City Builders / Ant Farm Games
Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2026 9:49 pm
I've been getting more and more into Workers & Resources lately, a city builder with a lot of Sickos Detail to it.
The first one to stick out to me were the logistics.
If you prefer the convenience, you can automatically import supplies (food, clothing, fuel, construction materials, chemicals for e.g. water treatment). They'll magically appear directly in the buildings that require them - but that also costs you a pretty sizeable transport fee slapped on top of the buying price, increasing the further said buildings are from the border.
Or, OR: you could save yourself that transport fee by handling the shipping yourself, saving money in the long term by building up solid logistical networks of storage buildings and "Distribution Offices" that link them together by road or rail, automatically dispatching the vehicles you staffed them with in response to regional shortages of this or that material:
And from there, you can slowly work your way toward resouce independence by building up your own elaborate resource extraction & processing, exporting any surplus (by setting up deliveries to the border, but make sure you set up your railway signalling right, or you might end up with horrifying deadlocks once there's lots of trains roaming around)
For example, here's the iron mine slash ore processing slash steel mill complex I've been working on:
That whole area took a while, but not as long as the infrastructure required to even actually start building it.
All that concrete and steel and asphalt has to come from somewhere! And again, it can just be instantly from your wallet, but it can also be your Construction Offices and local stockpiles of gravel, bitumen and cement (after all, you can't really store liquid asphalt or concrete), bricks, boards, prefabricated concrete panels, and so on and so forth:
The process is much, much slower than just paying out the nose for the conventional click-once-and-it-gets-built-for-money construction, but also unbelievably cheap by comparison, especially because foreign labour doesn't come cheap compared to having your construction offices bring your own workers (and excavators, and cranes, and pavers, and rollers, and so on and so forth) to the job site.
But they only can only drive so far... so at some distance, it'd be faster to build a new, closer construction office... and some local storage for materials... but how'll you build those? And you'll need the cement and asphalt mixed locally, so you'll also need to set up supply lines for gravel and bitumen and--
And there's the inherent joy of it. It's one of my favourite parts of this game. You get to watch all your little toy cars zoom around to deliver stuff, and your elaborately planned-out area slooowly comes together:
It doesn't end there, of course; most buildings need power, many also need access to drinking water and a sewage line - each of these utilities has its own specific structure and comes with its own little challenges.
Power has to be generated or imported, and converted from high to medium voltage before connecting up to a local substation.
Sewage lines need to have a slope to them, or (powered) pumps that raise them back up, and actually treating the sewage before dumping it in the water (causing pollution) or exporting it to be someone else's problem (costing money) can require a lot of space and chemicals:
And if you do dump it in the water without treatment, not only can it adversely affect the health of nearby residents - it also takes more chemicals to process the drinking water you're getting from the area, so you'll directly feel it in your bottom line.
Most of these sicko aspects are completely optional - you can play without ever worrying about the utilities at all, if you prefer.
And there's more parts I haven't even played with yet, like requiring heating in winter, garbage disposal,
(Naturally, there are many different kinds of garbage, some of which can be recycled back into useful materials)
wear and tear of vehicles, even a particularily messed-up one where building deconstruction requires elaborate manual disposal....
Awesome game.
The first one to stick out to me were the logistics.
If you prefer the convenience, you can automatically import supplies (food, clothing, fuel, construction materials, chemicals for e.g. water treatment). They'll magically appear directly in the buildings that require them - but that also costs you a pretty sizeable transport fee slapped on top of the buying price, increasing the further said buildings are from the border.
Or, OR: you could save yourself that transport fee by handling the shipping yourself, saving money in the long term by building up solid logistical networks of storage buildings and "Distribution Offices" that link them together by road or rail, automatically dispatching the vehicles you staffed them with in response to regional shortages of this or that material:
And from there, you can slowly work your way toward resouce independence by building up your own elaborate resource extraction & processing, exporting any surplus (by setting up deliveries to the border, but make sure you set up your railway signalling right, or you might end up with horrifying deadlocks once there's lots of trains roaming around)
For example, here's the iron mine slash ore processing slash steel mill complex I've been working on:
That whole area took a while, but not as long as the infrastructure required to even actually start building it.
All that concrete and steel and asphalt has to come from somewhere! And again, it can just be instantly from your wallet, but it can also be your Construction Offices and local stockpiles of gravel, bitumen and cement (after all, you can't really store liquid asphalt or concrete), bricks, boards, prefabricated concrete panels, and so on and so forth:
The process is much, much slower than just paying out the nose for the conventional click-once-and-it-gets-built-for-money construction, but also unbelievably cheap by comparison, especially because foreign labour doesn't come cheap compared to having your construction offices bring your own workers (and excavators, and cranes, and pavers, and rollers, and so on and so forth) to the job site.
But they only can only drive so far... so at some distance, it'd be faster to build a new, closer construction office... and some local storage for materials... but how'll you build those? And you'll need the cement and asphalt mixed locally, so you'll also need to set up supply lines for gravel and bitumen and--
And there's the inherent joy of it. It's one of my favourite parts of this game. You get to watch all your little toy cars zoom around to deliver stuff, and your elaborately planned-out area slooowly comes together:
It doesn't end there, of course; most buildings need power, many also need access to drinking water and a sewage line - each of these utilities has its own specific structure and comes with its own little challenges.
Power has to be generated or imported, and converted from high to medium voltage before connecting up to a local substation.
Sewage lines need to have a slope to them, or (powered) pumps that raise them back up, and actually treating the sewage before dumping it in the water (causing pollution) or exporting it to be someone else's problem (costing money) can require a lot of space and chemicals:
And if you do dump it in the water without treatment, not only can it adversely affect the health of nearby residents - it also takes more chemicals to process the drinking water you're getting from the area, so you'll directly feel it in your bottom line.
Most of these sicko aspects are completely optional - you can play without ever worrying about the utilities at all, if you prefer.
And there's more parts I haven't even played with yet, like requiring heating in winter, garbage disposal,
(Naturally, there are many different kinds of garbage, some of which can be recycled back into useful materials)
wear and tear of vehicles, even a particularily messed-up one where building deconstruction requires elaborate manual disposal....
Awesome game.