Best Resource Management Games Mac

91 rows Feb 01, 2020 Most of the best games are available on Mac.

This article describes some of the commonly used features of Activity Monitor, a kind of task manager that allows you see how apps and other processes are affecting your CPU, memory, energy, disk, and network usage.

Open Activity Monitor from the Utilities folder of your Applications folder, or use Spotlight to find it.

Overview

The processes shown in Activity Monitor can be user apps, system apps used by macOS, or invisible background processes. Use the five category tabs at the top of the Activity Monitor window to see how processes are affecting your Mac in each category.

Add or remove columns in each of these panes by choosing View > Columns from the menu bar. The View menu also allows you to choose which processes are shown in each pane:

All Processes
All Processes Hierarchically: Processes that belong to other processes, so you can see the parent/child relationship between them.
My Processes: Processes owned by your macOS user account.
System Processes: Processes owned by macOS.
Other User Processes: Processes that aren’t owned by the root user or current user.
Active Processes: Running processes that aren’t sleeping.
Inactive Processes: Running processes that are sleeping.
Windowed Processes: Processes that can create a window. These are usually apps.
Selected Processes: Processes that you selected in the Activity Monitor window.
Applications in the last 8 hours: Apps that were running processes in the last 8 hours.

CPU

The CPU pane shows how processes are affecting CPU (processor) activity:

Click the top of the “% CPU” column to sort by the percentage of CPU capability used by each process. This information and the information in the Energy pane can help identify processes that are affecting Mac performance, battery runtime, temperature, and fan activity.

More information is available at the bottom of the CPU pane:

System: The percentage of CPU capability currently used by system processes, which are processes that belong to macOS.
User: The percentage of CPU capability currently used by apps that you opened, or by the processes those apps opened.
Idle: The percentage of CPU capability not being used.
CPU Load: The percentage of CPU capability currently used by all System and User processes. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency. The color blue shows the percentage of total CPU capability currently used by user processes. The color red shows the percentage of total CPU capability currently used by system processes.
Threads: The total number of threads used by all processes combined.
Processes: The total number of processes currently running.

You can also see CPU or GPU usage in a separate window or in the Dock:

To open a window showing current processor activity, choose Window > CPU Usage. To show a graph of this information in your Dock, choose View > Dock Icon > Show CPU Usage.
To open a window showing recent processor activity, choose Window > CPU History. To show a graph of this information in your Dock, choose View > Dock Icon > Show CPU History.
To open a window showing recent graphics processor (GPU) activity, choose Window > GPU History. Energy usage related to such activity is incorporated into the energy-impact measurements in the Energy tab of Activity Monitor.

Memory

The Memory pane shows information about how memory is being used:

More information is available at the bottom of the Memory pane:

Memory Pressure: The Memory Pressure graph helps illustrate the availability of memory resources. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency. The current state of memory resources is indicated by the color at the right side of the graph:
- Green: Memory resources are available.
- Yellow: Memory resources are still available but are being tasked by memory-management processes, such as compression.
- Red: Memory resources are depleted, and macOS is using your startup drive for memory. To make more RAM available, you can quit one or more apps or install more RAM. This is the most important indicator that your Mac may need more RAM.
Physical Memory: The amount of RAM installed in your Mac.
Memory Used: The total amount of memory currently used by all apps and macOS processes.
- App Memory: The total amount of memory currently used by apps and their processes.
- Wired Memory: Memory that can’t be compressed or paged out to your startup drive, so it must stay in RAM. The wired memory used by a process can’t be borrowed by other processes. The amount of wired memory used by an app is determined by the app's programmer.
- Compressed: The amount of memory in RAM that is compressed to make more RAM memory available to other processes. Look in the Compressed Mem column to see the amount of memory compressed for each process.
Swap Used: The space used on your startup drive by macOS memory management. It's normal to see some activity here. As long as memory pressure is not in the red state, macOS has memory resources available.
Cached Files: Memory that was recently used by apps and is now available for use by other apps. For example, if you've been using Mail and then quit Mail, the RAM that Mail was using becomes part of the memory used by cached files, which then becomes available to other apps. If you open Mail again before its cached-files memory is used (overwritten) by another app, Mail opens more quickly because that memory is quickly converted back to app memory without having to load its contents from your startup drive.

