Banished

It's not a super advanced game, but it's cosy and satisfying if you don't have strentgh for something more difficult.

Banished is still the best colony builder out there, all else fall short. But I would like someone to try and beat it.

This is a city management, but the core design is survival. There is no money, there is no utilities, it's just your citizens and nature. You do this by your townfolk collecting resources (wood, iron, stone, etc), gathering food (fishing, hunting, gathering from forests, etc) and using the resources to build shops that cater to items needed for work and survival like tools, hospital, and coats. And you keep doing this until you feel you have a large enough population where work can be distributed but still have enough people to replace others if something should happen, ultimately getting to the point where your town can sustain itself. There are some random events such as tornado's or fires, but they don't happen enough to be of a concern, the main concerns you should have is food and having enough workers to perform jobs that you need done. It's also important to keep an eye on your citizens so they don't get sick or unhappy, these do have effects in the game. Controls are good, it uses both the keyboard and the mouse or you can use one or the other. No real port problems I believe. But yeah, pretty solid game. Give it a shot if your wanting a city management game that's pretty different from all the others.

Maybe I had been spoiled by games like Tropico, Simcity and Caesar series, but Banished did not managed to keep me engross for very long, even with the CC mod. Pros: Very chill and zen ambiance. The focus on survival without trying to fit in other mini-games (think of the token fighting in Caesar 3). Tutorial was good for explaining the controls and basic concept Cons: Tutorial actually "tricked" the new player into focusing on fishing (which led to 2 very short and hungry games for me). The Tutorial also did not warn a new player not to queue too many tasks at once and actually encouraged giving commands to harvest large area of resources and construct multiple buildings at one go. This resulted in everything being half done by winter. Not funny. Poor balance of the various food production methods that once figured out, made the game very easy. Totally RNG dependent traders that are completely unreliable. Even with a special order placed, I had never seen another trader with sheeps for 20 yrs, let alone the same one I placed the order with! In my 3rd game, once I found that the hunter and gatherer would pull the town comfortably through the first few years, and a Forester set to only plant trees (not chop) would create a dense patch of forest for the hunter + gatherer to exploit, the challenge fell considerably. Most of the difficulty curve came from the misguided tutorial, and a few simple "disasters" that will only catch a player the first time around. E.g. Forgetting to build houses for young couples (everyone grew old and died), not building wells for fire fighting, not preparing for diseases with a hospital... The game quickly turned into a "set to max 10X speed and hope the trader brings what I want next year" waiting game for me about 6 hrs of play and 30+yrs of in-game time.

Pros: Kind of relaxing atmosphere and music, easy to get lost in for a few hours. It's fun to try and collect the different kinds of crops and livestock to give your villagers variety in their diet. The number of building types isn't overwhelming, and the game seems fairly forgiving about where you place stuff compared to, say, Pharaoh Gold, which requires everything to be in exactly the right place or be useless. There isn't much of a story or goal, but there are some achievements to earn if you need direction. Cons: Really annoying placement rules. If I can't build a road up a gentle hill or make an orchard that isn't a perfect rectangle, why is the entire goddamn game set in a super-hilly wilderness that forces me to waste most of my space? The game lacks variety, and there aren't any rewards for getting far- everything can be built right away, and the only things that you don't start with are various types of seeds and animals, which aren't that hard to get. Can be difficult to get started without dying- your population uses food at an astonishing rate, and it's hard to maintain a supply for even a tiny population while still having enough people to fill the needed jobs. I managed to get the food situation under control, but then my young, healthy, happy villagers with lots of new houses inexplicably wouldn't breed, so the population dropped and dropped and dropped with almost no children to replace it, making production rapidly worse and worse and making my village unsustainable. Extremely frustrating because the game refuses to tell me what I'm doing wrong- I'm not even sure if I WAS doing anything wrong or it was just a bug. Fun for a little bit, but the limited choices and unfair, confusing difficulty really ruins it.