The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games(leidenmedievalistsblog.nl)
leidenmedievalistsblog.nl
The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games
https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/why-medieval-city-builder-video-games-are-historically-inaccurate
245 comments
That tracks, I think. Most strategy games are about things that real people had to be paid to do. There haven't historically been many who would govern a province for "fun". For money, glory or influence, sure, but not really for the visceral thrill of the thing.
What different people consider fun varies a lot though. There's no universal standard of fun.
Take Paradox games like Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings. They go to quite a bit of trouble to approach historical accuracy (there are still a lot of abstractions of course, but they do a far better job than the Civilizations and the Total Wars). A lot of people love them exactly for that reason. For those people, historical accuracy itself is fun. For other people, these games are probably horrible and tedious.
People have different tastes. I certainly would love a more historically accurate city builder. I lost interest in the fake base-building standard a long time ago.
Take Paradox games like Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings. They go to quite a bit of trouble to approach historical accuracy (there are still a lot of abstractions of course, but they do a far better job than the Civilizations and the Total Wars). A lot of people love them exactly for that reason. For those people, historical accuracy itself is fun. For other people, these games are probably horrible and tedious.
People have different tastes. I certainly would love a more historically accurate city builder. I lost interest in the fake base-building standard a long time ago.
Indeed this is all very true, but if you have a big publisher, “fun” is usually focused on a large target audience.
That’s why it’s so great that we have good tooling nowadays which allows indie developers to aim for the niche that they like.
That’s why it’s so great that we have good tooling nowadays which allows indie developers to aim for the niche that they like.
So basically this guy wants a dwarf fortress level city sim.
The city builder has its origins far back in the 1990s in the combination of the strategy genre and the management genre, leading to games such as Sim City (1989), Caesar (1992) and Age of Empires (1997).
Utopia for Intellivision/Aquarius came out in 1982. It was one of my favorite games growing up. I highly recommend it if you're into these kinds of games, or retro gaming. I guess I was retro gaming when I played it in the late 80s/early 90s, but we didn't call it that then. Some caveats, It's a 2 player game, you need to read the instructions, and it's annoying without the overlays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(video_game)
edit: When Sim City, and Populous made their way to Super Nintendo, I remember explaining to my older cousin that they were kind of like Utopia.
Utopia for Intellivision/Aquarius came out in 1982. It was one of my favorite games growing up. I highly recommend it if you're into these kinds of games, or retro gaming. I guess I was retro gaming when I played it in the late 80s/early 90s, but we didn't call it that then. Some caveats, It's a 2 player game, you need to read the instructions, and it's annoying without the overlays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(video_game)
edit: When Sim City, and Populous made their way to Super Nintendo, I remember explaining to my older cousin that they were kind of like Utopia.
It’s interesting and most likely not applicable - for the very same reasons you cant get realistic sword fighting (or even street fighting) in most Hollywood movies: realistic fighting doesn’t look as exciting as the fake thing.
Glad the author sees into that very clearly.
* Could be an interesting art game tho as someone pointed out below
Glad the author sees into that very clearly.
* Could be an interesting art game tho as someone pointed out below
There's a really great scene in HBO's Barry (Bill Hader) with an attempt at a more realistic fight scene. It's quite interesting actually!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MjQRqEk5M Spoilers possible if you haven't seen the show. Definitely recommend it btw.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MjQRqEk5M Spoilers possible if you haven't seen the show. Definitely recommend it btw.
Wow, that was very entertaining though obviously a bit comedic. Both characters also seem to have much better technique than conditioning.
The same episode, hilariously, includes one of their least realistic fight scenes. Wild ride.
If you watch MMA you would know that this fight would be over around the 1 minute mark.
The impression of realism you get here is not real realism - just a way to simulate it, still holding onto the tropes of the genre and the “time dilation” necessary for suspense in filmmaking.
Real street fights don’t last long, and fights between trained fighters are even shorter. one sucker punch or one good chokehold is all it takes.
The impression of realism you get here is not real realism - just a way to simulate it, still holding onto the tropes of the genre and the “time dilation” necessary for suspense in filmmaking.
Real street fights don’t last long, and fights between trained fighters are even shorter. one sucker punch or one good chokehold is all it takes.
> Medieval villagers were often living on the edge of subsistence. Agricultural surpluses were skimmed by the church and the feudal lords. Bad harvests, banditry, warfare and disease might decimate a village community at any time.
Dwarf Fortress has shown that this would in fact be quite exciting, but it would probably be a lot more niche.
Dwarf Fortress has shown that this would in fact be quite exciting, but it would probably be a lot more niche.
> but it would probably be a lot more niche
Dwarf Fortress also proving that if you hit the correct niche that your game can get a huge following if you're scratching an itch people never knew they had.
Dwarf Fortress also proving that if you hit the correct niche that your game can get a huge following if you're scratching an itch people never knew they had.
Once you get over the bonkers UI its pretty easy to make a dwarf fortress that can survive essentially forever, farmers are ridiculously productive so you can support a population of 100-200 pretty easily with 10 or fewer farmers.
When creating an entertainment product, be it a movie or game, your user’s expectations are the canvas you paint on. In some places you deliberately violate them, in others you accommodate them at the expense of “realism.”
An amusing example: In the Sly Stallone rock climbing action movie “Cliffhanger,” they shot a scene where he ice climbs without an axe. To get past a certain section, he dips his gloved hand in cold water and freezes it to the ice, using that for traction.
This is an actual technique alpinists have used. But test audiences (who are not alpine climbers) rejected it as preposterous. So it’s on the DVD as a “deleted scene,” but wasn’t in the cut they released to theatres.
The movie also features a “bolt gun” he carries that can sink a bolt into rock, which can then be used as a hold or to attach a carabiner. No such thing is possible with current technology, but audiences accepted it as possible, so it plays a prominent role in the plot.
The movie’s producers were catering to their audience’s expectation as they actually were, not as we may wish they were.
An amusing example: In the Sly Stallone rock climbing action movie “Cliffhanger,” they shot a scene where he ice climbs without an axe. To get past a certain section, he dips his gloved hand in cold water and freezes it to the ice, using that for traction.
This is an actual technique alpinists have used. But test audiences (who are not alpine climbers) rejected it as preposterous. So it’s on the DVD as a “deleted scene,” but wasn’t in the cut they released to theatres.
