When comparing Cities: Skylines vs Starbound, the Slant community recommends Cities: Skylines for most people. In the question“What are the best singleplayer games on Steam?” Cities: Skylines is ranked 28th while Starbound is ranked 66th. The most important reason people chose Cities: Skylines is:
At a total of 36sq.km of area to use (compared to SimCity 4), there is a large amount of room to build and play.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Large scale
At a total of 36sq.km of area to use (compared to SimCity 4), there is a large amount of room to build and play.
Pro Steady Stream of new content via DLCs
DLCs are optional, they do go one sale. Plus when a new DLC is released a bit of the content is released into the base game.
Pro Depth of field
There is a depth of field effect that will blur distant buildings, which mimics Sim City's diorama effect. It can of course be adjusted with a slider as to how much or little to use.
Pro Large Amount of Workshop Mods & Assets
With almost 150 thousand assets and mods, you can totally change the gameplay and look of the game
Pro Informative and well paced tutorials
Starbound allows the player to go at their own pace while completing the tutorials. By the end of the tutorials the player will have the skills and equipment to succeed in the game and have fun doing it.
Pro Incredibly deep gameplay
The exploration, crafting and combat are all both very polished and deep in terms of what you can do, especially compared to other games in the genre. This makes the sandbox very fun to play in as you're never really stuck doing the same thing over and over.
Pro Boss levels
For what is a procedurally generated game, Starbound offers boss levels that once beaten unlock new sectors of space to explore.
Cons
Con Resource Heavy
If your computer doesn’t have decent specs, don’t expect to be able to run this game smoothly.
Con Expensive
If you want more gameplay features, you have to buy expensive DLC, but you can get them on sale sometimes.
Con Can be difficult to glean what one has done wrong in game
Cities: Skylines has difficulty letting the player know what they have done wrong, which results in a lot of head scratching.
Con First few hours can be boring
Initially the player needs to amass enough coal to fuel their ship, which is a bit of a grind.