Games

Endless Sky. Open source and crowd developed. Its story lines, assets, and general size have only increased with age. Active Discord server as well (but it's only single player, for now anyway).

I'll go with some classics if you haven't tried them yet. Planescape: torment is a really engaging crpg if you don't mind old graphics and dig lots of lore and dialogue. Morrowind if you prefer first person for another old school rpg with lots of stuff to discover in a weird surreal environment. Dwarf fortress sounds like another older one you might be into too.

Some further suggestions I haven't seen mentioned in all these comments yet, surprisingly:

• Foundation
• Manor Lords
• 0 A.D. (FOSS and impossible to get ripped off, AoE clone)
• shapez / shapez 2 (the first one is only $2)

And maybe a little more casual, but still similar vein as city management:

• Mini Metro
• Mini Motorways

Out of all of these, I think I've played Mini Motorways three times as much as the rest, combined. I dunno why, I just love it.

• Tropico 6 is on sale 65% off on GOG right now.

• Yakuza Kiwami is a remaster of the original and is a beautiful and hilarious rpg

• Subnautica is kinda a perfect mix of both RPG and management games

This thread is actually huge, so apologies if this has already been recommended, but take a look at Against the Storm. It's an indie city-builder with a bit of a rogue-like spin. You can usually get it on fairly deep sales, and the rogue-like elements combined with some meta-progression gives it a real play length, even though a single city-building session is a ~45-60 minute experience.

Too lazy to check all responses but if you want a nice resource building game then Timberborn could be your jam.

Dyson Sphere Program is a great factory game. Check it out.

The Rock of Ages trilogy is fun

Hmm, how about mindustry (its open source and free outside of steam)? It's like factorio with tower defense. Note: after playing for few hours you might get access to many more stuff in game which might feel overwhelming

Even when the prompt is better (at all?) articulated, threads like these are a waste of time. People who respond barely read the prompt and OPs generally don't even know what they are asking for. So obviously you should play a little cult classic indie game called Hollow Knight.

My suggestion is to instead put some time in to find an influencer/reviewer you like. Even if you don't have a similar taste in games, a good reviewer will say WHY they do and don't like something and you can make informed decisions from there.

Ksp2 was severely botched by Take2.. but if you're into the genre you might want to check out Juno.

In addition you might want to keep an eye out for KSA which is currently in early stages of development. As there's no official website yet, I try to keep on top of any dev updates and nuggets of information so I can update the lemmy community.

Based on your enjoyment of management and strategy, Paradox's grand strategy games might be something you enjoy. Same publisher as Cities Skylines. There are four main series of them, each with their own mechanics but enough broad-scale similarities that knowing one helps with the others. They are:

• Crusader Kings, set in medieval Europe, North Africa, and about half of Asia. This one is the most roleplay-heavy, as you play as a succession of characters within a feudal dynasty rather than a country
• Europa Universalis, set from the European Renaissance up to the end of the Napoleonic wars. The whole world is playable, and exploration is a big mechanic
• Victoria, which covers the world through the rise of industrialism. This one is the most simulation-heavy, focusing gameplay around economic development and the diplomatic manoeuvring of great powers
• Hearts of Iron, which is the Second World War game. This is the one to go for if you want to play the military side of things

What distinguishes them from strategy games like Civ and Age of Empires is the greatly-reduced abstraction. There's no expectation of every starting point or playable country being balanced; if you start as Belgium in Hearts of Iron, you're going to have to do something clever to not get steamrolled by Germany. There's also no win condition beyond what you set for yourself. When I start a game of Crusader Kings, I'm not trying to win the game, I'm saying to myself "let's see if I can unite all of Britain and Ireland under a Gaelic ruler"

All Paradox games have quite a lot of DLC, but the base games are solid (often now including several of the earlier DLCs for free, in the case of older games) and they go on steep sales pretty often. If there's not a specific time period or mechanic that sways you towards one of the games, I recommend Crusader Kings 3 for the best new player experience

I liked ksp2

If you're saying that you liked the (unfinished, abandoned, poorly-rated) Kerbal Space Program 2, you might play the original, which is better-regarded.

On the "factory" side, maybe some colony simulators? Someone else mentioned Rimworld. That's got a bit of DLC, but I think that even the base game has pretty good value for money. Oxygen Not Included is another colony sim that focuses more on the building/automation/physics side; I think that you'll get a lot of hours out of that.

Dwarf Fortress is another colony sim, has a freely-available classic version or a commercial graphical build on Steam. Steep learning curve, but lots of mechanics to explore.

I like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, though it has a pretty punishing learning curve. Open-world roguelike. It touches on both the RPG (well, not much by way of plot, but in terms of building a character) and the factory (build buildings, faction camps with NPCs, and vehicles) side. You aren't going to run out of gameplay complexity to explore any time soon on that. Open source and freely-available, though there's also a commercial build on Steam.

I have not played Elin, the successor to Elona, but it might be worth a look too if you are looking for a game with both a sandbox aspect and RPG aspect.

So, I’ve spent over 2 hours on Steam searching for a nice game to play. But it’s all junk, as far as I’m fed with Steam recommendations.

Steam does many things well, but its recommendations system is one thing that, in my experience, really falls flat on its face (which surprises me, because they have enough information to do what I would think would be fantastic recommendations).

For finding games on Steam, I've had the most luck simply sorting by user rating (which is a pretty darn good metric of what I'll like, in my experience), and then using the tags to look for games in a genre. There has been one or two times that it's led me astray, but in general, an Overwhelmingly Positive game is something that I'll get a ton of fun out of, and a low-ranked game will rarely be a lot of fun.

Sometimes I've had luck with looking at "similar games" to a game, which are shown on that game's store page.

But the recommendations queue is just awful, in my experience.

Stardew if you want a comfy game to play Timberborn for colony sim

management / factory games like workers and resources

Maybe Frostpunk would be up your alley?

Look into Drova - Forsaken Kin. It’s been great so far.

You might enjoy Sid Meier's Civilization games. I'm partial to Civ 6, but they're pretty much all in the same vein of management games.

Railway Empire 2 hard to put down once you get going.

Wasteland 3 is awesome and akin to DOS2 and BG3!

If Baldur's Gate 3 is your speed, that game gives me countless hours of trying new ways to change the story and game.

I mean Oblivion Remastered just came out.

It's weird replaying Oblivion but it looks like a modern game. All the original audio is there (along with a few new voices to break up the monotony of hearing the same handful of voices over and over again), and all the locations and gear, but it all feels different. Like it's very familiar, but it's still very different from what we remember. Leveling is a bit different this time around as you have seven or so points to divide among your attributes, rather than picking a couple that would get increased by random numbers. I'd recommend trying it if nothing else than to try out the new polished version yourself.

Although some of the jank has been removed from this version, like there are no more items duplication glitches, but the Bound Armor/Weapon glitch works.

Going Medieval is a pretty great building/management type game! It gets updated often with new content too

You build your castle and manage the sims in their daily jobs. There's a great building system, farming, defense against raiders, mining, a good crafting pipeline. It's a lot of fun

Check out Elin.

Basebuilding/dungeon crawling/pixel art/roguelike. Kinda like ADOM meets stardew, but weirder and more Japanese. Weirder how? Here's the wiki entry on the chaos shape race, which you can play as.

VERY in depth systems in the game. Mutations, crafting, prayer, it's a deep game.