The movie also features a “bolt gun” he carries that can sink a bolt into rock, which can then be used as a hold or to attach a carabiner. No such thing is possible with current technology, but audiences accepted it as possible, so it plays a prominent role in the plot.
The movie’s producers were catering to their audience’s expectation as they actually were, not as we may wish they were.
This is very evident in historical media where medieval people are portrayed as wearing burlap sacks and misshapen clumps of fur inside plain brown plaster castles rather than wearing brocade, silks, or brightly died wool inside colorfully-painted palaces or churches. To some extent you have to meet the audience where they are.
The European world-view on what constitutes fine aesthetic sense is derived from Renaissance mis-interpretation of Greek decoration as being white marble. The colours that our culture subsequently rejects as gaudy, tasteless, and are othered are based on this.
In reality it turns out that the Greeks painted everything batshit colours and Ancient Athens probably looked more like an 80s day-glo MTV video.
In reality it turns out that the Greeks painted everything batshit colours and Ancient Athens probably looked more like an 80s day-glo MTV video.
Imagine the products of a culture with less tolerance for untruth than our own. It might see more films with postscript reality checks, like Jackie Chan's making-of "if you do this, you will get hurt". More children's picture books with errata pages, like Penny Chisholm's. I wonder if some such might be encouraged somehow?
Why would you want such a culture? People love movies and probably can learn how untrue or true they are by just googling stuff. I certainly do.
"Want" or "is good" are two different things. We're living in a culture where a lot of people clearly love believing all sorts of untruths, and don't care much for the real truth. Is that good? I think not.
Of course movies are for the most part relatively harmless entertainment, but they too do shape expectations. I've heard of Juries rejecting reasonable evidence because crime shows have taught them to expect iron clad proof.
Of course movies are for the most part relatively harmless entertainment, but they too do shape expectations. I've heard of Juries rejecting reasonable evidence because crime shows have taught them to expect iron clad proof.
Because knowledge is power over the environment and filling your head with lies is hard to unlearn.
googling doesn't disabuse you of ingrained lies.
googling doesn't disabuse you of ingrained lies.
You can not watch the movies you know. Nobody forced you to.
Movies are just fairy tales and people enjoy fairy tales for good reason. Stories are actually a very efficient way to sharing information. I could why in detail but I’d just say it’s the way we process information is more emotional than logical. A fairy tale is essentially a hyper compressed emotional truth (when it is a GOOD fairy tale).
Movies are just fairy tales and people enjoy fairy tales for good reason. Stories are actually a very efficient way to sharing information. I could why in detail but I’d just say it’s the way we process information is more emotional than logical. A fairy tale is essentially a hyper compressed emotional truth (when it is a GOOD fairy tale).
Sword fights certainly could seem more realistic without losing the excitement. Check this out ('fighting' starts at around 2 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GoQlvc_H3s
This is great but virtually all of this is similar to what I know about the samurai - most fighting with a sword ends VERY quickly with someone getting stabbed. We are talking about an encounter between two men being decided in a few swordstrokes. Seconds, not minutes. There is not much room for 3-5-10 minute fights and acrobatics.
Yes it’s interesting as a YouTube video, but for filmmaking suspense comes from “dilating” the moment in time, spending as much as possible in each step before the final blow.
With realistic sword fighting, this is mostly impossible afaik.
Yes it’s interesting as a YouTube video, but for filmmaking suspense comes from “dilating” the moment in time, spending as much as possible in each step before the final blow.
With realistic sword fighting, this is mostly impossible afaik.
> most fighting with a sword ends VERY quickly with someone getting stabbed.
Tanner Greer recently posted about teaching the Iliad to high schoolers, and made this point explicitly. The Iliad is composed for an audience that is familiar with hand-to-hand combat, and depicts it exactly this way: two people close, and one of them kills the other one and moves on. Fighting is mostly done with spears, not swords, but it happens the same way.
Homeric depictions of combat impressed my mother in a different way (she is a doctor): "Wow! Homer really knew his human anatomy!"
Tanner Greer recently posted about teaching the Iliad to high schoolers, and made this point explicitly. The Iliad is composed for an audience that is familiar with hand-to-hand combat, and depicts it exactly this way: two people close, and one of them kills the other one and moves on. Fighting is mostly done with spears, not swords, but it happens the same way.
Homeric depictions of combat impressed my mother in a different way (she is a doctor): "Wow! Homer really knew his human anatomy!"
Ridley Scott's debut movie, "The Duelists" is such a movie. It's based on real diaries of two dudes who dueled several times over course of decades. The sword fighting in the movie is among the most realistic. Check out the opening scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvVyyH2mQ9E
Also, the sword fight from "The Deluge" (Polish title - "Potop"). Admittedly, the plot says the commander didn't want to kill a rebelling but skilled officer, just teach him a lesson. But otherwise well done. It was a time when fencing and horse riding training was mandatory for Polish actors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkYjdPCyYjk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvVyyH2mQ9E
Also, the sword fight from "The Deluge" (Polish title - "Potop"). Admittedly, the plot says the commander didn't want to kill a rebelling but skilled officer, just teach him a lesson. But otherwise well done. It was a time when fencing and horse riding training was mandatory for Polish actors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkYjdPCyYjk
One movie that struck me as having probably more realistic gun fights than most (though I wouldn't know, having fortunately no experience with gun fights) is Children of Man. People are doing something. Suddenly someone collapses, you hear gun shots, they look for cover, and still you have no idea where the gun shots are coming from. Much more exciting and terrifying than the usual Hollywood gun fight.
You're supposed to make it up in numbers. The idea that there is a single hero fighting for minutes is the problem.
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Even modern city builders are inaccurate in the sense that timelines of how long it takes to build things aren't Modelled correct. Plus organic city growth is rarely simulated. Cities skylines for example has no concept of slums.
Also the annoying Western/Eurocentrism.
Eg: See the recent game Dorfromantik, its aesthetically pleasing, it is rustic european scenery, but why isn't it not set in Indonesia or Ecuador or Uzbekistan?
Also the annoying Western/Eurocentrism.
Eg: See the recent game Dorfromantik, its aesthetically pleasing, it is rustic european scenery, but why isn't it not set in Indonesia or Ecuador or Uzbekistan?
> Eg: See the recent game Dorfromantik, its aesthetically pleasing, its rustic european scene, but why isn't it not set in Indonesia or Ecuador or Uzbekistan?
