The Chronicle
Recommendations, guides and devlogs: the city builders we grew up on, and how ours is put together.
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Games like Caesar III
Caesar III is twenty-eight years old and the genre is still measured against it. The open-source port that makes the original worth playing today, the remake wearing Egyptian clothes, and what everyone actually means when they say they miss it.
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Games like Zeus: Master of Olympus
Zeus came out in 2000 and nothing has quite replaced it. What comes closest today, from the original on GOG to modern remakes and open-source revivals, and what people are actually nostalgic for when they say they miss it.
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Ancient city builder games, by civilisation
Rome has the deepest shelf, Egypt has the best modern remake, Mesopotamia has the most serious new entry. Greece is oddly empty. A guide to what exists and what each setting does to the design.
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City builder games you can play in a browser
Searching for a free online city builder turns up a lot of results and very few games. The four kinds of thing you will actually find, how to tell them apart, and where the good ones hide.
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A beginner's guide to your first city
The opening that works, how houses climb from hut to estate, why your granary can be full while people starve, and how to survive your first summer. Includes a build order to copy.
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Full granaries, starving citizens
Four separate bugs in one food system, each producing the same symptom: a city dying of hunger with a thousand units of food in storage. Including the market bottleneck that would not budge no matter how high we raised the limits.
Found a polis on the shores of the Aegean. Farm the coast, feed your people, trade oil and wine across the sea, and hold your ground against six rival cities.
The tutorial is free with no time limit, then €4.99 + VAT once. No download, no account.