> I upvoted just because you didn't like it.

Hmm, this sounds almost "edgy"? But then again OpenTTD is a lovely game and well worth the look for anyone who's one of today's lucky 10'000: https://xkcd.com/1053/

It has low hardware requirements, runs on many platforms, has multiplayer that "just works" and a rich scene of user created content, like alternate graphics/sound/music packs and plenty of maps, some of which are inspired by real world locations! It, alongside Jagged Alliance 2, is one of my go-to games if I ever want to play something on really low end hardware (think netbook), or just look at some nice pixel graphics.

For anyone with better hardware, I think that Transport Fever is a lovely 3D game, probably well worth it on a sale: https://store.steampowered.com/app/446800/Transport_Fever/ and the 2nd game in the series has perhaps the best UI in any game like this, period (OpenTTD one kind of sucks): https://store.steampowered.com/app/1066780/Transport_Fever_2...

Some might also enjoy the 3D but grid driven approach of Mashinky, although that is in early access (no planes yet, but development seems active): https://store.steampowered.com/app/598960/Mashinky/

And also there's a city builder game with industries and transportation called Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, where you build the city instead of letting it grow organically like in other games (placing infrastructure in the middle of an existing city was annoying in OpenTTD): https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources...

Hopefully that adds to the discussion a little bit, thankfully it doesn't seem like this genre is lacking in games! But when you don't want to invest any money into it, OpenTTD is well worth a play, or to just serve as a nice entry point into the genre. There's also a Wiki with tutorials and such: https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Manual/Tutorial/

I found Transport Fever 2 very disappointing. It dumbed down the economic model: businesses turn out cargoes even if you don’t carry them to market. It reduced supply chain challenges: the first game has interesting twists, like businesses whose output was halved if you didn’t carry less-desirable byproducts away. The second game simply eliminated this.

It also didn’t make any huge improvements otherwise and was really more like a 1.5. I recommend the first game over the second.

OpenTDD will always be my go to example for a product of love and good out of open source. People who love the game kept it alive and improved out of pure enjoyment.

Related. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engine_recreation...