OpenTTD

When I still had a windows PC, I would play a lot of a game called Deadlock: Planetary Conquest. It's a proto-4x game that came out in 1996, and got picked up by GOG and refurbished. There's no linux build, unfortunately, and I haven't been able to make it work with wine, so I've had nothing to scratch that itch lately.

The itch is sort of micro-optimizing a system, I guess? In order to do that, I need to know the system well enough to actually perform the optimization. In Deadlock, this took the form of allocating workers to job sites to ensure every settlement is optimally producing to meet its own needs and I'm not wasting money moving food and power around.

I'm giving OpenTTD a try. I never played the original TTD, though I did play a fair bit of Rollercoaster Tycoon. I can't decide whether I like it so far or not. I haven't reached a true fail-state with the game, so it might be a touch too sandboxy; in Deadlock, I'm in conflict with other factions to control the planet, so there's some pressure to actually have a good system. In openTTD, I'm not sure what determines a good station rating, and I'm not sure there are actual consequences when my system is inefficient. Maybe I need to experiment with having other transport companies on the map.

I am having some fun with the sandbox, though. Just discovering what happens if I have trains run in a loop around a city, for example, or trying out small maps vs. larger ones. Maybe as I learn the underlying game a bit better, it'll start to scratch that system-management itch I've been having since I stopped with Deadlock.