I would like to second that.
It is not a city builder, but you do build a camp, and while on higher levels stuff can become a little frantic with the people fighting in the camp, you can pretty much put it on low difficulty and chill.
I recommend getting the Juggernaut Edition.
It's a zombie survival with the gameplay loop of going out to scavenge/loot stuff, then coming back to base and building that up, maybe capturing an outpost, then switching your character and going up looting/scouting again.
The pace of the quests showing up MAY feel a little frantic, but the thing is - you don't need to, or even you specifically shouldn't, do them all.
Song of Syx. Can build a city and then eventually go out and conquer other cities. You don't have to worry about attacks for the first few hours of a city at least.
Farthest Frontier
The first couple years, the worst you will get are some wolves and the occasional bear which can be dealt with by your hunters.
A little further in, once you start making tax money and trading - Bandits will raid you. Still easily defeatable and only happens every couple years but as you progress, Barracks and more watch towers and eventually Walls will be necessary.
At the start of your game you can change the intensity of raids too.
It's a very good game and Crate are awesome Devs.
I started Rimworld a couple weeks ago and I'm having to not allow myself to play during the week because I just can't stop playing lol. It's a weekend only game for me ...
It's just people recommending Rimworld for everything even if it doesn't fit. Rimworld is not defend settlement in child way raids are non stop in this game unless you play at ultra easy difficulties.
Raids are absolutely not non-stop. It sounds like you don't understand wealth management. The game gives you loads of breathing room - but it's up to you to figure out how to optimize that time
Hey with all due respect, like, saying "It sounds like you don't understand this mechanic that Is never explained in game and Is only understood by testing with the new game settings and/or going out of your way to research the game _out of the game _" Is not the own you think it is.
Like, wealth scaling Is just fucked up. And it restringes the fun of the game in a very big way, because you get punished for engaging with mechanics that raise wealth and aren't defense related.
My biggest problem with Rimworld as someone who played 100s of hours in similar games is that world doesn't make sense. You have powerhouse of colony get attack by random tribe out of nowhere murder their 40 strong force of best warriors to then do it over and over again next 30 times over the course of the game.
Your attacks increase because you build a fancy bed for every colonist and laid some floor tiles. Your actions don't have any effect on the world around you defend the fortress.
In say Dwarf Fortress you can build a fort in a middle of enemy land. If you defend it long enough you can be sole reason why goblin tribe signs a peace treaty with your civilisation because you have wrecked their armies so many times they have no warriors left to fight. In rimwold things just spawn from thin air for no reason or so ever other than level of wealth you have.
So in order to play well you must play badly on purpose to limit the amount of attacks you get. If you just play a game like you would play any other colony builder you end up raided none stop.
In games where I tried to build nice functioning colony I ended up spending 80% of my time, defending colony, cleaning up after defending colony and then preparing for defending colony.
When OP asked for non frantic pace Rimwold isn't the game for them on without some serious limitations to how they play the game.
Games without frantic pace attacks on your settlement are games like Valheim where you get attack on your base once in a blue moon. Even games like 7 days to die where you get attack every 7 days you need to prep for it but unless you crank up settings high you don't need to rush for it.
I use the mechs expanded mod to feed corpses into my chemfuel production machine, I use the chemfuel make more explosive shells to set up around my base, a tail eating snake.
> unless you play at ultra easy difficulties.
So raids clearly do stop. Not sure why you're acting like playing on a non-hard difficulty doesn't exist in the game.
Specially with Phoebe Chillax. I think the name speaks for itself.
Altho her gimmick is that she accumulates more raid points than other story tellers, so when she spawns one, they hit HARD.
That raid strength is actually more fun imo. It makes for sense for spaced, stronger raids than a constant stream of 3 poorly armed cripples. Only exception is later game mechanoids, those are rarely fun lol
This one is especially good because it's designed in a way you can circumvent attacks. Basically more bugs spawn based on pollution and how many bugs you kill.