For more information about memory management, refer to the Apple Developer website.

Energy

The Energy pane shows overall energy use and the energy used by each app:

Energy Impact: A relative measure of the current energy consumption of the app. Lower numbers are better. A triangle to the left of an app's name means that the app consists of multiple processes. Click the triangle to see details about each process.
Avg Energy Impact: The average energy impact for the past 8 hours or since the Mac started up, whichever is shorter. Average energy impact is also shown for apps that were running during that time, but have since been quit. The names of those apps are dimmed.
App Nap: Apps that support App Nap consume very little energy when they are open but not being used. For example, an app might nap when it's hidden behind other windows, or when it's open in a space that you aren't currently viewing.
Preventing Sleep: Indicates whether the app is preventing your Mac from going to sleep.

More information is available at the bottom of the Energy pane:

Energy Impact: A relative measure of the total energy used by all apps. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency.
Graphics Card: The type of graphics card currently used. Higher–performance cards use more energy. Macs that support automatic graphics switching save power by using integrated graphics. They switch to a higher-performance graphics chip only when an app needs it. 'Integrated' means the Mac is currently using integrated graphics. 'High Perf.' means the Mac is currently using high-performance graphics. To identify apps that are using high-performance graphics, look for apps that show 'Yes' in the Requires High Perf GPU column.
Remaining Charge: The percentage of charge remaining on the battery of a portable Mac.
Time Until Full: The amount of time your portable Mac must be plugged into an AC power outlet to become fully charged.
Time on AC: The time elapsed since your portable Mac was plugged into an AC power outlet.
Time Remaining: The estimated amount of battery time remaining on your portable Mac.
Time on Battery: The time elapsed since your portable Mac was unplugged from AC power.
Battery (Last 12 hours): The battery charge level of your portable Mac over the last 12 hours. The color green shows times when the Mac was getting power from a power adapter.

As energy use increases, the length of time that a Mac can operate on battery power decreases. If the battery life of your portable Mac is shorter than usual, you can use the Avg Energy Impact column to find apps that have been using the most energy recently. Quit those apps if you don't need them, or contact the developer of the app if you notice that the app's energy use remains high even when the app doesn't appear to be doing anything.

Disk

The Disk pane shows the amount of data that each process has read from your disk and written to your disk. It also shows 'reads in' and 'writes out' (IO), which is the number of times that your Mac accesses the disk to read and write data.

The information at the bottom of the Disk pane shows total disk activity across all processes. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency. The graph also includes a pop-up menu to switch between showing IO or data as a unit of measurement. The color blue shows either the number of reads per second or the amount of data read per second. The color red shows either the number of writes out per second or the amount of data written per second.

To show a graph of disk activity in your Dock, choose View > Dock Icon > Show Disk Activity.

Network

The Network pane shows how much data your Mac is sending or receiving over your network. Use this information to identify which processes are sending or receiving the most data.

The information at the bottom of the Network pane shows total network activity across all apps. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency. The graph also includes a pop-up menu to switch between showing packets or data as a unit of measurement. The color blue shows either the number of packets received per second or the amount of data received per second. The color red shows either the number of packets sent per second or the amount of data sent per second.

To show a graph of network usage in your Dock, choose View > Dock Icon > Show Network Usage.

Cache

In macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 or later, Activity Monitor shows the Cache pane when Content Caching is enabled in the Sharing pane of System Preferences. The Cache pane shows how much cached content that local networked devices have uploaded, downloaded, or dropped over time.

Use the Maximum Cache Pressure information to learn whether to adjust Content Caching settings to provide more disk space to the cache. Lower cache pressure is better. Learn more about cache activity.

The graph at the bottom shows total caching activity over time. Choose from the pop-up menu above the graph to change the interval: last hour, 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days.

