All of these things require resources, workers and space, of course, calling for yet more tweaking. These limitations have forced me to spend a lot more time considering how my city should grow, and it means no section is ever really complete-I’m always redesigning them. If all the new buildings are creating too much drag, some more propellers could give you a bit more propulsion. If the city is lying a bit low, maybe chuck in a new fan or some wings. You have to build methodically, and then make lots of little adjustments. You’ve got infinite space, but thanks to gravity’s desire to keep you down, you can’t just keep expanding in whatever direction you want. Geography is a defining feature of a city, and thus city builders, but it loses its impact when you can soar above it all. Without that resource, the city’s done for-sadly it’s a bit too heavy to gently float to the ground. (Image credit: The Wandering Band)Physics ends up being an excellent replacement for terrain. All your most important components burn through the stuff, and unlike other resources it can only be stored in one location, limiting how much you can stockpile. They’re a precious resource, but it’s coal that keeps your city aloft. And it only takes one little building to push it over the edge. Since you have to hunt down and recruit your citizens, their loss can sting, and you might end up left with too few people to work or explore, necessitating some unwelcome downsizing as you destroy buildings and try to plan your comeback. It just looks like a disaster waiting to happen. They can stomach a little bit of tilt, but I can’t. And who can blame them? Nobody wants to live in a place where they have to nail down their furniture, or where they’re greeted by a view of the ground, miles below them, every time they look out the window. Too much tilt and your citizens will peace out. You’ll need to generate more lift, and you’re going to need to make sure it’s all even. But once you start placing houses, hangars for your planes and towering minarets, it’s going to start sinking. You start out with just a little town centre, like the one above, gently bobbing away in the sky, perfectly balanced. Physics is a constant obstacle, and more than anything else it’s that force of nature that determines your city’s layout. The war against gravity, though, never ends. All this is happening in the sky, though, and that’s a pretty substantial wrinkle.Īirborne Kingdom doesn’t feature any combat or even a whiff of conflict, at least not with other people.
Power, food, factories, morale-boosting diversions-there’s loads to build, but you’ll recognise all the categories. I’m an easy mark for a city builder and rarely manage to escape their grasp quickly, but Airborne Kingdom lodges itself in its own niche thanks to some unusual experiments and its spectacular style. The basics are familiar and conventional: you build simple production chains and infrastructure to fulfil the needs of the city and its denizens, with the demands of both getting more complicated as you expand.
That’s just one of the issues you bump up against when you’re building in the clouds. My plan was to play an hour of Airborne Kingdom to get gifs of cute clockwork cities, but instead it ended up stealing most of a day, with me finally leaving my floating metropolis at midnight. Airborne Kingdom, however, is the first city builder where I’ve lost people because the city was leaning too much. In Cities: Skylines, I “accidentally” flooded their homes in liquid poo In Surviving Mars, I left them to suffocate in broken domes In Anno 1800-this is the one that’s left me most ashamed-I failed to provide them with enough sausages. I’ve built a lot of cities over the years, and I’ve given my citizens plenty of reasons to flee them.
0 kommentar(er)
