For 40 years we’ve asked: why did Amiga never get a real city builder? SimCity classic was ported, Utopia tried, but nothing like Cities Skylines that used Amiga’s power. Today AmiDev Team fixes that.
Introducing ELITE CITIES — BUILD • MANAGE • THRIVE. A new indie Amiga game that starts where SimCity ends and where Elite II: Frontier begins.
What is Elite Cities?
Imagine if Paul Holmes made SimCity instead of Hunter in 1991. Flat-shaded vector city, roads you draw, trains that actually move, trams, airports, seaports. All running on any Amiga with 1MB or better. That’s Elite Cities. Also if you have 68030 and more, the game will use more effects and objects too.
But with a twist Amiga fans will love: it is structured like Elite II. You don’t just build one city. You build a civilization.
- Phase 1: Earth (1993-2100) — Classic city builder. Plan roads, railways, tram networks. Manage power, pollution, traffic. Over 100+ building types. Top-down isometric builder, plus Zeewolf-style 3D mode where you fly over your city in a helicopter to inspect it. This is the box we revealed — pure Amiga OCS, ECS and AGA compatible.
- Phase 2: Luna (2100-2500) — When your Earth city hits 100k population, you unlock Moon colonization. Low gravity dome cities, maglev tubes instead of roads, ice mining. You must run cargo shuttles from Earth. The graphics switch from SimCity colors to Frontier dome style — like our first Psygnosis-inspired cover.
- Phase 3: Mars (2500-4000) — Terraforming era. Build in canyons, hyperloops, crystal mines. This is where Hunter’s fractal terrain meets city building.
- Phase 4: Galaxy (4000+) — 100 billion procedurally generated planets, just like Frontier. Each planet you can land on and build a city. All connected by trade routes. Your Earth city from 1993 still sends tax income.
All on minimal amount of floppies. How? Math, not textures. Like Elite II did with stars, we do with cities. City layout = seed number. Save game = 32-bit seed + population. That’s it.
The Tech — 68000 and 68030, Chipset and RTG
We listened to community feedback. Elite Cities will have dual targets:
For Amiga purists (68000 lite): 320×256, 32 colors OCS, 50 buildings max, roads + trains only, 12-17 fps, one disk. Runs on stock A500 1MB. This is the Hunter experience.
For Amiga 1200, Amiga 4000, Amiga CD32 / PiStorm / Warp owners (68030 main): 320×256 256 colors AGA or 640×480 RTG via P96, 500+ buildings, roads, trains, trams, airplanes, boats, full simulation, zoom/rotate/day-night, 25fps AGA, 50-60fps RTG. Requires 1MB+ Fast RAM, HDD recommended.
And graphics abstraction: if RTG is detected, we render chunky directly — no C2P. If chipset only, we use blitter for polys and copper for sky gradient, exactly like Zeewolf (Binary Asylum, 1994). Zeewolf is our 3D benchmark — fast solid graphics, moving shadows, water impacts, low-level flying over islands. Imagine that but flying over your own city.
Many now use Claude to code Amiga games — and it works. Claude knows intuition.library and copper lists. We will prototype engine in C with #ifdef M68030 fast paths, then hand-optimize in 68k asm. Open source? Maybe later, first make it fun.
Why Now?
Because Amiga 2026 is perfect for this. PiStorm32-lite costs not much and gives every Amiga a 68040+RTG. Warp1260 gives Amiga 1200 68060 power. But we still respect any Amiga with 1MB RAM as our goal.
No modern city builder runs on just a few MB in total. No Man’s Sky needs 15GB. We need a few MB only. That’s Amiga spirit.
Timeframe for Elite Cities
This is indie, spare time, AmiDev Team + Amitopia community:
- December 2026: Prototype — Zeewolf-style 3D flyover over random vector city, 68000/68030 builds working
- Jan-Mar 2027: Earth city builder playable — roads, zones, trains, save as seed, OCS+AGA
- Apr-Jun 2027: RTG support, trams/planes/boats, economy, Amiga Format demo disk
- Jul-Sep 2027: Luna expansion, shuttle trade
- Oct-Dec 2027: Beta on Aminet, 2-disk ADF + HDD installer, box art print
- 2028: Mars + Galaxy if Earth is stable — the full Elite Cities timeline
We will post progress on Amitopia every month. Want to help? We need 68k coders, pixel artists for building icons, and testers with real OCS Amigas.
Elite Cities is not SimCity clone. It’s what would happen if David Braben and Will Wright had lunch at Commodore in 1993 and drew on napkin: “Build cities on every planet in Frontier.”
And that poster map from Elite II? We will print new one — Milky Way with city markers. For your wall.
Two floppies to rule them all.
Elite Cities is in development for Amiga 500/Amiga 1200/Amiga CD32/Amiga 4000. No publisher. No DRM. Just Amiga.
More progress info will come as we progress. And remember. As with any game development. Things can postpone. But we will try to stick to the roadmap.
