Lincity

Lincity is a free construction and management simulation game, which puts the player in control of managing every aspect of a city's socio-economy. Its name is a play on the title of the original city-building game, SimCity.

One of the features of Lincity is a choice between two ways for winning: reaching sustainable development, or evacuating the entire population with spacecraft.

Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Lincity is free software.

Gameplay
The player can develop a city by buying appropriate buildings, services and infrastructure.

The simulation considers:


 * population
 * (un)employment
 * basic water management and ecology
 * foods
 * goods (availability and production)
 * raw materials (ore, steel, coal)
 * services (education, health, fire protection, leisures)
 * energy (electricity and charcoal, coal with finite reserves, solar and wind power)
 * other constraints such as finance, pollution and transports.

Various indicators are provided, with mini maps or statistics. The player has to take care of population growth and various socio-economical balances.

History


The original version of the game was titled LinCity. This version can be played on older computers, without a 3D graphics card, low memory and a slow processor. It features complex, 2D, top-down gameplay. It was last updated in August 2004, though any changes since 1999 have been minor.

Lincity was originally designed for Linux, but also runs on Microsoft Windows, BeOS, and OS/2, as well as a huge variety of Unix-styled systems. Mac OS X, however, is only supported when compiled from source using GCC and run using X11.app. It uses SVGALib or X11 as its graphics interface API on Unix systems, with a variety of native versions on non-Unix platforms.

LinCity-NG
LinCity-NG is a fork of Lincity with 3D graphics and new sounds.

However, the gameplay is identical (up to release 1.1.2) and it can read classic Lincity save files.

Lincity-NG version 2 adds water management to the simulation, and very simplistic ecology. Version 1.91.beta was released on 11 December 2007.

It is released under the GNU General Public License with artwork dual licensed under that and the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 license; the included DejaVu fonts are distributed under their own liberal licensing terms.

LinCity-NG uses SDL and OpenGL, and has an isometric view.

It was The Linux Game Tome Game of The Month for January 2005.