That seems a bit harsh judgement for a game with a German name, made by 4 German game design students living in Berlin, with funds from the German state [0].
[0] https://toukana.itch.io/
That seems a bit harsh judgement for a game with a German name, made by 4 German game design students living in Berlin, with funds from the German state [0].
[0] https://toukana.itch.io/
Yeah, if a European developer attempted to make a non-European city builder then they'd probably get accused of appropriation, and in addition would also get slammed for the inaccuracies and socio-cultural misunderstandings that would inevitably manifest. Also, what stops developers in those aforementioned regions making their own games, there are plenty of relatively cheap and reasonable options in terms of game engines.
You make an excellent point.
>Cities skylines for example has no concept of slums.
That was one thing it seemed to simulate pretty well in my experience. Last time I played it, I set up the city with a bunch of low income housing areas in industrial zones, roads all through them, small housing plots next to industry and under overpasses and stuff.
The neighbourhoods looked exactly like the low income housing neighbourhoods around industrial areas I've seen in real life. The people in those houses were typically unhealthier than in other areas. I put the closest hospitals and schools just outside those areas, the waste water from the city was dumped nearby etc.
It's quite possible to create extremely disparate neighborhoods and areas. From slums to McMansion filled suburbs to bustling industrial areas.
Sadly though, my in game city started with me trying to model my real city. It turned out pretty accurate at least as far as neighbourhood layout and visual income disparity went.
That was one thing it seemed to simulate pretty well in my experience. Last time I played it, I set up the city with a bunch of low income housing areas in industrial zones, roads all through them, small housing plots next to industry and under overpasses and stuff.
The neighbourhoods looked exactly like the low income housing neighbourhoods around industrial areas I've seen in real life. The people in those houses were typically unhealthier than in other areas. I put the closest hospitals and schools just outside those areas, the waste water from the city was dumped nearby etc.
It's quite possible to create extremely disparate neighborhoods and areas. From slums to McMansion filled suburbs to bustling industrial areas.
Sadly though, my in game city started with me trying to model my real city. It turned out pretty accurate at least as far as neighbourhood layout and visual income disparity went.
Slums in Cities Skylines are useless. The only point of a "slum" in that game is to convert the slum into a richer neighborhood.
In contrast: creating Slums in Ceasar, Pharaoh, or Tropico is an explicit strategy. Why? Because low-income industries (such as mining or farming) cannot afford better housing. The slum is the best that you can give that population as a leader.
In Ceasar, they're extremely cheeky about the highest class of citizens. Only plebeians work. If you "upgrade" housing to the point of attracting patricians, you LOSE workers (because patricians don't work!!). There are entire strategies in the game about attracting as many plebeians (working-class) citizens needed to have a functioning economy, but then converting the excess workers into Patricians for higher-tax collection.
As such, you need to keep the plebeians purposefully at a lower class to keep your industrial sector working. If you convert everyone into patricians, no work would get done at all. Its a challenge to build road-networks that separate the housing units, but provide the workers needed to serve the upper class (ex: services such as bath-houses and marketplaces are run by plebeians, but should be placed inside of Patrician neighborhoods)
In contrast: creating Slums in Ceasar, Pharaoh, or Tropico is an explicit strategy. Why? Because low-income industries (such as mining or farming) cannot afford better housing. The slum is the best that you can give that population as a leader.
In Ceasar, they're extremely cheeky about the highest class of citizens. Only plebeians work. If you "upgrade" housing to the point of attracting patricians, you LOSE workers (because patricians don't work!!). There are entire strategies in the game about attracting as many plebeians (working-class) citizens needed to have a functioning economy, but then converting the excess workers into Patricians for higher-tax collection.
As such, you need to keep the plebeians purposefully at a lower class to keep your industrial sector working. If you convert everyone into patricians, no work would get done at all. Its a challenge to build road-networks that separate the housing units, but provide the workers needed to serve the upper class (ex: services such as bath-houses and marketplaces are run by plebeians, but should be placed inside of Patrician neighborhoods)
To be fair, almost everything in Cities felt useless. It didn't really feel like much of a game at all. Nothing you did really actually mattered at all. Cities was more like an interactive city model building toy than what I'd think of as a game.
Ceasar, Pharoh and Tropico are actual games with goals, win conditions and a point.
I didn't like Cities mostly because nothing you did mattered. Not just slums or anything else. You can kill off half the city by accidently routing waste dumping to the city's drinking water and within 15-20 minutes your city's back to being fully populated.
Trying to play Cities strategically the way you would those other games is going to be disappointing no matter how you build the city. It's just not that kind of game.
Ceasar, Pharoh and Tropico are actual games with goals, win conditions and a point.
I didn't like Cities mostly because nothing you did mattered. Not just slums or anything else. You can kill off half the city by accidently routing waste dumping to the city's drinking water and within 15-20 minutes your city's back to being fully populated.
Trying to play Cities strategically the way you would those other games is going to be disappointing no matter how you build the city. It's just not that kind of game.
If I recall correctly, in at least some of the Caesar/Pharaoh/Zeus/Emperor games, access to workers is a binary "Did a worker walk by here recently?" check, and if the answer is yes, then the whole city's population of workers is available to the building. So to serve a remote cluster of mines or whatever, you can have a "slum" that's one or two houses big.
There might be seven or eight levels of "common" housing that provides workers and then two or three of "upper class" housing that doesn't. But at least to me, a block of insulae isn't a "slum" in the game--a couple of huts with no water or food are.
There might be seven or eight levels of "common" housing that provides workers and then two or three of "upper class" housing that doesn't. But at least to me, a block of insulae isn't a "slum" in the game--a couple of huts with no water or food are.
Oooph. I definitely did not know that.
Sim City btw, does the same thing with Residential / Commercial / Industrial zones. All "traffic" start from a residential zone, then goes to a industrial zone, and finally ends in commercial.
That means a singular tile of "Residential" zone can "feed" the entire industrial sector. While a singular "Commercial" tile can serve as where the industry drops off their goods.
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So I knew that fact for Sim City (and took advantage of it in some designs). I never really knew that for Caesar / Pharaoh.
Sim City btw, does the same thing with Residential / Commercial / Industrial zones. All "traffic" start from a residential zone, then goes to a industrial zone, and finally ends in commercial.
