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The Rundown
Best for Politics:Urban Empire at Amazon, “You will not only focus on building cities but learn to adapt to and manage technological breakthroughs and ideological uprisings.”
Best Prison:Prison Architect on Steampowered.com, “Will please any city-building fan with its layers of complex gameplay in micromanaging every little detail.”
Nov 26, 2017 Welcome to the 24 Upcoming PC City-building Games in 2018 & 2019 list! Us city-building enthusiasts haven't been having the best of times as the genre kind of fell out of favour, but it might be. The above mentioned were the Best City Building Games in 2018-19 which will definitely addict you to play on. Furthermore, remember to give a feedback on the best game you find according to your wish. If you find any difficulties in any of the listed games then feel free to ask your queries.
Best for Colonizing Space:Planetbase at Steampowered.com, “You’ll guide a group of space settlers in hopes to ultimately set up a base colony that can operate on self-sufficiency.'
Best for Building A Mall:Another Brick in the Mall at Steampowered.com, “Carry out your fantasy of designing, building, and being in charge of your own super mall.”
Best Futuristic City:Anno 2205 at Amazon, “Sci-fi, city-building game puts you in the role of a CEO whose goal is to expand an enterprise while facing unique challenges.”
Best for Survival:Frostpunk at Amazon, “A survival-based, strategic city-building game where every decision you make comes with a lasting effect.”
Best for Dinosaur Amusement Parks:Jurassic World: Evolution at Steampowered.com, “Build and manage your own dinosaur amusement park from the ground up.”
Most Difficult: Dwarf Fortress at Bay12games.com, “Construction/management game that involves taking a band of dwarves to build a miniature civilization.”
Our Top Picks
Best for Politics: Urban Empire
Urban Empire deals with the nitty-gritty of politics where you will not only focus on building cities but learn to adapt to and manage technological breakthroughs and ideological uprisings. Every decision you make will directly affect both the civil infrastructure of your growing utopia and the price of politics that comes with it.
You’re the mayor, and you come from a background of one of four ruling dynasties with specific history and traditions. For the next 200 years, it’ll be up to you to establish city districts, debate in governmental decisions at city council meetings, and even blackmail and bribe your political adversaries for leverage.
Through time, from the years 1820 to 2020, you’ll research technologies in five-year increments, deploying electric trams, antibiotics, and even video games, all of which will affect the happiness of your citizens. Urban Empire has over 1,000 dynamic events that challenge players to make crucial decisions involving everything from child labor, raising taxes, and what to do with the hippies.
Best Prison: Prison Architect
Prison Architect is all about managing and constructing your own private prison while detaining as much chaos as possible and turning a profit. The top-down, 2D, cartoony, visual sandbox game will please any city-building fan with its layers of complex gameplay in micromanaging every little detail.
You may need to read up on the Wikipedia page of Prison Architect to feel fully confident in your multiple approaches of management. You’ll first start off slow by building pathways to cells, and then gradually incorporate more patrols, CCTV cameras to break through the fog of war when guards aren’t looking, construct an isolated kitchen to avoid inmates potentially acquiring knives, and so many other subtleties that’ll go a long way in ensuring the flow of order.
On top of all this, you’ll need to find a way (or not) to meet the various needs of your prisoners, including sanitation, food, and clothes while stomping out fires, seizing, contraband, breaking up gangs, and ultimately, expanding out your prison. Even a clogged up toilet can start a riot, so you’ll need to be prepared for everything.
Best for Colonizing Space: Planetbase
You're headed to space on a mission to colonize a remote planet in the city-building and management game Planetbase. Upon arrival, you’ll guide a group of space settlers in hopes to ultimately set up a base colony that can operate on self-sufficiency.
Planetbase has you commanding a group of colonists who construct numerous buildings and structures like wind turbines and solar panels that’ll provide oxygen and water for an ever-growing population. Your space settlers all come with different roles, including biologists who will look after food with armed security guards to defend it, engineers who can repair buildings and build components for robots who’ll do your dirty work, and medics who’ll heal people like your damaged miners that collect ore. You’ll need to brace yourself for disasters, too, including pirates who’ll ransack your turf and meteor impacts that can take out important supply depots, which can mean the difference between life and death.
