Month: May 2024

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | Beata Zawrzel)

No car company in recent years has been able to generate more news headlines than Tesla. Its original founders were among the very first to realize that lithium-ion laptop cells were just about good enough to power a car, assuming you put enough of them in a pack, and with critical funding from current CEO Elon Musk, the company was able to kick-start an electric vehicle revolution. But those headlines of late have been painting a picture of a company in chaos. Sales are down, the cars are barely profitable, and now the CEO is culling vast swaths of the company. Just what is going on?

Tesla had some good times

Always erratic, Musk's leadership has nevertheless seen the company sell electric cars in volume, profitably. What's more, Musk has at times been able to inspire faith in and devotion to his company's products in a way that makes the late Steve Jobs look like a neophyte—after the Model 3 debuted in 2016, 450,000 people gave $1,000 deposits to Tesla for a product that wouldn't go into production for at least 18 months.

Of course, that example also illustrates a long-running concern with the company and Musk's investment-attracting pitches: overhyping and underdelivering. By 2018, more than one in five reservation holders wanted a refund after cheaper models were delayed and delayed.

Enlarge / Are you enticed by this kind of orderly madness with a clean graphical layout? Then I suggest you… settle in. (credit: Goblinz Studio)

You can't buy Mini Settlers right now, but I think you should play the free "Prologue" demo and wishlist the full game if you dig it. It's not quite like any other city builder I've played.

Mini Settlers is "mini" like minimalism. It is in the same genre, but quite far from, games like Cities: Skylines 2 (a choice with some proven merit). Your buildings are not 3D-rendered with real-time lighting. Your buildings are colored squares, sometimes with a few disc tokens stacked on them, tabletop-style. Your roads don't have traffic, but they have drivers (tiny squares) that take resources between nodes. When things go wrong, you don't get depressing news about pollution and riots; some people just leave their homes, but they'll come back if you fix what's wrong.

Mini Settlers is not the game to play to satisfy your long-running suspicion that urban planning was your missed calling. In the (non-progress-saving) Prologue-free demo out this week, the mines and quarries have infinite resources. There is no "money" to speak of, so far as I can tell. Apple farms must be placed near apple orchards and water pumps by water, and the rest is up to you. The interface looks like a thought experiment in how far you can get from traditional city sim HUDs, but then someone implemented it.