That means a singular tile of "Residential" zone can "feed" the entire industrial sector. While a singular "Commercial" tile can serve as where the industry drops off their goods.
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So I knew that fact for Sim City (and took advantage of it in some designs). I never really knew that for Caesar / Pharaoh.
Cool then start an indie dev shop in Uzbekistan and make it happen. I will preorder the game if you do it for the hell of it, even if it is bad.
Why don't YOU make a game with rustic Indonesian scenery? Someone wants to make a game set in Europe, so they are now annoying Eurocentrics. To criticize someone because they are not making some setting choices that you would prefer, as some kind of moral failure, is not good.
I would love a building game where you can't build roads. All of those building games so far allowed that, but I think it would be more fun to just allow for constructing building, and roads/pathway would form depending on their connectivity inside the production chain. I.e. you wouldn't connect your farm to a butcher, but pathways would form and eventually turn into street based on the amount people from dependent shops walking to it (also depending on terrain and usage of i.e. horse carriages).
The settlers.did this AFAIK
I recall in settlers 2 you put down the initial walkway, but it widening into a 2-way path and eventually a carriageway that donkeys would traverse was down to how much traffic it saw.
Specifically Settlers 3 & 4. In 1, 2, 6 and I believe 7, paths are build manually; 5 doesn't have roads.
Back in the 90's, just to set the record straight. It was probably the first game that did it.
This is exactly what Foundation [1] (which was also shown in a screenshot in the article) does.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/690830/Foundation/
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/690830/Foundation/
Looks like it's windows only..
As are most games. According to ProtonDB [1] it should run more or less perfectly on Linux with Proton.
[1] https://www.protondb.com/app/690830
[1] https://www.protondb.com/app/690830
Proton [0] looks like a really nice exanple of Open Source collaboration.
[0] https://www.protondb.com/
[0] https://www.protondb.com/
[deleted]
Civilization 6 does this a bit, where roads are constructed by running trade routes, not built manually.
But you choose the trade routes individually. Its not natural, that's the player's choice in where the roads go (except for Rome: all roads lead to Rome lol (special power where every city auto-builds a road to Rome in the early ages))
It's not completely manual. If you have cities A, B, and C and you have an existing route from city B to C, and you add one from A to C, it will automatically choose the optimal route by utilizing existing roads and connect the new city from there.
That's not what the original commenter is talking about.
The "decision" to build a road from A to C was not really a top-down decision from the medieval periods. Rome built roads in a top-down manner that sometimes benefited the Empire as a whole... but Feudal Lords built roads in a smaller and more selfish scale.
The growth of roads at that time was more akin to animal paths (animals deciding to travel the same path as other animals: because the well-trodden areas are flatter and easier to walk). Its an organic growth, rather than a top-down planned growth.
I seem to recall playing a few games where roads grew naturally like this, but I've forgotten their names by now. Feudal lords built Roads more akin to Death Stranding (where the player builds a road to try to connect to the online community. Once the road exists, you gain the benefits of the entire community's efforts)
So people are talking about that kind of "locally selfish but community building" behavior. And also in a management simulator and... not whatever Death Stranding is (First person Post-apocalyptic UPS simulator?)
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Different mechanics for different eras of history. Again: Civ6 probably is akin to some Emperor declaring a road should be built between two major cities. But Medieval / Feudal society didn't have top-down edicts from an emperor (at best: maybe from the Pope but... the Pope didn't have that much power). Having a simulator for the medieval time-period could be an interesting gameplay mechanic.
The "decision" to build a road from A to C was not really a top-down decision from the medieval periods. Rome built roads in a top-down manner that sometimes benefited the Empire as a whole... but Feudal Lords built roads in a smaller and more selfish scale.
The growth of roads at that time was more akin to animal paths (animals deciding to travel the same path as other animals: because the well-trodden areas are flatter and easier to walk). Its an organic growth, rather than a top-down planned growth.
I seem to recall playing a few games where roads grew naturally like this, but I've forgotten their names by now. Feudal lords built Roads more akin to Death Stranding (where the player builds a road to try to connect to the online community. Once the road exists, you gain the benefits of the entire community's efforts)
So people are talking about that kind of "locally selfish but community building" behavior. And also in a management simulator and... not whatever Death Stranding is (First person Post-apocalyptic UPS simulator?)
----------
Different mechanics for different eras of history. Again: Civ6 probably is akin to some Emperor declaring a road should be built between two major cities. But Medieval / Feudal society didn't have top-down edicts from an emperor (at best: maybe from the Pope but... the Pope didn't have that much power). Having a simulator for the medieval time-period could be an interesting gameplay mechanic.
Before we leave has this:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1073910/Before_We_Leave/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1073910/Before_We_Leave/
You would need to model the “roads” becoming an impassable hazard (thick muddy mess) to wheeled vehicles and horses during heavy rain.
Even ancient people threw gravel down (or logs) to help address this problem. But that’s a heck of a lot of work.
Even ancient people threw gravel down (or logs) to help address this problem. But that’s a heck of a lot of work.
The logical implementation seems fairly easy to imagine to me.
You do ant-like pheromone tracking for movement by all peasants of the world. (Each cell keeps a tracker, which gets incremented by passing peasants and decays over time).
Upon sufficient pheromone build up, your walking tile upgrades. Perhaps in the form of grass -> well-trodden -> dirt road -> gravel road -> stone road. Simple model of decay would be to simply downgrade back down the list. More complex might be that stone/gravel degrade into some special state to maintain permanence (dirt roads goes back to grass, but stone roads turn to grassy stone or whatever).
Your peasant/wagon/etc pathfind accordingly, getting speedboosts (or losses) by road type — and in your example, by road type + local weather (modeled separately)
You could also have different pheremone types producing different artifacts. Human pheremone only produces dirt roads at max, but wagon and tamed horse pheremone jump from grass->road with sufficient buildup. Wild animals only build up to well-trodden paths.
You do ant-like pheromone tracking for movement by all peasants of the world. (Each cell keeps a tracker, which gets incremented by passing peasants and decays over time).
Upon sufficient pheromone build up, your walking tile upgrades. Perhaps in the form of grass -> well-trodden -> dirt road -> gravel road -> stone road. Simple model of decay would be to simply downgrade back down the list. More complex might be that stone/gravel degrade into some special state to maintain permanence (dirt roads goes back to grass, but stone roads turn to grassy stone or whatever).
