Rimworld is an indie top-down construction and management simulation video game. You will have to take responsibility of leading a colony that exist in a planet inside an external space labeled as “Rim World”.
Your main objective? Make sure of everyone’s survival. All of the characters spawn with different traits each time the world is generated. Immigrants join your colony as time passes by, increasing your population, or they can be rescued after a crash-landing on the map.
However, there are both positive and negative traits for each person in the colony that you must keep an eye for. The game is unpredictable with the random events that could harm your colony, thus making it much more entertaining and a dynamic experience!
To end the game, you will have to save everyone by sending them on spaceships, but the game can also end if everyone dies.
1. Oxygen Not Included
Oxygen Not Included is a survival simulation game about managing a space colony. Starting in an asteroid base, you, the player, will have to manage all different kinds of resources to ensure everyone’s survival. Your colonist needs water, food, and obviously, oxygen, to maintain their survival and possibly their happiness.
Please become familiar with your base, then start expanding it via the building feature. Gather resources by digging and mining for various needs. At the start of the game, each world is randomly generated and consists of different biomes.
Each biome is unique and contains special materials. Tasks are completed by the residents, allowing them to adapt and complete future chores much faster in the future.
2. Dwarf Fortress
Another Indie video game is mainly about construction and managing a soon-to-be colossal fortress. The game settles you in a randomly generated fantasy world with a group of dwarves as your primary population.
However, it is also possible to play the game on a map of your creation. You’re entirely free to decide how you wish to play the game; there is no time limit or a right end. Instead, your main objective is to make your colony wealthy and run successfully.
Discover the environment around the fortress in text-based visuals as the main texture. It would help if you protected the dwarves from possible threats that can result in the extinction of the colony and tested your managing skills.
3. Space Haven
Find a new home for humanity. Space Haven is about managing a spaceship full of human residents. You will have to monitor the spacecraft and manage it to keep everyone alive.
Providing food and water for the civilians is essential for their survival, as well as maintaining oxygen to keep the air in. The spaceship can be built and expanded through tile-by-tile mechanics; it doesn’t need a good aesthetic but something to keep everyone alive.
While alien monsters that can attack your ship exist, you must also keep in mind details such as keeping beds away from loud chambers to prevent sleep disturbance for the residence.
4. First Feudal
Life back in the middle ages had been harsh and brutal. First, Feudal introduces just that as you will have to manage a small settlement and turn it into a substantial fortified castle. You start the game with a few villagers as your initial population.
They will have to be assigned different tasks to help keep the settlement alive, like gathering food, mining materials, building houses, and farming. Work on attracting new settlers by decorating and improving the settlement. Defend against wild animals and bandits, or protect your people by surrounding them with walls.
Never forget your primary goal, you must always be ready for winter, or your settlement will be torn to the ground.
5. Gnomoria
The game is about managing a village in a sandbox-themed world by controlling and leading a small party of gnomes. Every game starts with a completely random generated map which also involves all resources that can be gathered from the surrounding environment.
Chop trees, mine stones, dig up iron and other ground materials, craft items, and build various structures to help your gnomes evolve their village. You are free to decide how you will manage their city. You can be a pacisft and focus on interior chores, or you can build up an army of gnomes and send them to invade the kingdom.
However, you can’t let yourself be too concerned with attacking. You forget to defend. There are vicious goblins out there that seek to harm your gnomes.
6. Prison Architect
Prison Architect is an exciting management game where instead of managing a colony, you will need to monitor a prison instead. Your penitentiary is filled with plenty of people who have committed serious crimes.
While the resources in this game could mainly be money, you will find yourself more busy managing your prison activities by reducing gang activity or prison fights. Special programs must be provided for each prisoner based on their criminal history and traits.
Invest in your penitentiary and ensure that only the best correctional officers are hired by doctors, lawyers, and other essential professionals.
7. Civitatem
A dynamic medieval city builder, Civitatem is another medieval-based game that allows you to manage a small settlement then expand it into a vast prosperous city.
Maps are randomly produced, and their resources and villages will be tasked with their usual chores to keep them alive and happy. Each can develop a skill that helps them complete jobs much faster than other villagers.
By building schools, you can make your people more educated, which allows them to become even much more productive than before. You can also discover the trade routes and sell the extra goods your village might spare.
8. Factorio
Build the ultimate industrial factories and turn them into a massive empire to make a name for yourself. While the start of the game might be a bit slow, chopping trees and gathering ores will become irrelevant to manage after building different machines and transport belts.
Create robots with different suitable characstic depending on their jobs, then fight off enemies and other threats that could disturb the progress of your empire.
You’re free to play and to manage everything the way you like. The game keeps you awake as you encounter challenging events to face off.
9. Frostpunk
A society survival game in a completely frozen world in the future. After a devastating climate change that almost destroyed all of humanity, you’re taking responsibility to manage and take care of what seems to be one of the few surviving colonies left.
Your main enemy is the overwhelming cold temperature that won’t even allow your people to leave their shelters at night. Heat is the main resource that you must never fail to provide. As the city’s ruler, you must ensure to keep everybody happy; the last thing you want to face is your people overthrowing their leader.
Many decisions that will shape the future will be taken. Enforcing the law, supplying health care, exploring the outside world, there are so many to be looked at in Frostpunk that might overwhelm you at the start, but investing in the game will be worth it.
10. Surviving the Aftermath
A strategy management game that takes place in an apocalyptic future world. The details of how everything started remained ambiguous, but a global catastrophe has destroyed civilization and almost wiped out all of humanity.
You will have to oversee and supervise a new colony for the remaining survivors, to restore human civilization into the world. Keeping colonists happy and alive isn’t an easy task. You must learn how to take care of every possible requirement to keep your people alive.
With over 50 unique buildings in the game, Surviving the Aftermath offers a vast world to explore alongside a science “Technology” tree that should be studied to improve society. But be wary! Outsiders can invade your colony and completely ravage it for loot.