Best for Building A Mall: Another Brick In The Mall
The cleverly titled Another Brick In The Mall lets you carry out your fantasy of designing, building, and being in charge of your own super mall. You’ll have your selection of various shops, supermarkets, restaurants, and more while hiring and managing a well-trained staff to keep everything in order.
You’ll start from the ground up in Another Brick In The Mall, optimally laying out every road with designated parking spots for customers and deliveries while building up each wall, tile floor, door, and more before you jump into the goods and services markets. Ultimately, you’ll want to turn a profit, which relies on seeing the finer details in the bigger picture like how well your staff performs while balancing their satisfaction, checking which items sell the best, and making sure you satisfy every customer because they may not ever come back if you’re charging too much on hotdogs.
Accounting is paramount in Another Brick In The Mall, and you’ll have thousands of characters and vehicles on the screen that, when zoomed out, looks like an ant colony.
Best Futuristic City: Anno 2205
It’s the 23rd century and you’re ready to erect the foundation of a futuristic city with eyes on the moon in Anno 2205. The strategic, sci-fi, city-building game puts you in the role of a CEO whose goal is to expand an enterprise while facing unique challenges, including stomping out competitors and meeting investor demands.
Anno 2205 has you starting out on Earth where you’ll gradually build houses and clear land for farms while acquiring resources such as purified water, energy, and minerals and upgrading the tier of your working class populous to operators, executives, and investors. As you thrive, you’ll enter new zones like the arctic where you’ll build science outposts that’ll eventually lead you to construct shield generators to protect your industrious moon factories from space debris.
Anno 2205’s complex economy and interstellar supply lines will keep you busy juggling a staff of thousands while jumping between your three settlements of your expanding corporate empire.
Best for Survival: Frostpunk
You are in charge of the last bastion of humanity in Frostpunk, a survival-based, strategic city-building game where every decision you make comes with a lasting effect. It’s up to you to spark both fires of warmth and hope in your civilization in order to bear a worldwide volcanic winter.
Frostpunk will draw you in with its outstanding story using a unique presentation of animation detailing a climate change catastrophe that plagues the late 1800s. You’ll rely and call upon your finite number of workers — all with their own needs and who prefer working on sunny days — who’ll trudge through the snow to gather resources while you push your limits in judgment calls over what vital life-saving structure to build next.
A number of ambiguous tough decisions will pop up as you write the law, shaping the fate of your society and leading to long-lasting consequences like whether you left the gravely ill to die or stretched food supplies by making a bad soup that everyone has to eat.
Best for Dinosaur Amusement Parks: Jurassic World: Evolution
Childhood dreams come alive with Jurassic World: Evolution where you’ll get to build and manage your own dinosaur amusement park from the ground up. You’ll be in charge of maintaining the safety and entertainment of your customers while creating a livable environment for your sensitive and needy dinosaurs.
Jurassic World: Evolution has you taking contracts from three factions as you start out with plotting your land and sending expedition teams to dig up fossils for DNA to make your own dinosaurs. The more different types of dinosaurs you have, the more customers you’ll get, but you’ll need to carefully balance both of their safeties by dividing them with electric fences and gates, making sure they’re not crowded, and having plenty of things to eat. You’ll get to tinker with building management, including adjusting prices of items and employing ranger stations to take care of your dinosaurs and contain them just in case any of them decide to escape and eat everyone.
Most Difficult: Dwarf Fortress
Dwarf Fortress (which inspired the second best-selling game in history: Minecraft) is considered to be one of the most difficult games in existence, but with that, comes the challenge of both conquering and cherishing its every moment. The construction/management game involves taking a band of dwarves to build a miniature civilization while managing resources, delegating jobs, reserving goods, building and using structures, and defending against goblins.
Each time you play Dwarf Fortress you’ll randomly generate an entire world with a passage of geological time, history, drainage and erosions, mineral deposits, Dwarf personalities, and so much more, which will all be factored into where you first set up your base.
From there, you’ll assign tasks to each dwarf, accumulating wood and food, crafting pickaxes, and eventually burrowing into a mountain where you’ll set up your fortress. Dwarf Fortress is open-ended and plays out like a book. Despite its graphics (which can be altered with graphic packs), a lot of the game is imagined in your head as you read a scroll of text about everything that occurs in the game.
