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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’ve been playing not much else than city builders in the past year or two, for some reason.

    Surviving Mars is good imo, and so is Frostpunk, but both involved a decent bit of trial and error to figure out. For Frostpunk that ended up being a strength, but not sure if I’d have just done a tutorial for Surviving Mars if I would have had fewer problems.

    I have like 400 hours in Satisfactory, some people consider it a city builder, I guess for resource management reasons. But there aren’t cute little people to watch so I don’t know about that, haha. Fun though.

    Kingdoms and Castles is a very cute game, but probably too easy. Still, very relaxing to play which is nice.

    I also enjoyed Jurassic World Evolution, driving the jeep through the park you’ve built is very fun.

    For the past few months I’ve been playing tons of Oxygen Not Included. It’s really fun, but tricky, and the simulation differs from how actual physics works enough that some mechanics are unintuitive for me. It’s a game that I had to figure out a specific reason to keep playing though, as once you get the main problems fixed you’re arguably “done”, but it’s not all that hard to get a self-sustaining colony.

    I tried Rimworld, and found it a very weirdly unsatisfying game. Imo it’s too slow and tedious to be good as a “story generator” but the problems you face are also too banal but also devastating for it to be a good city builder. I’m guessing a lot of people would hate me for saying I actually prefer Stranded: Alien Dawn to Rimworld, even though it’s just a 3d copy. But Stranded Alien Dawn is more fun to watch your people do stuff and I enjoy being able to build 3d houses too. It’s almost more like The Sims.

    I also briefly tried Against the Storm, but I dunno, it didn’t really grab me. Seemed really slow.

    Timberborn is a fantastic game, and everyone should play it. Just fantastic. I started before the badwater update and I think there’s merits to either mode, so if you wanna play safer, you can turn off badwater for a game and it’s still super solid.

    I just bought Manor Lords, but I’m gonna wait till it gets updated more before I crack it open. My ONI world has a lot of work still.

    Also, like everyone else says, Banished is great (though the UI leaves something to be desired, but it’s also a custom game engine from the one dev) and Cities Skylines is good too. Haven’t tried CS 2.

    I also really wanna try Captains of Industry, but I’ve gotta pace myself


  • Went on my first cruise just recently with my wife and two of my good college friends. We were interested cause we live in a city with a large cruise industry and I was very curious about it. I went into it with low-ish expectations, and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the buffet food (better than my university’s cafeteria, which is what I was expecting) but slightly disappointed overall with the fine dining entrees, though the desserts were good. I only had like 2 alcoholic drinks on the boat the whole week, which I believe is atypical (friend of mine said the drinks package is totally worth it, but I can’t imagine drinking >4 alcoholic servings a day for a week straight, which is probably what you need to do for it to even out). Sea days were cool, I enjoyed the shows generally more than I expected, and the laid back atmosphere was cool. Excursion days were also cool, but not mind blowing. Had the most fun snorkeling (although it took me five minutes to figure out how to not freak out from breathing underwater but only through my mouth, that was weird). Didn’t really feel like going to a foreign country, like it does when you take a trip to Europe. I think the main perk for me was that I didn’t have to cook any of my own food or clean any of my dishes for a whole week. I would go again, like some other people have said I think an Alaskan or Arctic cruise would be cool. We had an interior stateroom and booked it due to a very cheap rate 8-9 months in advance