Cliff Empire is a Space-Management Game by Lion's Share.
Following a massive nuclear war, the surface of the Earth is blanketed in a 300m thick layer of radioactive fog. Those who still live on the surface do so on artificial cliffs built high enough to escape the fog. You lead a trio of these cliffs as they struggle to survive.
This game contains examples of:
- After the End: The game takes place following a large scale nuclear war that rendered most of the surface uninhabitable, with the survivors living on either giant cliffs or space stations.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- You're given a few engines when you first set down a storage unit, ensuring you'll be able to build additional cargo drones for later usage.
- The tutorial gives you a small supply of cash for every portion you complete, which can be extremely helpful early on in order to sustain your cities until you can get a steady stream of income.
- Chekhov's Gun: Early on in the game, you'll notice that certain parts of the building a research options are blocked behind prestige levels. This includes entire sets of buildings. These are sets of buildings that allow you to keep expanding after the entire top of a cliff has been used up.
- Cool Airship: The game has several that are produced from the Airport, ranging from cargo drones (which are essentially the games version of a Worker Unit) to Civilian drones, which increase happiness, and blimps, which are used for tourism.
- Difficult, but Awesome: Office buildings. These require large amounts of population and power, alongside the numerous difficulties those bring, but unlike trade portals and trade shuttles, they provide a constant stream of income.
- Ominous Fog: The whole world is covered in a layer of Radioactive Fog. Occasionally, a large amount of fog will overtake your city, resulting in production grinding to a halt, and forcing you to rely on offices and trading for income.
- Refining Resources: Two examples so far.
- Matter is gathered from matter mines. While it can be sold, it's better to send it over to 3D Printer Facilities to produce gadgets, furniture, appliances, and/or engines. Engines can further be utilized to create drones.
- Water is drawn from either the ground or pools, and can be converted into numerous food plants, among them grapes, which can further be converted into wine.
- Tower Defense: Marauder attacks. They'll show up to your cliffs in ever larger fleets of fighters, airships and battleships (which seem to be weaponized versions of the transport ships that drop down warehouses on new cliffs) and start blowing up your buildings and stealing your resources. You can build turrets, missile launchers and fighter hangers to fight them.
- Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay:
- Colonists not only need food, but also a variety of food, and will be noticeably unhappy if they can only receive one source of food.
- You actually have to pay out unemployment benefits if you have citizens who don't have jobs.
- Similarly, some of your profits will regularly be stolen if you don't have any legal framework in place to discourage crimes.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: While the core of the gameplay remains the same almost throughout, the game does a good job of shaking things up regularly by expanding your game area (and, simultaneously, ramping up the challenge), forcing you to switch the way you're looking at your work space.
- When it feels like you've completely run out of land on the clifftops and there's no way you can continue managing shipments to the station... Suddenly you become able to build on the cliff sides, and the game becomes vertical.
- When it feels like even the cliff sides have become clogged up with farms and power stations... Suddenly you become able to build on the previously desolate surface, revealing an entirely new system of heavy industries requiring you to create infrastructure of a radically different in nature than that on the clifftops.
- When it feels like you just can't possibly handle in more population... Suddenly you become able to build multilayered megastructures that are incredibly space efficient, adding a new dimension to your cities.
- Then, suddenly, you have to take control of the space station itself, which previously only seemed to exist to buy your products and give you missions. There's no land to manage there at all, only massive modules to build and balance the station's limited production abilities.
- Finally, you're provided control of the Citadel, an enormous valley which functions more like the play area of a traditional city builder, where instead of creating three interconnected cliff-cities, you must create one massive metropolis.
- Worker Unit: Cargo Drones - while you cannot directly order them around, they build all structures and deliver goods to trade portals and shuttles for sale.
