Planet manager game

Tropico 6 also finally adds some much-needed spice to this most conservative of management series by stretching out your latest empire across an entire archipelago of islands, switching your traditional goal of expansion for expansion's sake to something you're actively striving towards. It's a small change, sure, but as that old saying goes, even the smallest change can make a profound difference.

Banished is a different sort of a management game. At first glance, it looks a lot like a Settlers or Anno - good-natured, brakes-on building and tree-chopping, enjoying the gradual and all-but-inevitable expansion from scruffy one-horse town to bustling old world metropolis.

But no. Banished is about scratching out a rudimentary life in the dirt and cold, and maintaining that life even as the elements turn against you - striving to subsist rather than to explode into glory. If approached wanting a cheery city-builder, you're going to have a horrible time. If approached as a sterling test of planning and resource management, in which failing to get it right means great suffering and even death for the handful of people in your charge, it's going to keep you very busy, challenged and, ultimately, feeling far prouder of yourself than most anything else in this list could hope to manage.

It's cruel, but it makes the things we take for granted in other management games feel like titanic accomplishments. Zeus: Master of Olympus might be as old as its Ancient Greek hills, but this 2D, historical city builder continues to hit the sweet spot of complexity, accessibly, prettiness and sheer charm. There is war if you want it, but really this is a game about making cheese. Also wool, olive oil and theatre. An artisanal colony all of your own.

Just watch out for wolves. And there are puns. Lots of Ancient Greek puns. You'll want the player-made resolution and widescreen fixes if you're planning on playing it today, but it remains an absolute delight. Sure, it's free of the strife and toil of ancient life, in favour of a colourfully genteel take on the pre-tech era, but it just gets on with being the very best pure town-builder it can, those nerve-calming loops of gentle expansion and efficiency-pursuit.

Complex but approachable, Zeus is designed to be something you lose yourself in. Management games have nobly struck off in so many new directions now, but Zeus' take on their economy'n'craft core might just have never been bettered.

The true star of the show, though, is its Steam Workshop support, where you can import or upload remarkable and terrible constructions. People have built some jaw-dropping stuff in Planet Coaster, and this age of massive monitors means that riding them is a genuine thrill. Even if you're not into sharing with or borrowing from the wider world, Planet Coaster's focus is much more on building stuff yourself than it is plopping down prefabs.

This is the designer's management game, not the accountant's management game. Its construction tools are delightfully accessible, and you'll be able to coax meaningful results out of them very quickly indeed. Keeping your guests happy and the coffers overflowing is still a fundamental part of the game, though, and you'll need all the ancillary theme park money-rinsers, such as cafes and gift shops too. After all, if you build it, they will come. Where can I buy it: Steam , Humble. Most management games are secretly puzzle games too: figuring out how to fit all these pieces into this finite space, and how to get x resource to y place as efficiently as possible.

Factorio takes this idea and runs with it to its natural extreme: impossibly dense, maze-like conveyor belt constructions shuffling massive networks of production back and forth between endless auto-factories, making this to make that to make this to make that, loop upon loop upon loop upon loop.

To gaze upon a late-game Factorio screenshot without ever having played the game yourself is to gaze into the face of madness itself. But Factorio's greatest accomplishment is how quickly that obscene mountain of mechanised noodles makes sense once you've put a couple of hours into it. From the humble starting point of a single conveyor belt forlornly shifting resources to the next machine, a portal of possibilities opens up - if I do that, then this , but I'll need to link it to that , but oh that will need one of those and then, well, bang goes your life.

Factorio is an achievement as frightening as it is remarkable: the mind that was able to design this game surely transcends humanity as we know it. Two Point Hospital is a hectic hospital management sim, but it's immensely satisfying at the same time.

When you finally get a brief window of respite, you expand, create new problems, compensate for those problems, and are able to enjoy watching the machine operate as smoothly as it's ever going to. Then it will throw a helicopter full of patients convinced they're Freddie Mercury at you, and suddenly the game's jaunty radio jazz transforms into a mocking dirge that guffaws at your efforts to maintain control. Two Point Hospital is a business sim first.

Since it balances visual chaos with workable, informative interfaces, you can nearly always find out what the problem is with a few clicks. It's as colourful as it is compulsive. It celebrates the legacy of Bullfrog creators of spiritual predecessor Theme Hospital even as it vastly improves and expands on so many elements. Want some light social commentary on the machine-like nature of public services that prioritise efficiency over patient well-being? It's got that, too.

The strangest thing about Maxis' world-straddling life management series is how few other games ripped it off. The Sims remains effectively peerless within its honking great niche: undisputed heavyweight champion of the human needs, drives and desires simulation world. From managing actual Sims - making sure they get to work on time, don't get lonely, don't lose all their friends, don't run out of money to pay the bills and most importantly don't end up dying - to building homes they can properly navigate, there's a lot to keep you busy.

Life-long Simmers will probably tell you that The Sims 2 is the best in the series, but we swear by The Sims 4. It's also got one of the most robust and thriving modding communities around, and has received a shed-load of expansion packs, game packs, and stuff packs that each add more and more content and play time to the game.

