Upcoming colony sim TFM: The First Men has an intriguing idea: What if you're in charge of the very first people? Starting with the first two people, you'll take charge of building up a base for your people like in other city builders or colony sims, but you'll also send people out into the world as parties to explore on RPG-style adventures.
It's a neat twist that offers something beyond the basics of your normal colony builder. The idea that your characters are part of a story that grows as they do, and that becomes part of living world, is a new one for a colony builder. Rimworld lets you chase stories and construct them around your characters, but it's not an overall campaign on a series of custom maps.
In addition to the campaign maps, TFM will include skirmish maps more like a 4x game. It'll also have more "roguelike" procedurally generated maps with custom constraints.
- Nested Lands is a 'brutal' survival city-builder about guiding villagers through a plague-infested world, and you can play its open alpha right now
- Endless Legend 2, the sequel to Amplitude's sublime 4X, is finally coming, and it's fully leaning into the joy of exploration: 'It is a feeling that will stick with you until the end'
The creators at Gathering Tree cite the classic Knights and Merchants, as well as Rimworld, as inspirations. I'm warily interested: This is a very hard genre to make, let alone get right. But, hell, give me a colony builder with goblins and the part of my lizard brain that always wants to play Dwarf Fortress will be interested.
TFM: The First Men will release some time in the spring of 2022 on Steam.
