Factory Town Idle

Chill game. Becomes pointless once you've basically got the last official research in all towns. I finished it around hour 40, and after that had no more motivation as there's no more sense of progression to continue.

Gameplay is not complicated. You buy buildings, and you assign workers. Then you use your resources to buy upgrades, or more buildings for more workers. That's it. The basic gameplay loop is to create resources, then extract the resources, craft the resources into intermediate items, then sell those items at your shops which produces money and city experience. As the city levels up and you complete quests you unlock new tech to build. This appeals to a specific kind of person, the kind of person who makes sure that every single facility is running at a net positive and all resource production is in the green. While the game purports to be an idle game actually just leaving the game running isn't very efficient. It's much better to unlock the upgrade that gives you time speed up while offline and close the game when you're not playing. That way you can run at 2x speed the entire time you're playing, or activate 100x speed in bursts. Judiciously using 100x speed can greatly accelerate progress such that you can 100% complete the game in about 20 hours. Things aren't perfect. You unlock up to 7 additional towns after the first but they're nearly identical copies of…

Rather than a true idler, this is more of a complex economic management simulation, run by using a spreadsheet-like interface. Which, yes, progresses when idle, but there's so much to fine-tune that you'll end up tinkering with it all the time.

The people thirst for apple juice, and I their king, must provide.

Very casual, low stakes, and easy to understand. Doesn't bog you down in overwhelming tutorials like some idlers do.

Sim City boiled down to its basic components.