Learn more

Learn about kernel task and why Activity Monitor might show that it's using a large percentage of your CPU.
For more information about Activity Monitor, open Activity Monitor and choose Help > Activity Monitor. You can also see a short description of many items in the Activity Monitor window by hovering the mouse pointer over the item.

Management games are all about being the one in charge. Whether it’s yelling at the England manager, cursing those clowns in Congress for doing it again (seriously, what a bunch of clowns), or laughing at Bryce Dallas Howard for running away from dinosaurs in high heels, we all think we could do better.

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This explains why management games have remained one of the most enduring and popular genres in PC gaming. It helps that managing balance sheets, planning cities, and bossing staff around is so easily translated to the keyboard and mouse.

From the early days of city building in SimCity to refining tactics in Championship Manager, through to the more recent classics we’ve got below, the humble management sim accounts for some of the best PC games of all time – not to mention the most addictive. These management games will eat your life away like no other, but every hour spent laying electricity cables, tweaking prices, or adding extra toilets is time well spent, so read on for a roundup of the very finest. Just remember to try and get some sleep, yeah?

The best management games on PC are:

Rimworld

While management games like The Sims let you manage every aspect of a person’s life right down to what they get up to in the bathroom, RimWorld shifts the perspective back a little and puts you in charge of managing a whole colony of people after crash landing onto an alien planet. What happens after this crash is partially up to your management skills, but also up to the tragedies that are dealt to you by the AI Storyteller, which hands disasters to you at a regular cadence, ranging from simple thunderstorms to vomiting livestock. So, while you might be up to handling the practicalities of this, the individuals in your colony will all react different ways, ensuring every game plays out differently.

It’s still getting plenty of love from its dev team, too. A recent RimWorld Royalty DLC heaps in a variety of royal titles your colonists can have and psychic powers that you can use to induce mass vomiting – what’s not to love?

Cities: Skylines

Despite developer Colossal Order comprising only nine people, Cities: Skylines manages to easily outshine most other city creation sims by taking the genre back to its roots – offering freedom, scale, and simple building mechanics.

The smartest idea the game has is disposing with individual building placement. Instead, you choose a ‘style’, and then basically spray-paint structures on to the ground. It’s really satisfying to behold your city just pop up in front of you.

Despite the straightforward attitude to building, don’t mistake Cities: Skylines for being easy, as there are plenty of interconnected components to manage and hundreds of ways for things to go wrong. There’s no Godzilla to go on a rampage – although there are disasters – but Cities: Skylines is the true heir to the SimCity legacy. Plus, you can expand your experience thanks to the huge number of Cities: Skylines mods available to download for free.

Planet Coaster

When Bullfrog created Theme Park in 1994 the studio probably didn’t realise it’d be giving birth to a whole sub-genre of management sims. With Theme Park unlikely to get another game any time soon (see SimCity or Dungeon Keeper instead, or EA’s back catalogue in general), it was up to others to dominate this small sub-genre. And Frontier Developments did – first with Rollercoaster Tycoon, and then with Planet Coaster.

Read more: Here are the best Planet Coaster creations

Planet Coaster is the ultimate theme park designer game. The level of freedom is unparalleled. You can do everything from raise the price of crisps by a penny to create entire, elaborate rides. That’s not just pick a ride, shove it down, and alter the height of the tracks – in Planet Coaster, you can design an entire experience from scratch, limited only by your imagination. We’ve seen fantastic, elaborate rides based on Aliens, Moonraker, and even a whole park that looks like Minas Tirith from Lord of the Rings.

Planet Coaster lets you micromanage your park at every level, and we do mean every level. It’s had a steady stream of official content and thousands of mods since release, too, so there’s a terrifying mountain of gameplay to be had here – and none of it is boring.

Two Point Hospital

Not long ago, Bullfrog’s classic Theme Hospital would’ve been a cinch for this list, but then a young upstart came and knocked it off – although, in this case, it’s a game by several of the original’s developers. Two Point Hospital takes everything great about Theme Hospital and brings it right up to date.

