I have this idea for a city builder game where all the buildings are either brutalist or built like a small town in 1870s Illinois and every building is named like its an old lady and every transport vehicle is an old man
You get points along an Axis towards either Midwestern Socialism or Eastern European Socialism depending on which style of buildings you build, this affects nothing about the gameplay except for what animals appear in the back ground and what flags are in the public park
You start by building the capital city of the Provence or state. And over time you can build and run up to 6 towns at a time and each one is based around a different resource, ie: energy, corn, timber, ect. This allows you to build up complex factory type cities as you ship objects between the factories/refineries, the citizens in the capital and the small resource towns
You have to keep your citizens happy or else they will overthrow you. You can provide happiness points by building amenities like shops, parks and roller rinks. The happiness points are doubled if a citizen lives within walking distance of the amenity, multiple by 1.5 if they can access it via transit in under a half hour and halved if they have to drive over a half hour to reach an amenity
Shops have to be stocked, hence the need for factories, for example a book store requires a lumber mill and a paper mill to make the books in one town which would be the timber town and a university in another to get new books written because otherwise overtime the happiness generated by the bookstore will decrease.
Each city is divided up into 16 districts, one of which holds the administrative functions of the city, for each district there is a transit and a amenity score which determine the demand for housing in a district. The higher the transit and amenities in the district, the more people want to live there. Districts get housing bonuses by containing water fronts and penalties for containing heavy industry. They get bonuses though for transit connections to heavy industry.
If a district is built with High density, it will be more expensive to build but cheaper to maintain and provide a slight happiness bonus. If a district is built at a low density, it will be cheap to build up but harder to change without damaging happiness, and more expensive to maintain
There are 9 industries one of the 5 outlying city can focus on.
- Oil, used to make records, vehicles and decrease travel time
- Education, functions as college towns, creates books, and raises wages of citizens
- Energy, used to power cities, can be coal, solar, or a dam
- Timber, used to make furniture, books and buildings in the Midwestern style, can have both paper and lumber mills
- Corn, food
- Beef and Dairy, food and leather products
- Concrete, used to lower road maintenance and build building in the Brutalist Style
- Trade, acts as ports and rail depots, allow for movement between cities and importing of goods for cheaper prices, can decrease travel times
- Ore, used to make technology, and vehicles
The capital can be upgraded to contain the industries of trade, energy, education or corn but primarily functions as the receiver of finished projects, the capital in the later game has a much higher required happiness to prevent a revolt
Also if you last 30 years into the game, you can replace all of your citizens with crabs
Oh and there are no interstates or expressways, if you want to move things by truck you have to take the time penalty of rural backroads
By default the capital city starts with a happiness threshold that makes it very unlikely to rebel even with the less dense housing and high import penalties on happiness from amenities in the early game, but as you build more towns the capital gets more and more likely to rebel at greater amounts of happiness so that there is still challenge in the late game
You would start off the city builder game with a pre-built train station in the brutalist style, from there you can build from a set of buildings including:
- 5 low density houses in the Midwestern style
- 2 sets of quadplexes in the Midwestern style
- 4 apartments in the brutalist style
- 6 shops in each style
- a city hall in each style
- both a modern tram system and a historic streetcar system.
You can unlock new sets of buildings by either reaching population milestones or completing challenges related to the building.
