When I was a child, I had a very nice and famous game on Amiga called The Settlers with which I also had sleepless nights. Today we see how to play a game similar to the old The Settlers, free and opensource available for Windows and Linux .
The genre of real time strategy, RTS, is the one where you have an empire to build starting from scratch, then building a city, buildings, developing the economy, educating the people and enlarging the business volume and wealth of the city.
Unknown Horizons claims to be a clone of Ubisoft's Anno series that I personally have never played but looks a lot like The Settlers that I played many years ago.
The player starts with a randomly placed ship somewhere in the middle of an archipelago.
The goal of the game is to found and build a city on an island and develop the colony to earn money .
Unknown Horizons is the ideal game to be placed in the background while surfing the internet, as an undemanding but engaging pastime.
A sort of SimCity therefore where the main activity is the development and creation of economy by properly exploiting the trade of goods and balancing taxes and expenses.
Urban development involves the creation of a metropolis that blooms from scratch with residential areas, industrial areas, roads, services and a lot of attractions to entertain citizens.
We must then organize the resources to feed, extend and defend the growing city against attacks by enemies.
Diplomacy should be used to plan the conditions of trade agreements and non-aggression pacts with other players.
Trade with other players can also be done by setting up local settlements in foreign territories.
The strategy is therefore a fundamental component to maintain control of the colony's economy, to make the city flourish and to keep it safe from enemy attacks.
Exploration is also important, in search of new islands, new trade routes and especially mines and resource depots to increase the wealth of the city and to extend.
Unknown Horizon has existed for some time but a few days ago the second version was released making it finally a valid and playable game.
The game runs very well and never freezes, has beautiful graphics and is accompanied by very pleasant music with commands that respond very well.
The only negative factor is that, having just come out, it still has several margins for improvement, especially related to the interface, sometimes not very intuitive.
The game is all in English so for those who do not chew it, there may be problems in understanding its operation.
To have a SimCity remake instead you have to look at Lin City-NG which is the basic game where you have to create the city, build palaces and industrial buildings, roads, infrastructures, electric poles, pipes and so on. away, we must manage the budget of expenses, govern taxes and satisfy citizens trying to make them live as best as possible.
The best Sim City games online to create and manage a city are described in another article.
For other similar games I can point out three very nice transport simulation and city building games such as Open Transport Tycoon, a list of strategy games of different types where to develop commercial business activities and, among the free open source games for Windows Linux and Mac, Widelands, a clone of The Settlers.
