sim management, you had the option of managing a number of different ways, taking into account economic management, welfare, natural disasters and possible island revolution.

	Zeus: Master of Olympus (2000) See Great Empires Collection II.