Your peasant/wagon/etc pathfind accordingly, getting speedboosts (or losses) by road type — and in your example, by road type + local weather (modeled separately)
You could also have different pheremone types producing different artifacts. Human pheremone only produces dirt roads at max, but wagon and tamed horse pheremone jump from grass->road with sufficient buildup. Wild animals only build up to well-trodden paths.
Foundation does this. No road building at all. Paths are created organically by activity. In addition, the player never builds houses either. The townspeople pick where they want their house to go.
There is road building in Banished, but the townspeople will only use them if it’s an optimal path. They’re not the least bit shy about ignoring the roads if they can get to their destination via a shortcut. Since the roads do give a substantial movement bonus, the most effective roads are the ones which trace out the organic movement of the citizens.
I like both systems, but prefer the one in Banished. It’s rewarding to build a heavily used road system based on observing patterns.
There is road building in Banished, but the townspeople will only use them if it’s an optimal path. They’re not the least bit shy about ignoring the roads if they can get to their destination via a shortcut. Since the roads do give a substantial movement bonus, the most effective roads are the ones which trace out the organic movement of the citizens.
I like both systems, but prefer the one in Banished. It’s rewarding to build a heavily used road system based on observing patterns.
> Foundation does this. No road building at all. Paths are created organically by activity.
You can put the roads where you want them by placing taboo zoning where you don't want them. Foundation's villagers have an unnaturally strong preference for staying on existing roads, so this is necessary if you want to straighten a road that was kinked due to an obstacle that no longer exists.
> In addition, the player never builds houses either. The townspeople pick where they want their house to go.
This is even less accurate; the townspeople can only build houses in areas that have been actively zoned for housing.
And their "desirability" requirements also mean that they won't build houses unless you've specifically built a lot of decorations nearby, so even if you zone everywhere houses will only appear in places where you make an effort to get them to appear.
You can put the roads where you want them by placing taboo zoning where you don't want them. Foundation's villagers have an unnaturally strong preference for staying on existing roads, so this is necessary if you want to straighten a road that was kinked due to an obstacle that no longer exists.
> In addition, the player never builds houses either. The townspeople pick where they want their house to go.
This is even less accurate; the townspeople can only build houses in areas that have been actively zoned for housing.
And their "desirability" requirements also mean that they won't build houses unless you've specifically built a lot of decorations nearby, so even if you zone everywhere houses will only appear in places where you make an effort to get them to appear.
Yes, you can micromanage roads if you like using the forbidden zone tool. You can also shape the roads by plopping a building into the middle of a path and forcing the citizens to route around it. But, by and large, the roads are generated mostly from activity. It's been one of the selling points of Foundation from the beginning.
And you are correct about houses. But it's still a difference from the usual medieval city builders in which house placement is something players do directly. Part of Foundation's goal of making their villages more organic and less grid. That was the point I was trying to make without getting into the weeds of how the housing mechanic worked in detail.
On a side note, I wish Foundation had the option for direct placement of houses. There were bugs in past versions which prevented house construction without enormous amounts of decorations. The current version is much better, but can still be mysterious as to why houses aren't being built in a desirable area with what seems to be plenty of room and the townspeople are wanting more houses. The reasons for the non-construction are not often clear. One thing I hope the game improves over time.
And you are correct about houses. But it's still a difference from the usual medieval city builders in which house placement is something players do directly. Part of Foundation's goal of making their villages more organic and less grid. That was the point I was trying to make without getting into the weeds of how the housing mechanic worked in detail.
On a side note, I wish Foundation had the option for direct placement of houses. There were bugs in past versions which prevented house construction without enormous amounts of decorations. The current version is much better, but can still be mysterious as to why houses aren't being built in a desirable area with what seems to be plenty of room and the townspeople are wanting more houses. The reasons for the non-construction are not often clear. One thing I hope the game improves over time.
Rise Of Nations did it like this.
Ostriv! It is developed by one guy and incredibly addictive.
Set in the 18th century.
That could be a fun visual feature, to watch as paths and roads appear procedurally based on the layout of the town, but I don't think it's particular realistic, and might miss out on some strategic richness. Designing road networks is actually a complex and nuanced thing in and of itself, and it's certainly not as simple as "pave over the paths that people walk on the most." I think I would prefer road design to be a crucial part of the strategy in designing an efficient town.
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Frostpunk kinda does this - you build roads later on but in the beginning people leave deep tracks in the snow as they go out to collect supplies. It looks really cool. The whole game has an awesome aesthetic.
That's how roads are formed in ostriv, an alpha title.
I found road building fun in KaM
The basic problem is the disparity in control mechanisms. As a city-builder player, you have central planning capabilities that would make Stalin jealous--and were completely unattainable in the relevant time period due to poor communications technology.
One solution is to make "social power"/"control"/"influence" an actual gameplay mechanic, rather than leaving it entirely to the players cognition/dexterity. Lack of player control is counterbalanced by powerful AI.
For example, at the start of the game you might play as a local authority that manages land rights. You merely specify who owns what land and have limited control over how they use it. Eventually, the peasants build organic settlements, and if they get big enough, you can get transferred there and act as mayor--with the ability to set more precise local policy and therefore begin to shape the town... And so on and so forth.
One solution is to make "social power"/"control"/"influence" an actual gameplay mechanic, rather than leaving it entirely to the players cognition/dexterity. Lack of player control is counterbalanced by powerful AI.
For example, at the start of the game you might play as a local authority that manages land rights. You merely specify who owns what land and have limited control over how they use it. Eventually, the peasants build organic settlements, and if they get big enough, you can get transferred there and act as mayor--with the ability to set more precise local policy and therefore begin to shape the town... And so on and so forth.
According to TFA however, one flaw in medieval city builders is that they are too organic, when actual villages were centrally planned. The more major one however is that growth was apparently near hopeless, which would really make them play like a different genre entirely.
I think with modern hindsight, growth would be fairly straightforward, but it’s anachronistic to bring 21st century intellectual tools to bear in a 10th Century context, like bringing a machine gun (and plenty of ammo) to a medieval battlefield. Even things like knowing about sanitation (so don’t put wells where you dump your sewer) would help massively.
Villages are planned to some extent, but they almost certainly are placed in areas with existing settlers i.e. productive capacity. The farms (settlers) come first, then the village follows.
