[gus_massa]

Is it only sandbox mode, or does it have some scenarios with an objective?

The river look too straight. I expected more meanders.

[mehwoot]

Just sandbox mode for now.

The rivers don't meander in the way that real rivers do- real rivers meander because of differences in flow velocity across the width of the river, but the simulation doesn't run at that sort of resolution. If it did, the area covered would be far smaller.

[gizmo]

You could totally cheat the river physics. The game would look better and nobody would know.

[schiffern]

It needn't even be that much of a cheat! There are empirically validated equations that can '1-dimensionally' model river meander evolution.

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1018448

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.102...

[hnuser123456]

I'd never heard of the OSTI before. Interesting.

[speps]

Look at From Dust[1] for something like this with gameplay, more recent than Populous (Xbox 360 generation).

[1] https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/from-dust

[sdflhasjd]

I really liked From Dust. It seemed impressive what could be done on the 360 at the time, and I'd really like to see it with a higher-res, larger scale simulation on some more modern hardware.

[kleiba]

Check out Populous or Powermonger for games with levels and an objective.