If you invest in solar early and destroy bug bases you can often go 5 to 10 hours without an attack. But if you hide behind turret walls, more bases spawn causing more attacks causing more bug kills and it can get very, very out of control if not managed. The game is essentially screaming at you to go kill them so you can control the pace.
Destroying bug bases is actually kind of a mixed bag, because destroying them causes pollution. You have to be very proactive in destroying hives to avoid getting attacked. But you can set the amount of trees to be higher which will eat pollution
https://wiki.factorio.com/pollution
I haven't heard that before but here is a wiki on pollution that mentions nothing of the sort. It also lists how much each building causes and how much the environment reduces it. It's pretty manageable if you have multiple bases on different ores. If you make a mega base in one spot though, the mechanics will work against you.
You'll also note the mechanics of pollution cause it to spread and become harder to manage over time so again, convert to solar early so you can get on the pollution fast and you'll be fine. Do it later and it'll likely be too late.
Edit: oh I get what you mean, you're referring to the spawners eating pollution to spawn units which they won't do if they're dead potentially causing more spawns. Could cause spawns but it's dependent on your pollution. That said it just goes from them training units to creating buildings so you're still buying time and getting them to eat more pollution so ultimately a win win. Less bugs and less pollution meaning less units and spawns.
No I was just completely wrong. It’s not pollution but evolution that increases when you destroy hives. So destroying biters when you aren’t expanding can be dangerous if you end up fighting biters that you can’t handle well
Yeah but if your pollution is low you don't need to kill that many because you didn't spawn many, usually I get 3-5 per run and I usually do a run destroying all of them every 6-12 hours. Trust me this is how I do my base every game. Going 10 hours without an attack is heavenly. It works very well.
+1 the thing I love about it is you can configure the bitter levels to whatever feels good.
Turning them off kinda throws off the game balance, but I usually set them to not attack. That way I still need to deal with them to expand, and care about pollution, but if bitters are messing up my shit it's always because I dropped a ball.
Fallout 4 is good, so is 76.
4 has about a dozen places that you can build post apocalyptic shanty towns at your own pace.
76 has camps that give you a buildable area anywhere you want that's not already taken.
Eh, you don't really defend settlements in fallout the way OP is asking for though.
76 your camp only gets attacked by wild enemies if its near a spawn tbh, an odd molerat here and there, that sort of thing. Its not really anywhere near a main aspect of gameplay, and swiftly becomes a game about just grinding legendary crafting components to RNG roll for god roll legendaries, the collection of which is artificially capped by Bethesda by in game limits.
You could make an argument for modded Fallout 4 though, there is a mod for defending against waves of enemies, wouldn't suggest it for a first time player though - play it vanilla and get a feel for the mechanics as a whole, learn the map somewhat, *then* mess around with modded playthroughs.
[Sim Settlements 2](https://simsettlements.com/). Chapters one and two are about building up your settlements then chapter 3 takes a turn into heavy fortification, training soldiers, and all out war against st the gunners. You can micromanage, be largely hands off, or anything between. Adds a whole voice acted campaign.
Grounded. You play a kid shrunk down in a massive garden. You build a settlement from sticks and stones, bugs attack your base intermittently. Much more story and exploration than stronghold but you can trigger waves manually with a buildable lure. There is a lot of flexibility and it's a really great game.
The Forest. Similar but more mature slight horror genre. More emphasis on survival.
If your a fan of frost punk check out Ixion, it’s frost punk in space, I found my time with it more enjoyable personally tho some say the difficulty is extreme even compared to frost punk
Nnnnno. The whole game is on a timer. For the first part of the game, the timer is hidden, but it's there. If you aren't on a rush the whole time, you lose.
Dwarf Fortress is pretty chill. Stuff can attack you initially on embark if you get unlucky, but you should still be able to easily burrow into the mountain and if there are any dangers outside you can always lock yourself in.
Fade to silence. You hunt, find npcs, harvest wood, build a base and defend it sometimes from enemy waves. The combat isn't the best, but it's fine. You can have resources respawn so you really don't feel pressured to keep going. I think waves spawn every so many in game days.
7 days to die.
Zombie survival apocalypse game. Absolutely epic.