This just in: video game discovered that doesn't completely adhere to <history / physics / reality / etc>. More at 11.
This is a case of HN's clickbait prevention hurting the title. The original title is "Why Medieval city builder video games are historically inaccurate" and considers some of the details rarely represented.
However to stop titles like "Why are 9/10 moms using XYZ?" that are badly disguised ads, HN strips opening questions from titles.
However to stop titles like "Why are 9/10 moms using XYZ?" that are badly disguised ads, HN strips opening questions from titles.
This is probably one of the better reasons why I like 0AD [1] more than anything (besides being open sourced [2]). If you read the forums and traverse the amazing artwork it's like a history lesson and there was no 0AD so they can mix/match.
[1] - https://play0ad.com/ [2] - https://github.com/0ad/0ad
[1] - https://play0ad.com/ [2] - https://github.com/0ad/0ad
I always thought city builders are a weird mix of sort of free market / authoritarian beliefs:
In most city builder games involve some planning, incentives provided, and people just show up, do their thing, growth is endless, build a business, and there you go.
On the other hand in most city builders the player makes all the decisions and can act at will with no regard to his local citizens ;)
In most city builder games involve some planning, incentives provided, and people just show up, do their thing, growth is endless, build a business, and there you go.
On the other hand in most city builders the player makes all the decisions and can act at will with no regard to his local citizens ;)
Can you imagine a real mayor simulator, where you'd have to get elected and answer to the city council and constituents? I expect most would find that boring, but it might be a fun (or at least educational) experience for some.
Tropico has this component of elections.
Tropico has one of the funniest "speech generators" ever.
* Praise a faction (ex: Religious, Academic, Military)
* Chastise a faction
* Praise a superpower
* Acknowledge an issue.
* Make a promise
-------
For example:
* Praise the Military
* Blame the Religious
* Praise the USA
* Acknowledge housing is a problem.
* Promise better housing.
Then the voice actor comes out and says the lines associated with your selection. Paraphrasing:
My people of Tropico! I wish to congratulate the Military for their outstanding service. But the Religious among us are holding us back from progress. The USA has given us a great amount of aid and we thank them for it. Our growth has caused a lack of housing in some areas. If you elect me again, I promise to fix our housing problem.
---------
EDIT: The speech has a big effect on the election.
Every faction has a rival faction. Praising the Military pisses off the liberals. Blaming the Religious encourages the Academics. Praising the USA pisses off your communists, but pleases your capitalists.
Acknowledging a problem lowers a citizen's "needs penalty" in the election. (If everyone's housing score is low, then acknowledging the problem reduces their penalty with regards to the election/vote).
Promising to fix a problem is even stronger than acknowledging a problem, but has repercussions in the next election. You need to have had substantial progress in 10 years otherwise the people will remember.
* Praise a faction (ex: Religious, Academic, Military)
* Chastise a faction
* Praise a superpower
* Acknowledge an issue.
* Make a promise
-------
For example:
* Praise the Military
* Blame the Religious
* Praise the USA
* Acknowledge housing is a problem.
* Promise better housing.
Then the voice actor comes out and says the lines associated with your selection. Paraphrasing:
My people of Tropico! I wish to congratulate the Military for their outstanding service. But the Religious among us are holding us back from progress. The USA has given us a great amount of aid and we thank them for it. Our growth has caused a lack of housing in some areas. If you elect me again, I promise to fix our housing problem.
---------
EDIT: The speech has a big effect on the election.
Every faction has a rival faction. Praising the Military pisses off the liberals. Blaming the Religious encourages the Academics. Praising the USA pisses off your communists, but pleases your capitalists.
Acknowledging a problem lowers a citizen's "needs penalty" in the election. (If everyone's housing score is low, then acknowledging the problem reduces their penalty with regards to the election/vote).
Promising to fix a problem is even stronger than acknowledging a problem, but has repercussions in the next election. You need to have had substantial progress in 10 years otherwise the people will remember.
> otherwise the people will remember
This breaks the immersion.
This breaks the immersion.
I realize you're joking, but it should be noted that Tropico is constantly breaking the immersion on purpose.
The only score that's saved in your high-score list is the size of your Swiss Bank account. A citizen's car is always located in the nearest parking garage. When you need your first college educated citizen (College Professors must be college-educated), the easiest way to get one is to command your Pirates to "rescue" a bunch of college-educated folk from international waters.
Then again, maybe the size of Swiss Bank accounts is really all that matters for most island-nation leaders and the best measurement of success :-) I do think that the game's sense of humor is among the best attributes... seeing what parts of the game the designers decided to be "realistic" vs "cartoony" is almost the fun of it all.
The only score that's saved in your high-score list is the size of your Swiss Bank account. A citizen's car is always located in the nearest parking garage. When you need your first college educated citizen (College Professors must be college-educated), the easiest way to get one is to command your Pirates to "rescue" a bunch of college-educated folk from international waters.
Then again, maybe the size of Swiss Bank accounts is really all that matters for most island-nation leaders and the best measurement of success :-) I do think that the game's sense of humor is among the best attributes... seeing what parts of the game the designers decided to be "realistic" vs "cartoony" is almost the fun of it all.
Last night, I was musing over the notion of a zoning board of appeals, where some percentage of your decisions are overridden or just plain tied up for years, and the city ends up looking like a patchwork.
Hearts of Iron (3 in particular)
One of the biggest problems with playing as the USA in Hearts of Iron is that you need to actually convince your Democracy / citizens that its worthwhile to go to war. And unless you click the "Crisis of Democracy" button (aka: turn yourself into a dictatorship), you don't actually have full control over the policies of your country.
Which is why its more fun to play as Germany / Hitler (where the button was already pressed before the game started). But playing as the USA (where you have to build support and convert the peacetime economy into a military economy in time for the war) is a big challenge... a "hard mode" for those who have already mastered the military portions of the game.
One of the biggest problems with playing as the USA in Hearts of Iron is that you need to actually convince your Democracy / citizens that its worthwhile to go to war. And unless you click the "Crisis of Democracy" button (aka: turn yourself into a dictatorship), you don't actually have full control over the policies of your country.
Which is why its more fun to play as Germany / Hitler (where the button was already pressed before the game started). But playing as the USA (where you have to build support and convert the peacetime economy into a military economy in time for the war) is a big challenge... a "hard mode" for those who have already mastered the military portions of the game.