What both games have in common – and what made Theme Hospital so particularly enduring – is gameplay that anyone could get their hands on and enjoy within minutes. Managing a hospital could easily be made too tricky, or too depressing, but Two Point Hospital makes it joyous. One floor, simple drag-and-place controls, uncomplicated items, and the simple goal of curing patients and keeping everyone happy. Then someone’s sick in a bin, the De-Humorifier blows up, or a failed patient comes back from the dead seeking revenge. All in a day’s work at Two Point Hospital so you better know how to deal with it all.

As we say in our Two Point Hospital review, everything escalates after the gentle intro and soon becomes proper challenging – but this management game never loses its humour. It’s cute in the same way Wallace & Gromit is, with plenty of ridiculous diseases – and cures – and the DJs on the tannoy only add to the entertainment. Just make sure to check under the snack machines as that’s where those pesky Monobrows lurk.

Frostpunk

Frostpunk mixes management with the harsh challenges of survival sims. You have to manage people, yes, but the goal isn’t to make money – it’s to make it through each bitter night without losing everyone to a sudden death.

From the creators of This War of Mine, which is similarly about a group of people trying desperately to survive under horrifying circumstances, Frostpunk deals with nothing less than the end of the world. The Earth is freezing in this post-apocalypse game, which means the group under your control has to build steam engines and collect resources to stave off the cold.

Sound simple? It would be, except half the time you’re not managing a society – you’re managing your own morality. You’ll soon find yourself sending frostbitten workers to their deaths in order to clear or a bit of snow, or executing your own citizens because they dared to disagree with you.

As we say in our Frostpunk review, this is one of the best management games on PC. Not just because it’s different, but also because it holds a mirror to your own actions like no other game – and you might not like what you see.

Factorio

Factorio is all about building and maintaining factories on the alien world you’ve crash landed upon. While initially about survival, harvesting resources by hand as you do in Minecraft, and fending off the dangerous wildlife, Factorio quickly expands beyond that. It allows you to create massive centres of industry, with production lines, automated machines, and solar-powered robots.

More like this: Check out the best idle games and clicker games

While Factorio could be too complicated for some, once you get into designing and managing your factory, you’ll soon find the hours slipping away. It’s not the most attractive game on this list but Factorio is probably the most addictive. We live in hope that the developer will actually finish it some day.

Stardew Valley

Stardew Valley lets you mingle with the locals and take a break from the stress of making decisions. But don’t be fooled: while on the surface it looks like an RPG that would be published on the Super Nintendo, this is in actuality a pure and gripping management game – just one that’ll get your hands dirty for once.

Inspired by the likes of Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley has you manage a farm that was left to you by your grandfather, which you can do with whatever you choose. You can grow crops and raise livestock, make a thriving jam business or enter the nearby caves to fight slimes that you can breed.

But there’s so much more to do outside of that, too. Head into town and you can make friends with the local villagers, or even start a romantic relationship. There are also quests to earn extra Stardew Valley money, a huge map to explore, and you can work on restoring the town hall if you want to be charitable. Stardew Valley is one of the loveliest farming sims available on PC. Just make sure to manage your time most of all as this game will eat it up. Plus, if you want to extend the experience then you can install a bunch of the best Stardew Valley mods.

Farming Simulator 19

Now, when it comes to farming, we know little when it comes to the agricultural variety. We’re much better suited to the farmer’s life when we’re doing it in space, as we would in Destiny 2. Which is precisely why Farming Simulator 19 is one of the best kinds of management games: with a deep tutorial that gets us started in one of the most complete farming games ever, we now everything we need to when it comes to owning a real farm, maybe.

With a welcome graphics upgrade to make living off the land an even prettier – if still smelly – experience, Farming Simulator 19 boasts more vehicles and tools than ever before. And, quite literally hold your horses as John Deere tractors finally make their way to this simulation game. In case you didn’t believe in the sheer detail on show here, check it out in practice with our Farming Simulator 19 diary to see how we fared. Spoilers: it didn’t go well.

The Sims 3

The Sims was a phenomenon when it first hit our PCs in 2000. SimCity creator Will Wright’s little people simulator gave us the chance to fully manage the lives of a family. You can build their house, get them jobs, help them fall in love, and remove the ladder from their pool and watch them drown, it’s all part of The Sims experience.

