Cliff Empire
Message for survivors on the Earth's orbit! After a nuclear war life on the surface became impossible. A 300m thick radioactive fog covered the Earth. Our scientists in the past decade predicted such course of events and used all available potential to build cliffs in the mountain region to restore life on Earth. We are looking for bold active people to manage the process of restoring life on Earth. Join! - develop in parallel the economics of several independent cities - trade between your cities and the orbital station - a dynamic climate change that will test the strength of your cities' economies. - choose between ecological and harmful power supply - 48 additional university researches to improve the city structure - over 120 structures for constructing the city - 15 goods for trade and consumption - possibility of switching between the 3D and the orthographic camera, as well as a free camera for walking around the city. - additional 15 quests that open access to orbital station and huge location in lategame - sandbox mode - tower defense more The compact gameplay involves the construction of three small cities in each randomly generated level.
Steam User 18
TL;DR: Net positive, but with some things to be aware of.
Pros:
-Pretty!
-Fairly straightforward once you understand the resources
-Events are mostly balanced, though you might wipe once or twice at first
Cons:
-Map generator does not always give you somewhere you can build bridges, making certain objectives impossible and certain technologies useless.
-Grammar and syntax are very clunky, and while it's mostly still understandable there are one or two places where I don't know what the writers are trying to say.
Steam User 10
This game is flawed in some ways and will never be a 'great game'. That said, this game is incredibly FUN. If you like city builders and sci-fi, take it for a spin! One of the trickiest things is understanding the trade and how you need to get your resources and when, it's kind of hard to do without having failed a couple of times and it's very easy to bottleneck your supply feed.. BUT...... A city.. defended by automated missiile launchers... mounted on the sides of the very mountain mesa it sits perched... IN THE SKIES? Yes... Very much, yes.
Steam User 9
TLDR: it's fun but can be overly punitive. Some stuff doesn't make sense, but ultimately as a city builder I've had a lot of fun up to a point.
As a city builder it's very enjoyable but can also be tough. You will learn as you go along that not doing something will lead to a a consequence and that consequence can often be quite fatal. It's easy to get a cascade of issues, not unlike other games though like Surviving Mars.
What I like is that it's not like say Frost Punk for example, where if you don't do action A at 23.01 while rubbing your stomach and tapping your head you're OUT. Cliff Empire is a bit more forgiving and it's not hard to go back a save game or two (if you've made them) and sometimes avert a disaster.
I think what bothers me most, to almost contradict myself now, is the game can be punitive. And I think space garbage is one of those. In a real strike of deus ex machina the game decides to throw some space debris down and blow up your power plants on the ground. The ones on the ground take AGES to build and lots of resources. After it's just done it again, I just shut the game and thought "You know, I can't really be bothered anymore". And that's a shame. There needs to be more balance of set backs vs just trashing your city for the same of 'challenge'.
The game for all its polish lacks what I consider quite basic features too. Like a list of your buildings and are the upgraded or not. It's near impossible once you have a busy city to find what's where and also quickly see upgrade opportunities for your facilities.
The economy is a weird hybrid between your three cities. On the one hand they are managed like three separate economies and if you sell one thing to another then there’s a cost for that. However things like research are communal, with no economy between them all. So one city can take a massively financial hit building a university, but the others will benefit without cost. Yet they’ll charge that university town for every drop of water! It needs to be either all in or all out on the separate economy. Personally I think the three cities should be managed as one economy.
Talking of economy, trading is a bit odd too. One city can say ‘buy water from my neighbour if I Have below 80’ but you can’t in the neighbour say ‘sell water if I have over 40’. It’s odd that you can’t set safeguards, minimums before a city would trade with its neighbour.
Overall I enjoyed this a lot. I enjoyed the tight use of space and having to think creatively on what to prioritise. But I can’t get over the setbacks, and for a while it’s great to overcome them but after seeing my power plants destroyed again – not damaged literally removed from the map – I feel I’ve had enough. Which is a shame.
Steam User 4
I've played this a fair bit and it's a great chill city builder and it has been updated through the years which is great that the dev still cares about it.
Steam User 4
literally, a nice, chill city builder with a great concept. The finer details put into the game make it great.
Steam User 4
Too Long; Didn't Read: A Cliff Empire Review Summary
Given the price of and content in, this game, is an absolute bargain - even when its not part of a steam sale.
Given what Cliff Empires sets out to do, once you're familiarised with each stage of progression, you'll discover this game has a lot to offer at such a low price and there is always something to do whilst you reach levels of more efficient automation.
Introducing: Cliff Empire
This is a fantastically casual or difficult to extremely difficult sim management city-builder game, with limited space you find yourself more likely to revamp areas as you progress and actually feel like it was the appropriate choice (when needs must, destroy and rebuild better and more efficiently) with a range of different custom game settings for all your single-player needs. The difficulty of this game is entirely based on your pre-game settings before playing and each one makes a refreshing change to the overall gameplay.
Want to just go against waves of marauders that get increasingly bigger to feel like a tower-defence game?
