New Cycle PAX West Impression

Production charts and prediction algorithms are all over New Cycle; there are ways to predict and see the growth of every aspect of the city.

Real-time strategy and simulation games have a lot packed into them nowadays.  What used to be a relatively simple matter of managing buildings has been broken down into many different statistic-based categories to make everything efficient.  Core Engage’s New Cycle is looking to pack in everything expected from a civilization management game, but also break it down in any way that players wish as they prepare for what a post-apocalyptic wasteland landscape can throw at them.  New Cycle was showcased at PAX West and I took a look at a demo to see how everything is progressing.

Set on an Earth changed by solar flares, New Cycle is presented to players as a post-apocalyptic world with different biomes and seasons to navigate through.  Each biome will come with its own set of challenges that players have to navigate to keep everyone healthy and fed.  Maintaining morale and keeping everyone healthy won’t be easy though, as players deal with crop shortages, problematic weather, and managing new settlers.  All of this will have to be balanced to prevent the city from failing.

Adopting and sustaining local resources to prevent them from going extinct will be big factors as well.  Settlers will all join the city as immigrants and with systems of learning in place can be adapted into workers, craftsmen, specialists.  These aren’t available from the start, however, as the player also has to manage creating buildings to foster this growth.  There’s a lot to maintain at any given point during New Cycle and keeping track of it all isn’t easy.

Managing what resources are nearby is important, but not the only way to maintain stability for the city.  Connecting roads to town centers and creating conveyor belts to ship items from one area to another are among the ways players can help things move quicker in the city.  Later on players can make connections to other cities for trade and commerce, allowing the utilisation of different city strengthens to mitigate weaknesses between them.  Making sure everything is going well can be seen with little visual add-ons for layering water, wind, mining, farming growth, and drilling possibility over the map and on the charts.

Production charts and prediction algorithms are all over New Cycle; there are ways to predict and see the growth of every aspect of the city.  This does not need to be done to enjoy the full scope of everything, but for those with the predilection to graphs and charts there’s plenty here to satisfy.  If players need to speed things allow, they can ramp up the speed to three times normal pace, which makes everyone zoom around quickly, though it can be hard to keep on top on things while sped up.  Suddenly, entire areas are mined out in moments due to a lapse in memory and suddenly that two minutes real-time of mining results in there being nothing left.

There’s still some things to be ironed out, but for the most part New Cycle is almost ready to go.  The title has a lot of depth and strategy involved in how to build up the city in the best way.  Last minute touch-ups and implementations mean the title will be ready to enter Steam Early Access in Q1 2024.