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Comment by Vaskivo | Hacker News Reader

OP here.

I feel in the last years we're having a resurgence of management/simulation games.

Just like Will Wright did his own SimCities, SimFarms, SimLifes, etc., new developers are returning to these themes.

We need more of these freeform interactive management sandboxes. We have Prision Architect. Rollercoaster Tycoon is coming back. Bring back Theme hospital and the histrical city-builder! Let's open our arms for new management games in new unconventional contexts. (Boon Hill is a graveyard simulator. How cool is that?)

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Game Dev Tycoon is one of my favorites (http://www.greenheartgames.com/app/game-dev-tycoon/)

Kerbal Space Program also fits into this trend. It's a little interesting that this is pretty much all indie Steam games - the AAA publishers haven't pivoted to start chasing this demographic again yet.

Except for EA (that bought Maxis) Sim games were never big on AAA market.

For example Roller Coaster Tycoon was created by a single guy, that made the game in Assembly (yes, almost 100% of RCT1 is ASM), he ended getting "publishers" in the sense they sold the game for him, but the game is still his.

Game Corp DX is equally enjoyable (I played both of them), worth checking out http://store.steampowered.com/app/399670/

I maybe like Game Corp DX a bit more as it gives more freedom. Simple things like the office layout etc, but it's a nice addition.

> We need more of these freeform interactive management sandboxes.

If you haven't checked it out yet: Rimworld. You manage a group of people who crashed their spaceship on a planet, and they found a colony. The game has a storyteller AI that tries to make your struggle for survival interesting and entertaining. I love(d) it.

You might enjoy http://maiagame.com/

There's an open source Theme Hospital implementation written in Lua:https://github.com/CorsixTH

Doesn't look 100% stable, beta 0.5, you'll still need the game files from the CD

I been looking at this for years just so I can finally finish the game as the copy I have has the last level bug where you cannot keep the doctors happy and they all leave.

That being said I think I been watching it for 10 years :/

I'm playing through the game again using this.

It's still in beta but I haven't run into any issues. I'm currently on level 7 I remember right.

Please, no more city builders - they're all clones of each other. Oddly, they all have strange ideas about budgets. Want to build a hospital? That's $5k. Even for a hundred years ago, that's laughably small...

Well I have to say that, while arguably unrealistic, I'm addicted to Cities:Skylines. Been playing for two months and it brings back the days of the original SC. The later SC titles really went down hill IMO. It's been great fun having a well made one after all these years. Even if it is mostly a rip-off of SC and not truly realistic. Honestly though I don't care if hospital prices are accurate only how fun the game is to play. One of the first games on Steam I've gotten my money's worth in a very long time.

I am really impressed with the Cities:Skyline dev team. They have done 2 IamA on reddit (most recent - https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3ly7ib/we_are_the_tea...)

I hope we moving in to a time where Dev teams are interacting with their players instead of lunching a game and just moving on. I really want to go back to smaller super star studios

I've often considered creating a realistic city building game. Where instead of just clicking to build a bridge or a hospital, you click where you would kind of like to have a bridge or hospital, then wait 1-15 years, pay 1.5-15x the initial price estimate, have a X% chance of the project being canceled on you and a Y% chance that the bridge or hospital shows up in a completely different place with completely different specifications.

Man, I instead always wished for a non-American centric realistic city building game. Where you start not from 1800-something, but from 0 AD or earlier. As eras go by you get new buildings and requirements (reinvent your roads for cars, dismantle & re-purpose buildings, etc), plus some disasters and events change (in old eras you get raided by foreign armies, ...). In the end, you get a meld of old and new architecture and a truly alive city.

Like a macro-scale Civilization ? I'd play the hell out of that.

I remember getting hooked on DinoPark Tycoon as a kid :D

Part of the impetus for that is also the existence of Dwarf Fortress, showing how deep a simulation like this can go. While nobody else goes to the depth DF does, it is a rich source for game mechanics that can form the basis of other game ideas. Planetbase is a good example in this style, of a simcity-like experience with much simplified, DF-style inhabitants.

> Bring back Theme hospital

Well, there's this new Big Pharma simulator on Steam :).

Big pharma is well made, and definitely fun, but it's completely different to Theme Hospital - BP is completely lacking in the humour that made TH what it was.

Thanks for the opinion. It was a bit pricey last time I checked it out, and I wasn't sure if it's good. I'll reconsider buying it :).

Big Pharma is way more of a puzzle game. Very fun, but different mix of genres.

Seems to me that Prison Architect is closer to Dwarf Fortress than those games.

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