I know what you want. The humble city builder isn’t enough for you any more, is it? You need a cities builder, you can’t just stop at one, but you don’t want to build up an entirely different city on a new save file. If it were up to you, they’d all be on the same map, a motorway’s worth of a drive away from each other. If we’re talking contemporary cities, I can’t help you, but if you can settle for numerous medieval towns across an entire county, then County of Fortune should do just fine.
County of Fortune just landed in early access a couple of days ago, and as mentioned (and as the name suggests), you’re building up an entire county! “You place whole settlements across the county and lay each one out on a medieval grid. Each one grows, specializes, and knits into a living region where rivers and resources decide what thrives,” the game’s Steam page explains. “As the county matures, a second game begins. Named mayors run each settlement. Rival noble houses weave politics across the region. And migrating cultures bless some villages, while complicating others.”
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To start with, it’s up to you where you want to place each of your settlements, deciding how they individually function as you do. The towns are then partially procedurally generated as they get built up, slowly connecting to other nearby towns. “The scale is the point. You are not zooming into a single town – you are zooming out to see a whole county come to life.” A big part of the strategy comes down to how you navigate the map; finding resource deposits, picking appropriate terrain profiles, utilising rivers efficiently, finding a good climate, setting good trade routes, it’s all about working with the land you’ve got.
Each settlement will produce different things depending on the materials available to them in close proximity, meaning each one has a unique function. You’ve got different types of characters to consider too: mayors, noble houses and cultures, all intersecting with different elements of how a town functions. Seems like a unique approach to city building! And as mentioned, it’s out in early access; you can pick it up on Steam here.