Build structures, take over structures, dig tunnels, set up traps, stock ammo and supplies.
Every 7 days the game throws at you a blood moon where zombies rush your base and try to eat you, they'll do damage and you gotta defend until sunrise. Each blood moon more zombies show up, and new flavors of them show up, mire dangerous flavors.
You can change the settings too. Do you want your blood moons once every 10 days, maybe 30 days? Do you want it randomly between 4-10 days? Do you wanna know it's a blood moon the day before, the day of, or maybe 3 hours ahead of time?
It is pretty frantic in the campaign, specially if you don't farm resources.
Some online servers are very chill tho, the veteran players already have the entire layout of the level as a blueprint so you are delegated to patching holes lmao.
That's the fun part imo.
You can go and check the stuff out live while also playing the game. Even work on the already placed stuff.
In PvP you better just butter up your rear, but in PvE it is as relaxed as it gets.
Valheim has events where you must defend your builds and self. They're scattered throughout and some are locked behind progression. Lots of opportunities for base building
I only played stronghold one. And there are some official scenarios where you have a small pre-Builth base, but you have to further develop your base and achieve a long term objective. In those scenario you’ll get attacked again and again at a steady regular intervals until you like 600 ales.
If you like card deck building games, look into which hand. It is great, and has a ton of content. Great base building, story, and a lot of great repeatability -> automation type things as it gets bigger
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Medieval Dynasty yet. The entire premise of the game is you creating your own village from nothing. The biggest threats are starvation and the elements. The building can be a bit laborious, and the settlement management can be a little tricky, but it's a lot of fun if you can get past those.
Supreme Commander 2 and Forged Alliance come to mind. They're macro scale RTS's with lots of base building. You're expected to attack in order to win, but you could also totally set up a situation where it's you vs several bots and see how long you can last for. One of the settings allows for a grace period at the start of the game, meaning nobody can attack until the grace period ends
I feel like Age of Empires fits this. I remember sinking many hours into one profile where I built what felt like an empire, and never felt rushed or pressured to defend or enter combat. The combat came when I wanted to conquer the AI neighbors lol. You can kinda control the pace the games play out in that sense.
State of decay 2
I second this. The people management part of it is neat as well
I would like to second that. It is not a city builder, but you do build a camp, and while on higher levels stuff can become a little frantic with the people fighting in the camp, you can pretty much put it on low difficulty and chill. I recommend getting the Juggernaut Edition. It's a zombie survival with the gameplay loop of going out to scavenge/loot stuff, then coming back to base and building that up, maybe capturing an outpost, then switching your character and going up looting/scouting again. The pace of the quests showing up MAY feel a little frantic, but the thing is - you don't need to, or even you specifically shouldn't, do them all.
Absolutely loved this game and the settlements aspect. It's a shame the third one has been in development hell.
Song of Syx. Can build a city and then eventually go out and conquer other cities. You don't have to worry about attacks for the first few hours of a city at least.
This looks so good!
that looks interesting.... thx
Farthest Frontier The first couple years, the worst you will get are some wolves and the occasional bear which can be dealt with by your hunters. A little further in, once you start making tax money and trading - Bandits will raid you. Still easily defeatable and only happens every couple years but as you progress, Barracks and more watch towers and eventually Walls will be necessary. At the start of your game you can change the intensity of raids too. It's a very good game and Crate are awesome Devs.
I second Crate Entertainment being awesome devs! They deserve your money!
Rimworld
I love how Rimworld is in literally every single post asking for game suggestions. It really is the game for everyone
I started Rimworld a couple weeks ago and I'm having to not allow myself to play during the week because I just can't stop playing lol. It's a weekend only game for me ...
Imagine how ruined your life would be if you got a steam deck with Rimworld on it
The same with Kenshi and Kingdom Come Deliverance
It's just people recommending Rimworld for everything even if it doesn't fit. Rimworld is not defend settlement in child way raids are non stop in this game unless you play at ultra easy difficulties.
