Honestly, as a controlling person, I find it satisfying to manage minuscule aspects of a game to see it have an overall effect. After failing down the Rimworld hole with over 100 hours before the beta, I was curious how many other people like these types of games. I will widen the pool of games to ones with management elements, which include games where you play as God, or games that use management between gameplay, like Xcom.
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Rollercoaster Tycoon was my childhood omg, reading this made me want to play them so bad
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No I have not tried Factorio, seems interesting, but I feel like it would be lost on me. And speaking of Roller Coaster Tycoon, have you tried Planet Coaster?
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Regarding Planet Coaster, I’m trying to perfect the challenging art of Pee Extortion. It involves having a mastery of convincing your customers to drink up at the concession stands as drinks are at the lowest prices, yet secretly inflate the bathroom prices to absurd levels. Their agony will persuade them to fork over the money, which not only recovers the amount you lost on selling drinks, but you also profit more than the rides themselves, because everybody foolishly had their drinks without thinking of the consequences.
I’ve almost mastered that art, but I still haven’t managed to handle the overly long lineups because they pee faster than I can build bathrooms. And in other cases, people chose to bravely hold it in for days and complain about the high prices instead, which as time goes by, I continue to lose money due to the almost free giveaway of drinks. It becomes a battle of attrition at times when they hold it in, and I bleed money. Still working on it, but I WILL perfect Pee Extortion one day!
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I enjoy management games from time to time, usually I get an intense craving for them and delve deep into one or two titles for a month or so then stop for 6-12 months. Last time I went looking for one I couldn’t really find anything that seemed to hit the spot properly, partly because I refuse to buy anything in early access and they’re ALL in early access.
I played Stardew Valley for a solid month and a half back when it was first released. While some people seem to claim it’s a laid back leisurely farming and socializing title I’d beg to differ. You have 3 main resources to balance time, energy and space and you want to spend those resources in the optimal manner to gain the most cash at the end of the month. This means optimizing every single step you take!
Start every day with a plan, know what you have to do and where those tasks will take you, know what other things you can do on the way there and back, know the daily schedules of the people in town and “socialize” with your targets as necessary to reach your goals without wasting valuable mining or fishing time.
Or I suppooooose you could just take it easy and coast by accomplishing nothing!
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Good show! Well done!
Ah, I remember a long time ago when I used to play RollerCoaster Tycoon and Transport Tycoon(or as I played it - Sabotage Simulator). I used to do everything in my power to sabotage my enemies: from running over their trucks with trains, to blocking their railroad stations, to raising the height of terrain at their airports to make their planes eventually crash.
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I love Transport Tycoon though I usually played it without AI opponents but when I did it was in order to ruin as much of their shit as I could too.
I still don’t understand the AI’s tendency to rely on trucks and buses, they were never as profitable as trains. Had this one particular game where 3 AIs ended up running all their trucks and buses down a single road between 2 towns with suitable factories and resources on each side. 2 cheap train engines and a few tracks of rail and I set up a scrapyard of epic proportions. Thousands of lives lost… why do they even bother running bus services?
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I only ever made busses for 2 reasons: 1) getting the bus designs in advance, so I made 1-2 busses just to keep the early contracts going. Or 2) If a train station in one of the big cities for some reason attracted 200-300 passengers even though I had no passenger cars for my trains, and they came from the middle of nowhere from some forest, then I would make a few busses to cash them in, if I didn’t have any more pressing matters. After all, those 30-40k of profit (after deducting buss and station costs), if done several times could have been the difference between having enough cash to finish a highly profitable train route without making a bank loan, or having to get a loan and then pay it back double.
I’m not a fan of pure management games, but things like turn-based RPGs and Strategy games have management elements, and I enjoy them quite a lot.
Civ V has to be my favourite turn-based strategy. I actually really enjoy micro-managing the cities themselves. Many people automate a lot of things, like workers, scouts and population, but I like to do it myself.
For turn-based RPGs, the one that has the most management that I also really enjoyed would probably be Divinity: Original Sin. Unlike XCOM where you’re almost always limited to 2 actions per character, Divinity has a lot of action points and various abilities cost various amounts of points and they carry over if you skip that character’s turn. A lot more choices need to be made, a lot more abilities can combo together and you’re a lot more free to approach the situation the way you want.
And since it’s an RPG, it has your usual fair of min-maxing and stat management, so yeah.
Not quite Roller Coaster Tycoon or Factorio, but it’s something.
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