Hey! I'm starting to get into city builders, looking for suggestions on some good games to get in the genre. Both older and newer suggestions are welcome!

Pharaoh is my personal favorite of the Sierra City Builders. The others in the series are definitely also worth checking out: Caesar 3, Zeus and Middle Kingdom
Simcity 3000 for a more conventional option. 2000 and 4 are great too.

Both examples can be made to run with proper widescreen resolutions, in the case of the Sierra City builders with a simple exe swap, and in 3000 with just a little bit more effort

Stronghold is also somewhat of a city builder on most levels, though a bit on the difficult side at times.

Ostriv is currently in development, but it's a really strong game already. It's a gridless village-building game, which allows for a lot of creativity and you can make really beautiful little settlements. It's made by a Ukrainian developer and really captures the look and feel of their historical villages.

Banished is in the same vein. These games are both on a smaller scale, but with really satisfying core loops.

The Caesar series is one of my favorites from my childhood. Caesar III or Caesar IV are both great.

Frostpunk is a great, polished entry point for someone who likes a challenge. It also has one of my favorite aesthetics.

Anno 1800 is by far the best city builder. It is not on gog :(

Tropico is one I enjoyed far more than I expected to the first time I played it. On top of it being fun, the music is just so darned catchy.

In general, I feel as though Tropico was a logical progression away from SimCity (past a certain point, at least) and honestly prefer the series (to an extent) over that of SimCity.

Cities: Skylines is one of the best (maybe even THE best) in genre. That is if you don't mind Steam and ...ugh... DLC.

Caesar III was the first with the infamous "walker system" I believe, and as such it really doesn't work very well - later on in the campaign you are basically forced to build very unnatural and ugly looking cities in order to guide the walkers along a certain path so all your houses are reached. At that point it really wasn't much fun any more for me. I think the later games (Pharaoh, Zeus, Emperor) are better in this regard, but I only played Pharaoh and that was a long time ago.

In any case, my all-time favorite city building franchise is Anno, and I recommend 1701 or 1404. Not that the older ones are bad (1602 and 1503), but 1701 is basically a more modern version of 1602, and 1503 is probably the least good, but it's still good. I believe it can have issues on newer systems, though.

Good ones that are already out:

https://www.gog.com/game/pharaoh_cleopatra

https://www.gog.com/game/anno_1404_gold_edition

In development ones:

https://www.gog.com/game/endzone_a_world_apart

https://www.gog.com/game/ostriv

https://www.gog.com/game/foundation

https://songsofsyx.itch.io/songs-of-syx

https://matek.itch.io/lowpolis

https://foundersfortune.com/

http://www.stonehearth.net/

https://forums.crateentertainment.com/t/whats-the-latest-on-crates-town-builder-game/47816

All available DRM-free.

Tropico 4 is very good. Oh, and you ould try the Civilization games. No real city builder games, but building up and improving your cities is a very big part of gameplay.

I most certainly enjoyed simcity 2013, took me quite a while before i managed to understand that one, after that cities felt like a breeze in the park, cities skylines that is which i won't and would recommend, lousy engine but they way the city is depicted is quite awsome. I still can't understand why they choose to implement such a poor road system but mods can fix that one, still i would pick simcity over cities skylines any day

Other games i did enjoy are anno 2020 though i do feel if you played one you've seen them all which might explain why i did not spend a lot of time with anno 2150 preserving that one for another time

A game you should certainly try and play is Settlers 2 anniversary edition, the campaign can be quite worth your time with its easy to grasp hard to implement design choice and cuddly figures ofc!

edit:

forgot to name bannished, the first game that actually got me worried about birthrates and your economy... in the line of that game i'm also casually trying foundation, lets see where that one goes... atm it feels like the bigger brother of bannished

edit 2 :

And on steam there is this polish village thing which also looked pretty great, look it up!

Banished is pretty good, but benpfaa already happens to own it and seemingly has enjoyed it enough to start this thread.

I will mention a few, but will not recommend them, as they have some issues with the gameplay. I find this genre to be flooded with bugs, with bad artificial intelligence, with empty base game that needs to be enchanced with mods and some are still in development.

Banished - needs to be played with mods, as the base game is empty. Most mods are outdated. A mod which increases the age of the villagers and the childbearing age for women is essential.

Dawn Of Man - suffers from bad artificial intelligence of the tribesmen. Bad game design does not allow labour specializations, thus any tribesman can do any task. The problem is they do not prioritize labour which is essential even if marked as such, and which is in their vicinity. Often they will travel all across the map to complete a task which another tribesman close to the selected task could have done. This can lead to mass starvation of the entire village due to the lack of food supplies, when combined with natural disasters like desease, animal attacks, storm, and so on. The game gets regular monthly updates, so I would recommend waiting a bit more for this game.

Tropico 5 - Tropico 5 has a massive bug, which causes a lot of chain reactions, that can break the joy of playing it. I have made a thread in the dedicated sub-forum. Read here.

Frostpunk - harsh and unforgiving. Might not be a good game for city building, as the entire game is focused on hardcore survival. I am yet to play more of this game. So far I was unable to beat the first scenario. I haven't played much.

Ostriv, Ancient Cities, Foundation, Endzone - A World Apart, Surviving The Aftermath are still in development.