Townsmen vs Wurm Online
Townsmen
Townsmen by HandyGames gives you a chance to build your own thriving empire starting from a small village.From your castle, you get to run your empire and build a stable economy for your citizens. With a huge variety of buildings, players can extract resources, harvest a huge variety of crops and strengthen their empire defenses with guard towers, canons and more. Bandits are always on the lookout for looting your empire so a strong defense is a key to a strong empire in this game. Moreover, seasonal disasters will also pose a challenge to your citizens, testing your disaster management skills.
With a huge variety of management challenges, Townsmen is one of the best city simulations out there.
Wurm Online
Wurm Online is a unique sandbox/adventure RPG that many has been touting as being the most realistic one ever. The game is not a solo survival game unlike Minecraft. Instead, you are given the opportunity to build your own settlement - literally from the ground up - and help it to grow. Being an MMO, you can enlist the help of other players to develop your settlement from being little more than a camp with a few shabby and lopsided huts into something that passing bandits might be eyeing hungrily at.There is also an adventure element in this game where you get to venture of into the wilderness to fight a variety of creatures to earn some loot and to level up. Players who enjoy clashing swords with their fellow players can even hop into a PvP world server to enjoy some open world PvP. That said, things will go by a bit slowly if you are playing the game alone though. Wurm Online is an MMO for a reason!
The game has nothing but a fun and great experience to offer to its players and best yet, it's free to play! You can opt for a premium membership if you like just so you can play on multiple servers but, as mentioned, the game can be enjoyed without having to spend a cent.