My most memorable moment has to be the time I built my most beautiful city ever in Sim City 4, only to accidentally trigger a massive earthquake that levelled half the city. So embarrassing. My citizens were recovering for weeks after...

Playing Settlers 2 split screen with my best mate over and over again up to our early teens. I made him cry once... we stopped playing for a while after that...

Good times

I am a big fan of City-Builder Series.

I have played Caesar III, Pharaoh & Cleopatra and Zeus & Possidon and I am currently playing Emperor and repeating Caesar III.

Everytime, I have a new idea on how to build my city, I shall repeat the game once more.

Everytime, I have new experience on the game.

You may find my snapshot of the cities in facebook (www.facebook.com/leo.lam.5249/photos_albums) and comments are welcome.

Attached are snapshots from Emperor (Zhou Dynasty) I am currently playing.

I wish I had a cool story from some such game, but 1.) I don't often play city builders anymore, 2.) I've always been fairly bad at most of them, and 3.) I almost never remember interesting happenings from video games in general, especially ones I haven't played in a decade or more.

The closest thing I've got to an interesting personal anecdote from a game in this genre is that I'm apparently awesome at Banished, having never lost (or even come particularly close to losing) any of my 4 or so villages. Great story, eh? :P

Caesar III was the first real game I played. And the first game I fell in love with.

Somehow I managed to get a hold of the demo. It had a couple of limitations, like a single map to play on and a limited set of available buildings. The game was absolutely magical but equally baffling. The biggest problem I had was getting food to my people (and thus upgrading their houses).

I managed to get farms creating food, but couldn't get my granaries to fill. I have attached an artists' impression (photoshopped) of what my initial solution looked like. That field of granaries (even bigger than this in reality) is the earliest and most vivid memory of gaming I still have. It did not fix my problem; if I'd have to guess right now, I probably forgot building a market? ;-)

The other limitation of the demo was that saving was not possible. This meant that even on that first night I installed the game, I got permission from my father to pause the game and let the big beige box run until morning. By the way, this experience with the granaries also taught me that there's things I can (only?) figure out on my own, because my father was unable to help and diagnose my problem.

That same week we went and bought the full game, with its lovely box and manual.

Fun fact about granaries in Caesar III: they're actually a road intersection with a building, on top of pillars, above it, meaning that you're sometimes better off having a road stop at one of its sides and have it continue at the other side instead of building the "granary" next to a road. I don't think I've ever built a city where every granary on the map is used as a real intersection, with all four directions of the road being used, but I'd imagine it'd be magical!

ETA: I did not change my title or avatar for this post! It's been that way since forever; before the centurion my avatar was a Caesar III bathhouse, which always felt like it'd be a lovely place to be in.

I bought Dark Cloud just a couple years ago because I love the building/action hybrid types out there (so few of them), but I found the dungeons a bit to challenging to progress. Maybe I should dig it back out.

I once made a replica of Reno in SimCity 2000 and then I shot down helicopters just to watch them die.

The dungeons in the first Dark Cloud can certainly be a bit of a trek. I've also always felt that it took a lot of time to build up weapons, especially because it always felt like runes were a rather rare item/expensive to buy rather than being more common to acquire, considering how important it was to build up your weapons. It's certainly not a bad game, but maybe one that hasn't aged super well.
I find the sequel is a much better improvement over the game formula of the first. It's honestly one of my favourite games ever. The dungeons are more enjoyable to fight through and weapons are easier to build up, but not too easy, and when they break, you don't lose them forever like in the first game, you can just repair them. And you don't have to have played the first game to follow the story as they're pretty much completely separate from each other with a small handful of references/recurring characters from the first. Also the town building grants you much more freedom/items/structures to build to make them look how you'd like while still being able to meet the requirements.
You can actually download both Dark Cloud games on PS4 for like, $15 each, (as well as Rogue Galaxy, which was made by the same developers and is also a great game). Totally worth it at that price, IMHO.

In SimCity2000 I covered the map in so many prisons that I (as a Brit) had to rename the area "Australia".

God save the Queen.

My best city-building moment has to be when me and my brother FINALLY made a megalopolis in Simcity 1 for SNES. I believe it was after a few years of owning the game but we learned what was needed to finish such a city. Believe me when I say the devs made it very hard or we just sucked. We had to use a special map that had no water on it so we could fit the maximum number of buildings and had a really specific pattern used to optimize growth so that we only placed railroad exactly where needed. It felt so good to see Mario come out to congratulate us on our achievement and to this day it is still one of my best gaming moments not to mention city-building one.

Caesar III was my first city builder, a new genre for me, different, exciting and immersive. During those early days, I didn’t know what I was doing so it was also chaotic. My dreams of beautiful cities and perfect prosperity turned into ramshackle muddles, debt, migration, Caesar attacking, pulling at oars. I was useless at military stuff; badly placed forts, Legionnaires strolling leisurely across the countryside arriving too late, Legionnaires turning to face the opposite direction from the enemy. Now that was fun, a bit like a pantomime – “they’re behind you!”

I laughed through all of that. Caesar III was like a ray of sunshine, brightening my daily life. I smiled into work as rush hour commuters became hoards of barbarians; I smiled in the office, as my boss became a baying wolf and I visualised Mercury spiriting him away. After work, I regularly visited the nearby ruins of a Roman fort to pray for help. Yes, this game certainly got to me.

Eventually, out of chaos came order. By the time Pharaoh arrived, I was a confident micromanager. Better at fighting as well, although I was happy to bribe my way through Zeus and Emperor. I loved all the city builders, but to this day Caesar III remains my favourite.

I’m off now for a bit of feng shui in Emperor and maybe a bribe or two, just for old time’s sake!

One time, I played SimCIty 4 kind of good, and my city was making money.

And then the whirlwind came:(

Picture it: My Living Room, 1996

Simcity 2000, a game which I devoted hours to, loaded up on the family computer. I had a city I built with my dad, one I built with my friend, and one that was all mine.

While my friend and I typically tried to do neat things, and my own city was neurotic, my father tried to actually make a functional city. We'd been playing together for about two months on this save, and had created a pretty self-sufficient city that was turning a slow but steady profit. In a juvenile stroke of genius, I decided it would be great fun to have some serious cash to spend, and concocted a plan: leave the game on while I was at school. Perfect! It would be amazing.

When I returned home.... destruction.

A fire had started, and spread to the power plant. The nuclear power plant. Which then melted down. This overloaded the other nuclear power plant, which also melted down. No power + lethal radiation. Dead city.

I forget the details of how, but the game got saved. I'll always remember my father's face when he found out. I didn't let him load the city, the horror of my careless extinction event conveyed to him in a report, rather than a tour. I broke him of the game that day.

He and I did play SC2K again, but only in non-serious games after that. We'd load a template city and flood it with disasters, and try to salvage any part of it. Or we would cheat resources and build crazy layouts. But, we never relived the dedicated city building. It was left to me to methodically build for the future, the memories of that dead city forcing caution, forcing patience.

When my wife saw what the cows were thinking in Tropico and made me pause the game and read what everyone was doing.