I've had this massive itch for city builders for several years, but could just. never find 'the right one' for me.
I had been looking for a lighthearted and cozy builder with an initially gentle learning curve and so far it's exceeded my expectations. Thus far, Against the Storm thus far feels absolutely incredible at 21 hours invested.
What's really won me over with the games formula is that semi-RNG determines not only what resources the map has, but also what buildings you can craft. In addition, selection between RNG options determine which items you deliver and which rewards you receive: if I don't have any source of wheat.. is this potential reward with a very beneficial passive worth it? Very rarely does anything go according to plan and the name of the game is adjustment on your path to victory.
The game features zero 'rts-like' combat and no troop management. Instead, your enemy is an increasingly hostile forest, a cyclical seasonal storm, and a tug'o'war with maintaining the happiness of your civilians." All while juggling time sensitive delivery of goods to 'quest' locations.
But the best thing? All games are under one hour of unpaused gametime and in that time you'll be faced with almost constant RNG, improvisation, risk/reward, and rogue-lite decision making. Given that gameplay loop, it doesn't feel like the end of the world starting over and suffering through the early-game again.
Yes it looks complicated: but I started blind and have no desire to do anything but learn on my own. At higher difficulties, I'm sure it gets even more crazy. But everything, thus far, has been extremely intuitive.
(((As the many fine games that I've tried to replicate that AoE/The Sims 1/Roller Coaster Tycoon/Civ III feeling from my youth? Oxygen Not Included, Rimworld, Prison Architect, They Are Billions, Banished, Timberborn, I suppose Endless Space/Legend, Shadows of Forbidden Gods. Against the Storm just nailed everything for me and I'm only on 2/5 difficulty.)))
You might like Ixion, it's a pretty tight city builder that's story driven. People's main gripe with it is the difficulty, but they added a difficulty slider that should fix that. I found the original difficulty just right, but your mileage may vary.
I finished ixion today amazingly, glad to see it get a mention.
Ixion is fantastically fun but definitely a longer time sink compared to what is described here for against the storm (which I haven't played but am interested in).
Ixion has multiple chapters and if you fail, the game restarts you at the chapter start or a manual save. I liked that mechanic although as a new player I made some design decisions that I regretted later on which were somewhat challenging to completely fix. Those slightly hindered me later on in the game.
Literally bought it five days ago and I’m having a blast!