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Comment by omnibrain | Hacker News Reader

Having played Prison Architect for ~200h spoiled me for this genre of games. I too wanted "more" but in a different setting, so I tried various airport sims, including Airport CEO and SimAirport (why don't they get sued by EA?) but refunded all of them.

I also tried "Another Brick in the Mall" but also made it only ~30 minutes in. I think I'm trying Timberborn next.

When Paradox bought Prison architect I hoped they were going to use the engine to build similar games with different settings. Instead they killed the game with buggy expansions and stopped to support it a few months ago. At least they (slightly) teased Prison Architect 2.

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>SimAirport (why don't they get sued by EA?)

That is strange. The only thing I can think of is that EA isn't terribly motivated since they aren't trying to keep a broader "Sim" brand alive, just The Sims and SimCity (and it's not clear how invested they are in SimCity anymore).

Poking around U.S. trademark database, EA may not have a general "Sim" trademark— as Maxis' appears to have lapsed [0]—and maybe "SimAirport" is distinct enough from "The Sims" and "SimCity" trademarks EA has to not be worth suing over.

[0] https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=74300602&caseType=SERIAL_...

Creator of SimAirport here. We fought EAs opposition to the trademark and won; we did the same for the SimCasino trademark. :)

I guess I assumed most studios wouldn’t want to go up against EA’s lawyers, but I’m glad you did. Congrats!

Prison Architect was such a fun game before Paradox, but don’t kid yourself its always been a buggy mess. I think my favorite was designing prisoner escape prisons, and I loved playing them too.

Timberborn is great, worth a try. You'll be stressing about droughts in no time.

Tried Dwarf Fortress?

Not since the update (steam release).

I tried it years ago - I think even before Prison Architect and Rimworld (another great game, that spoils you for other games mechanicswise) - but could not get into it, because I felt very "disoriented". And a feel of disorientation is difficult for me to work through in games.

I think you might be able to get through it now, specially the steam version, as the UI is much closer to RimWorld than the ASCII version was.

Never tried Steam version, I think it wasn't available on Mac or something, but I tried the old ASCII version and it's super cool. My main problem is paralysis of choice.

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