Where can I buy it: Origin , Steam , Humble. Not so long ago, we'd have picked SimCity 4 to represent modern-but-traditional city builders, but now that Cities: Skylines has had a couple of years to bed in, with copious DLC and the mammoth impact of its modding community, there's no doubt that Colossal Order's triumphant revival of the genre picks up Maxis' battered baton.

A session with Skylines is reminiscent of the golden age of gaming. That's not any particular year; it's related to your own relationship with games. Remember when you'd spend hours playing without worrying about the outside world, or even feeling any pressure from within the game itself? Hours of comfortable, calming bliss, laying roads and watching a city grow before your eyes.

Skylines creates those long holidays from reality. It's relaxation in game form. That's not to say the actual simulation isn't complex, though. If you want a challenge, Skylines can deliver, though you'll often have to set your own parameters.

The brilliance of the game is in the variety of cities it can host, from perfect geometrical machines to wonderful recreations of real life locations. It's like the biggest box of building blocks in the world. Where can I buy it: Steam , Humble , Paradox. Dwarf Fortress is much more than a management game, but where else could we file it?

Because it's unfinished? Because it's too broad and baggy to allow for definite managerial approaches to emerge? Because learning the obtuse interface is Actual Work?

Because it's about dwarves and we all know that management games are all about taxes? Admittedly, Dwarven Tax Tycoon would be a fine proposition, but the actual reasoning behind Dwarf Fortress' position as the 3rd best management game of all time is known only to a select few. Whether you're allergic to the number three or not, you should play Dwarf Fortress right now - it's one of the most remarkable, complex and unpredictable games ever made, and probably always will be.

What I like to focus on first is keeping everything in the upper right corner of the Planet Summary tab in the green. Allowing overcrowding, having low amenities, and having crime present all decrease morale, which decreases production.

This produces enforcers who will work on decreasing crime. You can also build a city district to eliminate overcrowding. I also like to build any specialized buildings, like an energy grid, that increases the total output of the resource the planet specializes in.

The short answer is grab as many as you care to micromanage since there is no penalty, except for empire sprawl, to having lots of systems and planets. Some players recommend 5 to 10, some recommend more based on the map size. Having more planets and systems will increase empire sprawl penalties, but the planets and systems will more than compensate for that problem with the resources they produce. Empire sprawl is not a profoundly serious thing and can be handled with a strong economy. When I get the terraforming technology watch out because I will methodically start turning all those red planets green.

Terraforming usually costs 5, energy credits, and usually by the time I have that technology available I have a very strong economy that can handle the cost. I like having a lot of planets since having a lot makes it tougher to get knocked out of the game, plus I enjoy having planets to manage. The only real consideration is how many do you want to micromanage. The tab you will do most of the planet management on is the Planet Summary tab.

This screen has a wealth of information and management options. Anno , however, is an excellent exception to this rule. Putting you in the role of a budding industrial magnate, it charges you with taking a pre-industrial farming village and transforming it into a fully-mechanised hive of work and profit. Anno is fundamentally a game about detail. Every road, house and building in your city has been artfully and painstaking modelled, lending a palpable sense of life to your ever-expanding metropolis.

Most impressive of all, however, is how clearly Anno communicates its systems. Not only is the way your city grows truly breath-taking, you always know exactly what each building is doing, what resources are being transported where. Like city-building games, I think factory-building games are destined to become a managerial sub-genre of their own. Factorio is essentially a game about building a production engine, but it takes that idea far more literally than most management games.

Then it injects it with steroids. But not just any factory. Your roads become conveyor belts, your buildings become furnaces, assemblers, and recyclers.

What are you making? All that matters is you make, and make more, forever, until everything that can possibly be made has been. Factorio is the ultimate expression of the satisfaction a good production line can bring, the joy of setting up an automated system so that it does all the work for you, and the terror when a tiny flaw in that system shuts the whole operation down.

If your brain is tickled by the idea of making things, then Factorio will make you laugh yourself to death. Yet running alongside these macro features is a huge amount of micro-detail. Your colonists have individual needs and moods which affect their friendships and relationships with other colonists.

They can fall in and out of love, develop addictions and illnesses, suffer injuries, and even have limbs replaced by prosthetics. Designed to lend a sense of drama, the storyteller will assess your progress and throw in obstacles and boons that depend upon your specific situation.

In this way, RimWorld is designed not just as a management sim, but also a story generator, and as a result its potential to entertain is virtually endless. Two Point Hospital.

Theme Hospital is arguably the best management sim ever made, so it takes some talent to create a game that lives up to it. This is exactly how Two Point Hospital came to be, and also why it's absolutely bloody brilliant. Like the game that inspired it, Two Point Hospital has just the right balance of everything to make it welcoming to virtually all-comers. The first time I saw a caretaker deal with a ghost haunting the hospital by hoovering it up, I think I laughed for about a minute straight.