I think HOI problem (more familiar with 4) is that it feels much more half baked. US Congress is mostly click a few event popups, click a few policy stuff in a menu and see the congress members just flip. It's more shoehorning it into the HOI system.
I think you could make the process fun, but in paradox style games where you need to generalise a system to fit everywhere in the world, it can fall flat.
I think you could make the process fun, but in paradox style games where you need to generalise a system to fit everywhere in the world, it can fall flat.
I feel like most events in HOI in general are just... popup windows.
You need a very active imagination to piece together those popups into a cohesive story. HOI is a pretty abstract game, but a lot of simulation stuff is going on under the interface.
The map is realtime, so you can see your troops movement. But otherwise, its got a very "newspaper" like feel to events. If something happens, its reported as a popup window.
You need a very active imagination to piece together those popups into a cohesive story. HOI is a pretty abstract game, but a lot of simulation stuff is going on under the interface.
The map is realtime, so you can see your troops movement. But otherwise, its got a very "newspaper" like feel to events. If something happens, its reported as a popup window.
> but in paradox style games where you need to generalise a system to fit everywhere in the world
Interesting that you say this, because EU4 is filled to the brim with region-specific mechanics (to the point where it's actually kind of annoying).
Interesting that you say this, because EU4 is filled to the brim with region-specific mechanics (to the point where it's actually kind of annoying).
Frostpunk has a little of this - there aren't any elections but if you piss people off enough they'll run you out of town (and you lose the game).
Good article. The difficulty with simulating these plots and new settlements is that the player’s interests aren’t the same as any individual freeman’s. Letting the player map out fields could certainly be done, but it wouldn’t meaningfully change the game as conventional city-builder players of any skill also have a layout in mind before they begin the game.
Players also value a high quantity of content and replayability, again at odds with the interest of a medieval freeman, churchman or lord who preferred consistency to novelty for the reasons mentioned in the preface.
Players also value a high quantity of content and replayability, again at odds with the interest of a medieval freeman, churchman or lord who preferred consistency to novelty for the reasons mentioned in the preface.
I’m actually beginning some informal research on 17th century Europe for a small game right now. There are some village life and village builder aspects.
It’s the beginning of the “modern” period and just after the renaissance. What is life like for the local business owner? Who would they be? What extent is it still feudal serfdom in <country> during <year>? It’s an interesting time with massive social, scientific, and religious change, it’s been really fun to read about so far
Edit: if anybody has books or articles to recommend, I’d love to hear about them
It’s the beginning of the “modern” period and just after the renaissance. What is life like for the local business owner? Who would they be? What extent is it still feudal serfdom in <country> during <year>? It’s an interesting time with massive social, scientific, and religious change, it’s been really fun to read about so far
Edit: if anybody has books or articles to recommend, I’d love to hear about them
ACoUP is incredible, though not specific to that time period: https://acoup.blog/resources-for-world-builders/
I was waiting for ACOUP to pop up in this thread - surprised it took so long :D
17th century Europe was quite modern with for example long distance power transmission. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/01/mechanical-transmi...
The spinning wheel similarly had already transformed transformed the making of cloth and rope. By the 1700’s cottage industries where setup to leverage the free time of village workers on an industrial scale. Communities would specialize based on local resources including transportation networks.
Also, rivers where the medieval equivalent of highways and railroads. A 500 mile journey by waterways was generally cheaper than a 50 mile trip by land.
The spinning wheel similarly had already transformed transformed the making of cloth and rope. By the 1700’s cottage industries where setup to leverage the free time of village workers on an industrial scale. Communities would specialize based on local resources including transportation networks.
Also, rivers where the medieval equivalent of highways and railroads. A 500 mile journey by waterways was generally cheaper than a 50 mile trip by land.
According to AcoUP, transport cost over land is five times that over rivers, and twenty times that over sea.
https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii-real-c...
https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii-real-c...
That’s a reasonable estimate, however the Edict on Maximum Prices was issued in 301 AD so it’s quite outdated by this time period. Also it’s important to separate navigating rivers upstream vs down, long journeys generally involved both and possibly loading cargo multiple times.
Rome and the Middle Ages both had a systems of canals which are neutral to navigate. They always require something to pull, but there isn’t any current.
Rome and the Middle Ages both had a systems of canals which are neutral to navigate. They always require something to pull, but there isn’t any current.
Elizabeth Norton's Lives of Tudor Women overlaps somewhat with the period that you're interested in.
History of Private Life, edited by Aries and Duby - volumes 2 and 3 cover the medieval and renaissance period.
History of Private Life, edited by Aries and Duby - volumes 2 and 3 cover the medieval and renaissance period.
Don't forget Renaissance was the peak witch burning period. Have some witch burning while you're at it!
Figuring out how to take these realities and tweak the gameplay cycle to make it "fun" seems like a fantastic design challenge.
I wonder what the author would think of Dwarf Fortress forts that have been played on the surface.
I wonder what the author would think of Dwarf Fortress forts that have been played on the surface.
I played a group of dwarves who, instead of burrowing into the mountain, deforested their land to make a town of wooden buildings on the surface (complete with archer towers, drawbridge, and moat). Naturally, the neighboring elves weren't too pleased with all the tree felling and eventually wiped the dwarves out.
City builders, such as Sim City or even City Skylines are all inaccurate to various degrees. I find it more "honest" when Tropico 6 makes fun of the concept entirely: with your hackers stealing the White House from the US Government.
Strangely enough, I find Tropico to be a more believable setting.
* Citizen simulation: Citizens need to travel between different areas. Miners need to enter the mines, but when they get tired, they need to travel home to rest. Every now and then, they must travel to Church to fulfil their personal religious needs (religious citizens need more church than non-religious). Etc. etc. for all the personal needs of citizens (food, housing, religion, entertainment). Citizens also grow up: adults give birth to children, children go to school (or not: if you don't have schools they'll grow up uneducated), 20 years later they enter the workforce as either "uneducated", "high school" educated, or "college educated". Higher education levels can perform more jobs (ex: Petro-chemical engineer), while uneducated are forced into the lowest wage jobs (farming or mining).
You do need farmers and miners however. So you kind of need to balance the number of high and low educated fellows in your island.