Look no further, this game has it covered and you have the option to make this either the easiest to extremely difficult by choosing to enable or disable a fully unlocked tech-tree; unlimited resources; population needs; weather extremes + many more options
Want to play the game normally?
Why wouldn't you? And you still have the option of disabling or enabling marauder attacks for extra spiciness during a normal, as-intended, play-through.
The Tech Progression is real
The tech progression covers all bases, speaking of bases, advancing far enough will get you in full control of the space-station you've been relying on throughout the whole run-through, which is such a lovely addition that complements the games' progression and adds more hours of management, in a way that is both fun and engaging.
From 3 cliff empires to control and manage, progression then moves to an additional ground-level for additional resource gathering coupled with cliff-side attachment structures as build-space can become quite limited as you would imagine, so tech-up carefully! And eventually you will gain full space-station control and management and it is a pretty cool feeling.
The research tree is quite extraordinary, but also slow if you don't want to invest too much manpower and resources into research, on the plus side if you improve your economy enough you can speed it up with money - additionally you can speed up time as well but don't worry, its not a race to research asap and there's plenty to keep you occupied with until you run out of space and have optimised the efficiency of ship and drone automation.
Automation itself is quite simple, just be sure to balance the amount of ships you have based on how many resource/manufacturers you've constructed and prioritize structures efficiently, which is very simple once you get the hang of it. If you've played any other sim management game with automation, this mechanic in the game should be fairly straight forward to master.
Power of 3's: The Cities
The three city zones are randomly generated per game and you can refresh the seed at the start before placing your first structure if you don't like the look of the first three generated zones.
Each of the three city zones have their own individual funds, you choose when to occupy them be it all 3, just 2 or simply focusing on just 1 of the 3 zones at a time, this is entirely up to you.
Each zone will come with a different bonus (%'s) regarding; Wind, Solar, Metal, Uranium, Soil Fertility, Water and Fish so manage carefully and get the research unlocked that will display what each of these are asap
In-addition to this, there are also numerous population needs for you to manage of which I am not going to list but I will say once you get the hang of the game it is not as overbearing as it first may seem as not all population needs require to be met from the start of the game, they know what they are signing up for and once they're able to land at one of your three cities, provided they don't starve, dehydrate or lose power, they're very patient. Whilst your population is low at the start of the game, food(s) and water lasts long enough whilst you set up the necessary productions to facilitate needs.
Final Notes:
Huge respect to the developers for this underdog of a game, its a sim management city-builder I never knew I wanted.
The only con to this game is if you mess up, depending on the pre-game settings, you have no choice but to restart from scratch - but we live and learn thus becoming more efficient with our build orders, so be sure to figure out the vital structures based on necessity in the first hour - practice improves build order and construction efficiency, what took you 2 hours to accomplish in your first game should take less and less time to get back to where you ruined it all with every restart.
If you enjoy sci-fi sim management city-builders, this game is an enjoyable time-sink with a lot to do as well as different routes in order to progress through the game and a great game to come back to now and then, different settings each time or the same again, entirely up to you. Sometimes its nice to just casually take out wave after wave after wave of Marauders with limited consequences without much else to think about, because why not? Its fun.
For a game with limited build-space, you gain an expansive sense freedom and I don't say this lightly.
The build-space you do have is still enough for whatever you wish to accomplish and as you progress, you'll literally unlock extra build-space expansion. A fine example of how much so little can make a bigger difference, especially if you require that extra space for additional defence structure(s)
Given the price of and content in, this game, this is an absolute bargain - even when its not part of a steam sale.
Little bit of advice:
For your first run of the game I recommend making sure that you disable the marauders otherwise if you're under-prepared for an attack they will target vital structures which could completely cut you off in the early game - they'll come again X minutes later and in bigger numbers of ships and this can majorly whittle away at any and all progress and your game sessions may start to feel like the spaceships in the background of the first episode of Futurama when Fry cryogenically travels forward in time by 1,000 years (especially if you leave it on x4 speed), only without many or any population remaining depending on the severity of attacks.
When you're more familiar with the game but feels a bit dull, play it normally and include Marauders as part of the 'special events' in the pre-game settings, it'll definitely spice up your game.
There is a tutorial, right? ... ... Right?!
There is a tutorial of course and it will benefit you economically at the start of the game and give you a better idea of an efficient build-order. However, even without marauders enabled be prepared to learn from a grievous lack of foresight at times and accept that you need to restart rather than struggling to re-coordinate resources, power and population - with every restart I have become much more efficient whilst learning and figuring out this game - the amount you would like to manage can all be altered in the pre-game settings before you start and its the pre-game settings which makes Cliff Empires so replayable.
A fully established, three-city with ground-level expansion of Cliff Empires can look like.
Thanks for reading and I hope this was helpful, whichever your next decision might be.
Steam User 3
This is a neat little city builder. It's got a low entry to learn and high ceiling to master. When you're looking at sims that will cost three and four times what this does, it's amazing how this little builder took simple and made it amazing.