While there are four games in the series so far we suggest playing The Sims 3. The Sims 4 is still lacking a few crucial features, although you can enhance the experience with the best Sims 4 mods. The Sims 3 still reigns supreme for the ability to travel to other neighbourhoods and manage them too, and the high level of both developer and mod support.

More Simoleons: Here’s a list of Sims 4 cheat codes

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The Sims 3 is a well-rounded package that still looks good today. Just try not to name Sims after your close friends or family as that doesn’t usually go well – ‘what do you mean you locked me in the basement?’ Agh!

Tropico 4

The Tropico games are essentially city builders like SimCity except they have you managing a tropical island that’s been conquered by a dictator. SimCuba, if you will. But rather than being grim these are some of the funniest management games out there.

You look after every aspect of your island, including where you get your money, exports, relations with other countries, and making sure the workers don’t revolt – and if they do, will you placate them or mercilessly stomp out their revolution? What makes the Tropico games distinct in the genre is that you can succeed by keeping your population happy, or subjugated under your brutal regime.

More strategy greats: Read about the best 4X games on PC

The reason to play Tropico 4 over any other game in the series is that it’s the most well-rounded of them. Each entry does a good job of improving the formula but Tropico 5 complicated matters by trying to go in a different direction. With Tropico 4 you have the freedom to rule your island with an iron fist – or not. The choice is yours, Mr Presidente.

Football Manager 2019

When it comes to the best management games, Sports Interactive are a shoe-in for that accolade with each annual entry to their famous football series. Football Manager 2018 was already excellent and the most complete a behind-the-scenes simulation of the beautiful game, so FM 19 is very much an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach. Still, for what’s effectively a collection of interactive charts, diagrams, and spreadsheets, this is the next best thing to being by the touchline. Shouting at your players from the other side of your screen is optional.

Not much has changed under the hood, but the surface is much more appealing and simpler to digest. Experienced gaffers will certainly appreciate the more streamlined – and particularly purple – user interface, but new players can benefit from tutorials for key systems in a way that’s informative without being overwhelming. Optional walkthroughs for training and building FM19 tactics are a handy head start, but control freaks can customise every fitness session and player role down to the tiniest granular detail. If you fancy yourself as the next special one, this is the only PC game you need.

Jurassic World Evolution

Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis was far too long ago. Thank goodness, then, that Planet Coaster developer Frontier turned up to make a modern version of the classic dinosaur park management sim. Jurassic World Evolution lets you breed, care for, and unleash dinosaurs on unsuspecting visitors – if you’re feeling particularly nasty.

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Frontier brings the incredible extinct creatures to life with fantastic animation and sounds that are so superb you’ll think your name is John Hammond. Keeping the dinosaurs happy, and meeting the demands of your department heads, is a full-time job. Especially when the Indominus Rex breaks out and you have to send a team out to capture it eats all the tourists.

Jurassic World Evolution is a thrilling dinosaur game that will please fans of the franchise. Bear in mind that you’ll have to complete challenges before unlocking an island that you can build your own park on. Not that it’s a chore when there are so many dinosaurs to watch.

Upcoming management games

Planet Zoo

Planet Zoo is the upcoming management game from Jurassic World Evolution developer, Frontier. Our impressions of Planet Zoo are mostly positive, however, it may not be for those new to the management game genre due to its scale and detail. we say, “It imbues everything with a real sense of life, and places its astonishing animals at the heart of it all. Genre newbies should be wary of being taken in by its charming aesthetics, but the rewards on offer are more than worth a bit of a mauling”. It’s definitely one for fans of the genre to watch out for when it releases later this year on November 5 2019.

So there you have it, ten of the best management games on PC, a genre particularly suited to our favourite platform. If you’ve played all of these games we’re astonished you have the time to eat, sleep, or even breathe, let alone read a feature like this.

Still, if you do love having no spare time – and don’t mind commanding armies instead of workers – you can also check out our list of the best strategy games on PC. Just don’t start with Civilization…