What to Look for in a City Building Game
Complex systems - The best city-building games are elegant on the surface but hide underlying complex systems. If you’re looking for a great city-building game that will keep you occupied for hundreds of hours, choose one with gameplay that’s easy to pick up, but takes time to master.
Innovative settings - The city-building genre isn’t just limited to mundane city planning. If you’ve had your fill of Sim City and Cities Skylines, why not check out a game that uses similar mechanics in a totally different setting, like a mall, prison, outer space, or even fantasy world?
Open-Ended vs. campaigns - Most city-building games are open-ended (letting you do whatever you want), and many don’t have any conditions for winning the game at all. If you want a little more structure to your play, without taking away from the fun and creativity, look for titles like the Anno series, which give you the option of playing through single-player campaigns while you build your cities.
City builders are curious. On the surface they offer no excitement, no shooting, no adrenalin pumping moments and no storyline. Yet despite that, they can drain hours from your life without you even noticing. If you’re in the mood to create instead of destroy, here are what I think are five of the best city building games for PC in 2017 so far.
Also see our article The Best Games for the Chromebook
As someone who played the original SimCity series, I know only too well how effective city builders are as time sinks. You cannot help but stick around while one zone grows and to see whether that new subway line will reduce traffic or whether it will be a waste of money.
These games weren’t released this year and I don’t think any city building games are in the pipeline for release this year. Each of these games is available to buy this year though.
Cities: Skylines
Cities: Skylines is what the new SimCity should have been. An open, freeform city builder with all the frustrations, elations and challenges that come with the genre. Released in 2015, it didn’t have the most auspicious start but regular updates and DLC are still being released. The graphics are good, the modeling is excellent and the range of buildings is superb.
You do need a fairly recent PC to be able to do this game justice but you are rewarded with a living, breathing city with day and night cycles, fairly realistic mathematic and population modeling and real consequences for your actions. I have this game and still find myself going back to it regularly.
Banished
Banished began as an indie game on Steam designed and built by one person. I think that same person still runs everything now but you would never believe it. While a long time coming, once banished did arrive, it met with lots of praise. It is a medieval city builder with a slight twist. You manage an existing village and have to grow and expand it as the game progresses. You have to manage people, food, tools, materials and every aspect of resource and population management.
The game looks fantastic with superb season theming, building design and feel. The sound is pretty good too. This is probably the most challenging city building game I have played and another than keeps me coming back.
SimCity series
City Building Games 2018 Online
SimCity was the original city building game but it seems to have lost its way a bit recently. The game itself has all those features we liked about the previous versions. Detailed cities with great design, sound and feel. Lots of challenges, different terrain types, accurate transport and population modeling and lots and lots of building options.
SimCity 4 was excellent but the rebooted SimCity (2013) was a real disappointment. The inclusion of always online DRM ruined the game for many, myself included. The requirement to always be connected to the internet meant no more playing while I was commuting or while away from home and was a deal breaker. As was the fact that as soon as your city grew to a certain size it could not be self-supporting but had to depend on other player cities to survive.
Upcoming Games 2018 Pc
Buy SimCity 4 as your city building game but not the newest version.
Tropico 5
I have played all of the Tropico games. I like the setting, the simulation, the music, sense of humor and everything about them. Tropico 5 is all that and more. It’s more island simulator than city simulator but the premise is the same. Build your economy, city, population and meet a set of objectives.
Tropico is more mission based than sandbox but those missions are varied and interesting enough to add rather than detract from the game. Graphics are good, writing and voice acting is good and there is enough here to keep you coming back for more.
Anno 2205
City Building Games 2018 Ipad
Anno 2205 is a futuristic city building game that has you build on earth before moving to the moon and beyond. The Anno series is another regular city builder that has covered many periods of history before shifting to the future. While not as involved or as accurately modeled as SimCity or Cities: Skylines production quality is high enough for it to deserve its place in this list.
Anno 2205 feels as much a company simulator as city builder but the balance is good. You need to manage the hierarchy of needs, resources, profit and all those other things alongside developing new tech and manufacturing. It is quite an involved game that become more complex the longer you play.
Games Of 2018
What do you think are the best city building games for PC around right now? Tell us about them below!