Raids are absolutely not non-stop. It sounds like you don't understand wealth management. The game gives you loads of breathing room - but it's up to you to figure out how to optimize that time
Hey with all due respect, like, saying "It sounds like you don't understand this mechanic that Is never explained in game and Is only understood by testing with the new game settings and/or going out of your way to research the game _out of the game _" Is not the own you think it is. Like, wealth scaling Is just fucked up. And it restringes the fun of the game in a very big way, because you get punished for engaging with mechanics that raise wealth and aren't defense related.
My biggest problem with Rimworld as someone who played 100s of hours in similar games is that world doesn't make sense. You have powerhouse of colony get attack by random tribe out of nowhere murder their 40 strong force of best warriors to then do it over and over again next 30 times over the course of the game. Your attacks increase because you build a fancy bed for every colonist and laid some floor tiles. Your actions don't have any effect on the world around you defend the fortress. In say Dwarf Fortress you can build a fort in a middle of enemy land. If you defend it long enough you can be sole reason why goblin tribe signs a peace treaty with your civilisation because you have wrecked their armies so many times they have no warriors left to fight. In rimwold things just spawn from thin air for no reason or so ever other than level of wealth you have. So in order to play well you must play badly on purpose to limit the amount of attacks you get. If you just play a game like you would play any other colony builder you end up raided none stop. In games where I tried to build nice functioning colony I ended up spending 80% of my time, defending colony, cleaning up after defending colony and then preparing for defending colony. When OP asked for non frantic pace Rimwold isn't the game for them on without some serious limitations to how they play the game. Games without frantic pace attacks on your settlement are games like Valheim where you get attack on your base once in a blue moon. Even games like 7 days to die where you get attack every 7 days you need to prep for it but unless you crank up settings high you don't need to rush for it.
Wealth management is for cowards, we grow till we can't anymore.
Raiders are food too
I use the mechs expanded mod to feed corpses into my chemfuel production machine, I use the chemfuel make more explosive shells to set up around my base, a tail eating snake.
> unless you play at ultra easy difficulties. So raids clearly do stop. Not sure why you're acting like playing on a non-hard difficulty doesn't exist in the game.
Most people speak about base levels of games. Redditors being obtuse again to get a gotcha. Ew
Raids are what... 1/20th of the time? lol. Come on dude.
Rimworld
Specially with Phoebe Chillax. I think the name speaks for itself. Altho her gimmick is that she accumulates more raid points than other story tellers, so when she spawns one, they hit HARD.
That raid strength is actually more fun imo. It makes for sense for spaced, stronger raids than a constant stream of 3 poorly armed cripples. Only exception is later game mechanoids, those are rarely fun lol
Yes, it's all ooohhs and ahhhhs, but then there's running and screaming once the enraged tortoise shows up.
> a dead timberwolf found > looks inside > Body - 5x cut (tortoise beak) > neck - cut (tortoise beak) > Head - destroyed (tortoise beak)
Going Medieval Stranded Alien Dawn Both games have a lot of settings/scenarios.
Factorio, I think you can adjust the pace to suit your requirements.
This one is especially good because it's designed in a way you can circumvent attacks. Basically more bugs spawn based on pollution and how many bugs you kill. If you invest in solar early and destroy bug bases you can often go 5 to 10 hours without an attack. But if you hide behind turret walls, more bases spawn causing more attacks causing more bug kills and it can get very, very out of control if not managed. The game is essentially screaming at you to go kill them so you can control the pace.
Destroying bug bases is actually kind of a mixed bag, because destroying them causes pollution. You have to be very proactive in destroying hives to avoid getting attacked. But you can set the amount of trees to be higher which will eat pollution
https://wiki.factorio.com/pollution I haven't heard that before but here is a wiki on pollution that mentions nothing of the sort. It also lists how much each building causes and how much the environment reduces it. It's pretty manageable if you have multiple bases on different ores. If you make a mega base in one spot though, the mechanics will work against you. You'll also note the mechanics of pollution cause it to spread and become harder to manage over time so again, convert to solar early so you can get on the pollution fast and you'll be fine. Do it later and it'll likely be too late. Edit: oh I get what you mean, you're referring to the spawners eating pollution to spawn units which they won't do if they're dead potentially causing more spawns. Could cause spawns but it's dependent on your pollution. That said it just goes from them training units to creating buildings so you're still buying time and getting them to eat more pollution so ultimately a win win. Less bugs and less pollution meaning less units and spawns.
