RimWorld, I say! https://store.steampowered.com/app/294100/RimWorld/

The lead developer has a lot of great behind-the-scenes stuff too: https://youtu.be/VdqhHKjepiE

I don’t know. It can get pretty dark really quickly and I’m not sure I’d give my kid that kinda game.

If he finds out drug trade, organ harvesting and slave trading are the easiest/most efficient methods of making money, and he will, you might expose him to something a sub-12 year old may not be ready to process yet.

That being said, I love Rimworld and have 1200 hours put into it. It really is the ‘forever game’.

That's fair enough. The health system alone is pretty gruesome, and it's easy to get attached to disposable pawns if you treat them like Sims. A few runs of trying to save "everyone" is soul-crushing enough as-is. Horrible possibilities aside, it just takes a mature mindset to process and respond to every threat or disaster that happens to your colony circumstantially.

That said, I think it's a wonderful system of skill expression that also rewards the opposite style of play. Running a prison pretty much requires the same work as a greenhouse or hotel. Stockpiling drinks and decadent meals can be more lucrative than mass-manufacturing coke. Organ harvesting looks crude and unnecessary once... well who am I kidding, organ harvesting is always lucrative unless you don't get raids.

Perhaps RimWorld isn't for kids. But for teens and adults, it's kinda like a smorgasbord of all the best strategy game concepts rolled into one. And all that being said, the game still isn't offensively explicit or depraved. If you have a specific goal in mind (like the Royalty DLC questline), your run can stay pretty focused without resorting to cannibalism or humanleather parkas. I think the war-crimes reputation of RimWorld turns a lot of people away from the more fulfilling and benign gameplay loops. You can play it like the Sims, if you accept that your neighborhood will be raided by offended tribes and locals. And that your Sims can get carcinoma.

I’m a grown man and I quickly fell into a flowchart mindset when I started, where I checked if a raider: A) Had skills I needed and an appropriate personality, and B) was healthy. That decided if he was scrapped for parts, sold wholesale or recruited. There were counted instances where NPCs didn’t end up in the meat grinder, as viable members of society were few and far between, and they had to be lucky enough to be incapacitated instead of dying in a kill box.

It took a conscious effort not to do this kind of morbid activities. I found late into my Rimworld experience that healing and releasing prisoners nets you good relations with other factions. After releasing 5 or so of them with a full belly and no injuries the tribes and cities around you decide “Hey, you’re alright, mister, we won’t raid you anymore”. Except for pirates, space pirates will never like you. So they either become chicken feed, an involuntary organ donor or a couch, maybe all three.

Time and effort and resources put into helping people that came specifically to kill you doesn’t happen spontaneously and I doubt a kid would favor that style of play. I wouldn’t want my son to tell me stories of how he turns people into a log or how his cyber super soldier can level 100s of tribesmen with a minigun by himself.

I’d rather introduce him to other war crime sims like Factorio where humans aren’t the subject of his ire.

It's just the opposite for me. I think ethics is done right in Rimworld. Doing the right thing should never be the efficient option. I have more issue with the constant violence in there though.

Also I dislike Rimworld becaus it's the forever game. I was happy with the early betas which were winnable, but the recent builds just feel like a treadmill with the game always trying to rip down what you've built up.

Cities: Skylines is the obvious answer; I believe the 2nd game is not as good so you might wanna go for the original.

I've been playing a lot of Transport Fever 2; it's more akin to Railroad/Transport Tycoon (or OpenTTD), focused on connecting industries and cities with trucks, trains, ships, trains, etc. It's quite easy to get started with and addictive though you do not build cities.

If you want something more hardcore and with tons of micromanagement I've heard good things of "Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic" it does look much more serious and hard to learn though, been meaning to try it but haven't had the time.

Cities Skylines, the Anno series, Timberborn, Frostpunk, etc. Broadly, they're called city builders. Many are available on Microsoft PC Game Pass, which can be combined with GeForce Now to allow you to play AAA games in a browser, streamed from Nvidia.

I maintain a community list of building and other engineering / building games, if it helps: https://github.com/arcataroger/awesome-engineering-games/blo...

How old is the kid? My 7 year old just got into "Kingdoms and Castles" -- nothing special but it was simple enough for him to get started (with plenty of new dynamics to consider as he figured things out).

I recently finished Sid Meier's book and I really do think 90s-2000s were the peak for strategy PC gaming. I'd love to just give my son an airgapped Windows XP desktop with a bunch of games installed from that era.

Later versions of SimCity are available on Good Old Games with adaptations to let them run on recent versions of Windows.

Micropolis should work on modern systems

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/micropolis/

Check for a package for your OS if you don't want to build from source.

> Haven't been able to successfully run SimCity on modern hardware

I’m a bit surprised by this. Have you tried running the DOS version with DOSBox, or the SNES version with an SNES emulator?

Going to assume you're talking about the 1989 game, there's a 2013 game too.

I remember Cities: Skylines being the SimCity successor - I haven't played it though!