Midweek: Free Cities Edition

No story this week, I'm afraid. Just not enough time, health, or motivation to get it done. Hopefully next week!

I know I've talked about Free Cities once before, but I just recently discovered what I would consider to be the 'definitive' version of the game, containing all sorts of mods and alterations.

You can find that version of the game at this location, though it does require a bit of work to get it operational. If you follow the readme, it walks you through what's required, but the gist of it is that you need to download the repository as a zip, unzip it into a folder, then run compile.bat. This will create a bin folder into which the game will be compiled. You can then run FC_pregmod.html in your browser to start the game.

If desired, the game will tell you where to download an image pack, but in my opinion, the built in Vector images do the game justice just fine.

The core game isn't really any different than before, but the new mods add a plethora of options to fiddle with. There's a propaganda HQ, security HQ, and Riot Control Center to deal with the moods of the citizens and slaves in your arcology, as well as the usual barracks which can be used to build up a security force to protect your free city from raiders. This is in addition to the mercenary army you get to start up later in the game.

The story line follows the same path as before, but there are a few added scenarios to handle post main story line, such as the 'hacker,' as well as a peacekeeping force sent by one of the old world nations. Depending on how you handle them, you may well get extra slaves to play with. If you handle them badly, you might end up deposed and enslaved.

It's too bad the game doesn't have a story path through which you could work your way back up to slave owner, but to be fair, that's outside what the game is trying to tackle.

It all costs money, of course, and I usually build a dairy and turn most of my slaves into cows. Once the Dairy gets up to about thirty slaves, there usually aren't so many money problems to deal with, and I can move my arcology from promoting Pastoralism to starting its own religion. Once the religion of hucows is established, there's nothing that can stop 'The Farm' from dominating the landscape of the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Wa ha ha ha!

Ahem.

Fortunately, you can turn off any content you don't want to play with, and with the sheer amount of things you can do in the game, there is certain to be something that will likely offend you. I like to make sure all the characters in my games are eighteen plus, and I turn off any amputation related content, as both of those rather disgust me.

I do like the idea of creating a family/dynasty of slaves, but since the game runs so slow (weekly), you pretty much won't get the opportunity to do that unless you have the child incubator to age them up to eighteen super quickly. Upgraded all the way, it can age children a year of age each week, so you can have a family to play with in the span of 18 weeks, once they give birth (pregnancy still takes the normal amount of time).

Still, the game suffers from a lack of story content after the three or four big events are out of the way. Once you're about three years in, you have enough money to buy the world and there's just not all that much to do besides army upgrades.

That said, the ride up until that point is pretty fun, so I would recommend giving it a spin.

Next week I hope to have more writing to post, so stay tuned for that!