I know the Clockwork Empires started out with its roots being based in Dwarf Fortress, but over time has evolved and borrowed from other games like The Sims, Stronghold, and Tilted Mill's city building games. Honestly I feel it is more similar now to the Stronghold series, where you build up something of a fortress and weather attacks while trying to keep your people happy and fed. It really doesn't have much in the way of a Dwarf Fortressy feel to it. It also seems very Sims like with the buildings. Thoughts?
Whenever I need to chop trees in CE I always get that guy's voice in my head saying "Wood needed" But let's not forget: Get up on those walls! Can't build that there, sire. The people worship you, sire! Granary stocks are very low, sire.
I'm hoping that down the line the game moves more towards Tilted Mill's examples of city games with Stronghold in mind in terms of walls, defenses, traps, troops, and deterrents. With trade maps, roads, running to the end of the map allowing some sort of trade and population connection. On the subject of combat I'm hoping that we eventually see larger battles. The invasions currently are a bit underwhelming for me (though understandable since all we have is gabions and landmines to stop them). I'm hoping for invading troops to set up trenches on the outskirts of the map, bring in artillery to fire on your walls and defenses, while charging in mass waves with normal troops along side the invading empire's own special units at entrenched cranked gatling guns and cannons while your steam knights fire upon their entrenched guns with grenades and burn half of the forest on the map down. Now that's some Dwarf Fortress style combat.
Citybuilder. Nothing complicated or hard about it. If it is broad enough for games like Anno 2010, then it's broad enough for Clockwork Empires.
I grew up on Tilted Mill games, they absolutely stole my heart and shaped my gaming preferences. I even adored Children of the Nile despite all the flack it got for being so ambitious and moving to 3D. Seriously, I'd kill for graphically updated version of that. Oh yeah, back to CE. A few months ago Nicholas posted a shot of a massive brick bunker module with a stationary gatling gun in the center. Will it ever make it into the game? Who knows, but it exists.
Oh yes, I loved Children of the Nile not because of the 3D graphics or anything like that, rather because you could watch as your workers hauled bricks and an obelisk from a quarry, onto a boat, then down a road, hoist it upon the temple you were building and then a stonecarver finish the chiseling on it. Instead of just plopping down a structure already done and it magically coming out of your resources. Same with the pyramids in the game, it was the sense of starting with nothing, watching something rise and then the satisfaction of completion that I really liked. As for the gatling gun, I remember that too. It will probably come later on with the walls.
It's in the City Builder genre without a doubt. The games it is most similar to right now are Settlers and Banished. It's in particular VERY similar to Banished at this point in time. I don't think it's anything like Stronghold at all.
Tropico is a different kind of city builder entirely, and has more in common with Tilted Mill games like Caesar, where there are no individual colonists. These games are more derived from the traditional Sim City style of city building. Games like Clockwork Empires use individual colonists and have a lineage derived from Settlers/Serf City and Cultures. Cultures in particular is very, very similar to Clockwork Empires in the colonist design, involving individual colonists with personal stats and skills which influence how efficiently they work, or what work they can do.
They have a name, a father and mother, they marry, gets kids, education, job. They can become criminel, and you can then kill them. What is not individual ?
If other game equivalents have to be made and we're talking strictly how the game plays as a user rather than how many surface features you can draw lines from one game and another to and go "Well obviously it's like xxxx and yyyy because of it has A B and C", then 1.0 Clockwork Empires is very much in the generalised box along with Banished and the Anno series. For example.... Whilst the game does have things like colonist emotions, memories and traits which you can plot a line to something like Rimworld/Dwarf Fortress/The Sims, where this comparison falls short of any real equivalent meaning to help explain what CWE is like as a game, is that unlike all these other games the whole simulation doesn't really have any central part to play in the game and certainly not in terms of what it means for the player.... for the player it means very little at the moment. Even emotional state holds most meaning as a binary "Are they happy enough to be productive? Yes/No" consideration. They could be extremely angry but as long as that hasn't caused their productivity state to switch to the 0 state, then really other than for perfectionist reasons.... *shrug* leave 'em to it. But now the role these things play is as primarily as conditional checks for the separate event system. So the event system goes: But if the event system doesn't decide it wants to fire off something involving colonists that love beetles, or have a morbid fascination in what their neighbours insides might taste like.... then those things are doing nothing, because the emergent behaviours that allow a colonist to do things on nothing but their own drive and create their own stories spontaneously isn't really there.... which changes the entire user experience and what actually matters to the player over things like The Sims, Dwarf Fortress and so forth. So there's definitely significant limitations to trying to hold games up to others by playing a game of "Pin the surface features and describe what it's like against other games". But yeah, if you avoid doing such things and just try to make general comparisons to what it's like to play and the things that are actual consideration points for the player as they play... then I'd say it definitely falls into the Banished/Anno-lite feel of things.
As it is presently formed ,I will hesitatingly call the project a :" Plantation Builder". without Simon Legree.overseer type, controlling the indentured.,reluctant so called colonists. This is said in the light of the reviews,which allude to a player wish,toward, nascent slave driving ,as well as dictatorial power.. . This is instead of the current attempts,as it currently stands, of a polite hard working civil servant, attempting to manage, as well as establish, the nucleus of a new nation, in spite of :realistic environmental difficulties, including ,the unwillingness and exhibition of the typical primate behaviour,of the unfortunate victims of the empire.
