I’d rather be having bros autistically obsessing over supply lines and infrastructure than the ww2 borders of a fascist yugoslavia. Map painting games, city builders, and political sims all push the same dopamine button in the brain. You give a dude a map of earth and tell him to build communism on it and he will spend the next twenty four hours arguing with similar nerds in a forum about entirely fictional models of resource deposits in Africa being entirely unbalanced. Let’s focus the analytical mind towards coming up with highly unrealistic plans for managing the global economy than making war.
I like citybuilders, but I’m not sure where people find the time for them. I also wish I didn’t get so rusty on GIS software. Playing around with maps is genuinely fascinating and fun.
Maybe I made a mistake when I said city builder, focusing entirely on one city would be too micromanaging. Map making games are more macro, city games can be that but they usually don’t have complex supply chains and the general autism that makes map games enjoyable. City builders are mostly “place building model here, it does nothing, maybe it simulates traffic, idk fuck you.” There’s no strategy in them.