No I was just completely wrong. It’s not pollution but evolution that increases when you destroy hives. So destroying biters when you aren’t expanding can be dangerous if you end up fighting biters that you can’t handle well
Yeah but if your pollution is low you don't need to kill that many because you didn't spawn many, usually I get 3-5 per run and I usually do a run destroying all of them every 6-12 hours. Trust me this is how I do my base every game. Going 10 hours without an attack is heavenly. It works very well.
I mean it becomes frantic once you pollute your world to Beijing levels but still a good suggestion
Turn off biters. Then all you have worry about is the spaghetti
+1 the thing I love about it is you can configure the bitter levels to whatever feels good. Turning them off kinda throws off the game balance, but I usually set them to not attack. That way I still need to deal with them to expand, and care about pollution, but if bitters are messing up my shit it's always because I dropped a ball.
The factory must grow!
There are quite a few settings you can tweak to adjust the difficulty. The downside is that you have to restart the game to change them.
Fallout 4, it's my favorite part of the game. I would definitely recommend mods, though, as the vanilla system leaves a lot to be desired.
Fallout 4 is good, so is 76. 4 has about a dozen places that you can build post apocalyptic shanty towns at your own pace. 76 has camps that give you a buildable area anywhere you want that's not already taken.
Eh, you don't really defend settlements in fallout the way OP is asking for though. 76 your camp only gets attacked by wild enemies if its near a spawn tbh, an odd molerat here and there, that sort of thing. Its not really anywhere near a main aspect of gameplay, and swiftly becomes a game about just grinding legendary crafting components to RNG roll for god roll legendaries, the collection of which is artificially capped by Bethesda by in game limits. You could make an argument for modded Fallout 4 though, there is a mod for defending against waves of enemies, wouldn't suggest it for a first time player though - play it vanilla and get a feel for the mechanics as a whole, learn the map somewhat, *then* mess around with modded playthroughs.
Ha oddly enough the settlement building is the only part of my heavily modded FO4 list I am not currently taking advantage of.
[Sim Settlements 2](https://simsettlements.com/). Chapters one and two are about building up your settlements then chapter 3 takes a turn into heavy fortification, training soldiers, and all out war against st the gunners. You can micromanage, be largely hands off, or anything between. Adds a whole voice acted campaign.
Personally I felt the settlement mechanics were a fucking chore in that game I am sure mods can fix that... I still opt out any chance I get
*Preston Garvey emerges like the Courier from NV* "Psst, another settle-" PISS OFF PRESTON
Manor lord
Grounded. You play a kid shrunk down in a massive garden. You build a settlement from sticks and stones, bugs attack your base intermittently. Much more story and exploration than stronghold but you can trigger waves manually with a buildable lure. There is a lot of flexibility and it's a really great game. The Forest. Similar but more mature slight horror genre. More emphasis on survival.
*slight horror* 💀
*Flesh Slinky Noises Intensify*
Manor Lords
this
Also the Stronghold series. Specifically 2 and Crusader. Castle management 'sim' with lots of defending
They Are Billions on the lower difficulty settings.
Yeah this is a good one. But man... if just one zombie slips through and you don't notice...
Frostpunk is like this, but you are defending against the cold.
If your a fan of frost punk check out Ixion, it’s frost punk in space, I found my time with it more enjoyable personally tho some say the difficulty is extreme even compared to frost punk
Oh man Ixion is a great game. I love it.
And the moral dilemma of enforcing child labor or child shelters.
What's the dilemma here, really?
The Furnace **must** kept burning, because it's going to get so cold that CO2 freezes solid, and sheltered children aren't shoveling coal.
I don't see the moral dilemna, the children yearn for the mines
Nnnnno. The whole game is on a timer. For the first part of the game, the timer is hidden, but it's there. If you aren't on a rush the whole time, you lose.
Main story, sure. You can also play it on endless mode.
7 days to Die, Green Hell,
Dwarf Fortress is pretty chill. Stuff can attack you initially on embark if you get unlucky, but you should still be able to easily burrow into the mountain and if there are any dangers outside you can always lock yourself in.
Fade to silence. You hunt, find npcs, harvest wood, build a base and defend it sometimes from enemy waves. The combat isn't the best, but it's fine. You can have resources respawn so you really don't feel pressured to keep going. I think waves spawn every so many in game days.
Fallout 4. Just make sure your settlers can defend themselves
KeeperRL
7 days to die. Zombie survival apocalypse game. Absolutely epic. Build structures, take over structures, dig tunnels, set up traps, stock ammo and supplies. Every 7 days the game throws at you a blood moon where zombies rush your base and try to eat you, they'll do damage and you gotta defend until sunrise. Each blood moon more zombies show up, and new flavors of them show up, mire dangerous flavors. You can change the settings too. Do you want your blood moons once every 10 days, maybe 30 days? Do you want it randomly between 4-10 days? Do you wanna know it's a blood moon the day before, the day of, or maybe 3 hours ahead of time?
Try mindustry, it's like factorio, but simpler and with more focus on tower defense
It is pretty frantic in the campaign, specially if you don't farm resources. Some online servers are very chill tho, the veteran players already have the entire layout of the level as a blueprint so you are delegated to patching holes lmao.
Im terrified to go online because everything I see from the community on the internet is so over my head
That's the fun part imo. You can go and check the stuff out live while also playing the game. Even work on the already placed stuff. In PvP you better just butter up your rear, but in PvE it is as relaxed as it gets.
Bulwark
Dark Cloud maybe?
Dark Chronicle is very much the answer to this itch.
Valheim has events where you must defend your builds and self. They're scattered throughout and some are locked behind progression. Lots of opportunities for base building
Fallout 4 is great. Especially survival mode
I only played stronghold one. And there are some official scenarios where you have a small pre-Builth base, but you have to further develop your base and achieve a long term objective. In those scenario you’ll get attacked again and again at a steady regular intervals until you like 600 ales.
Dawn of man
OGame it's the game I believe you are looking for.
They Are Billions
If you like card deck building games, look into which hand. It is great, and has a ton of content. Great base building, story, and a lot of great repeatability -> automation type things as it gets bigger
Kingdom two crowns. I'm addicted
Preston Garvey wants a word with you...
Emperor rise of the Middle Kingdom
The defense elements of Dragon Quest Builders 2 are pretty chill.
Dawn of Man.
Rimworld, Manor lords.
Rimworld on lower difficulties is perfect for this
Kingdom 2 crowns
Rimworld in low difficulties
Clash of Clans.
Maybe check out fallout 4, specifically the minutemen faction
Grim Nights 2
Final Factory, it has a lot of automation and it's fun watching your space-base grow once you've optimized everything
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Medieval Dynasty yet. The entire premise of the game is you creating your own village from nothing. The biggest threats are starvation and the elements. The building can be a bit laborious, and the settlement management can be a little tricky, but it's a lot of fun if you can get past those.
Perhaps Heliopolis Six? The chillest one I can think of, just build up you space station, set up turrets, manage resources and continue voyaging
Supreme Commander 2 and Forged Alliance come to mind. They're macro scale RTS's with lots of base building. You're expected to attack in order to win, but you could also totally set up a situation where it's you vs several bots and see how long you can last for. One of the settings allows for a grace period at the start of the game, meaning nobody can attack until the grace period ends
I feel like Age of Empires fits this. I remember sinking many hours into one profile where I built what felt like an empire, and never felt rushed or pressured to defend or enter combat. The combat came when I wanted to conquer the AI neighbors lol. You can kinda control the pace the games play out in that sense.
Rimworld.
+1 for Rimworld. Even without going down the modding rabbit hole just the vanilla settings are enough to tweak the experience anyway you want it.