* The economy: Tropico simulates a small island country in a world of "Superpowers". Tropico 6 has 4 ages and therefore different sets of superpowers. Early ages is "The Crown" (the sole superpower), your hypothetical king who sent you to colonize the island. Then comes "Axis" and "Allies" as the two superpowers. A few decades later you get USSR vs USA. Finally the superpowers split into the modern age (Europe, USA, Russia, China).
* You're a small fish in the world. Your entire economy consists of satisfying the superpowers with goods. More advanced goods means more money from a superpower. Too much relations with one superpower (ex: USA) will piss off rival superpowers (ex: USSR in Cold War era).
----------
This leads to some very believable situations:
* The city center naturally flows from the harbor: your sole connection to the superpowers of the world. While there's some trade / economy within Tropico (ex: various food items, meat, entertainment, and maybe tourism), the vast majority of your wealth will be from trade with the superpowers you're aligned with.
* Rich vs Poor citizens -- Poor citizens work the mines. Educated citizens can be university professors, pharmacists, or engineers (who can turn raw petroleum into plastic and sell for even more money to the superpowers). Rich people want to live in nice houses and drive cars. Poor citizens can't even afford to ride the bus and walk everywhere (meaning you need to plan poor communities very differently than rich communities).
* "Ghettos" -- If you have a valuable resource in a far-off corner of your island (such as Coal, Gold, Bauxite, Oil, or Uranium), you naturally have to build a mine over there. But your workers also need to live there (otherwise they'll spend too much time traveling between the city center and the mine, never actually working). Your compromise is to build a low-quality housing area... a "Ghetto", with just barely enough needs to survive. That way, your workers are encouraged to stay on that corner of the island without spending too much of their free time walking back and forth to the higher quality town center. Raw materials (mines) don't have as much value as higher-grades of products, so its not worth the investment improving that corner of the island.
Besides, if you upgraded all of the housing in the "Ghetto" area, those workers couldn't afford those houses. I guess you can enact the "free housing" edict, but that pisses of the USA-superpower (though it makes you closer to the USSR...). Free-housing also means free: you no longer get income from homes but instead lose money on every house. So its harder to make money.
-----------
Ceasar / Pharaoh also did the rich/poor thing better IMO (the richest citizens leave the workforce!! You may suddenly find yourself in a worker shortage if you "upgrade" your citizens too far). A big issue with Sim City / City Skylines is that the entire interaction of rich / poor is completely neglected.
Strangely enough, I find Tropico to be a more believable setting.
* Citizen simulation: Citizens need to travel between different areas. Miners need to enter the mines, but when they get tired, they need to travel home to rest. Every now and then, they must travel to Church to fulfil their personal religious needs (religious citizens need more church than non-religious). Etc. etc. for all the personal needs of citizens (food, housing, religion, entertainment). Citizens also grow up: adults give birth to children, children go to school (or not: if you don't have schools they'll grow up uneducated), 20 years later they enter the workforce as either "uneducated", "high school" educated, or "college educated". Higher education levels can perform more jobs (ex: Petro-chemical engineer), while uneducated are forced into the lowest wage jobs (farming or mining).
You do need farmers and miners however. So you kind of need to balance the number of high and low educated fellows in your island.
* The economy: Tropico simulates a small island country in a world of "Superpowers". Tropico 6 has 4 ages and therefore different sets of superpowers. Early ages is "The Crown" (the sole superpower), your hypothetical king who sent you to colonize the island. Then comes "Axis" and "Allies" as the two superpowers. A few decades later you get USSR vs USA. Finally the superpowers split into the modern age (Europe, USA, Russia, China).
* You're a small fish in the world. Your entire economy consists of satisfying the superpowers with goods. More advanced goods means more money from a superpower. Too much relations with one superpower (ex: USA) will piss off rival superpowers (ex: USSR in Cold War era).
----------
This leads to some very believable situations:
* The city center naturally flows from the harbor: your sole connection to the superpowers of the world. While there's some trade / economy within Tropico (ex: various food items, meat, entertainment, and maybe tourism), the vast majority of your wealth will be from trade with the superpowers you're aligned with.
* Rich vs Poor citizens -- Poor citizens work the mines. Educated citizens can be university professors, pharmacists, or engineers (who can turn raw petroleum into plastic and sell for even more money to the superpowers). Rich people want to live in nice houses and drive cars. Poor citizens can't even afford to ride the bus and walk everywhere (meaning you need to plan poor communities very differently than rich communities).
* "Ghettos" -- If you have a valuable resource in a far-off corner of your island (such as Coal, Gold, Bauxite, Oil, or Uranium), you naturally have to build a mine over there. But your workers also need to live there (otherwise they'll spend too much time traveling between the city center and the mine, never actually working). Your compromise is to build a low-quality housing area... a "Ghetto", with just barely enough needs to survive. That way, your workers are encouraged to stay on that corner of the island without spending too much of their free time walking back and forth to the higher quality town center. Raw materials (mines) don't have as much value as higher-grades of products, so its not worth the investment improving that corner of the island.
Besides, if you upgraded all of the housing in the "Ghetto" area, those workers couldn't afford those houses. I guess you can enact the "free housing" edict, but that pisses of the USA-superpower (though it makes you closer to the USSR...). Free-housing also means free: you no longer get income from homes but instead lose money on every house. So its harder to make money.
-----------
Ceasar / Pharaoh also did the rich/poor thing better IMO (the richest citizens leave the workforce!! You may suddenly find yourself in a worker shortage if you "upgrade" your citizens too far). A big issue with Sim City / City Skylines is that the entire interaction of rich / poor is completely neglected.
I think Tropico really cuts a balance in scale/scope that hits the perfect sweet spot for me. I also think the thematic elements are inherently more interesting than most other city builders. The bigger the scale, the more you have to abstract, so in Cities Skylines or large-scale city builders you literally don't have to or need to care about any individuals, nor is there much in the way of meaningful simulation of them. Skylines ultimately devolves into traffic management, since that ends up being the (perhaps realistic) breaking point when you build a large city.
Tropico manages to keep the maps at a scale that they really do build out and look like a city, but the citizens/agents are still represented in a way that makes them matter individually in some cases. The way tourism works as a means to base the economy on is also something pretty unique to Tropico, largely down to the thematic elements.
One thing that really bothers me about a lot of city builders (The Anno games are where this really stuck out to me but a lot of them do this) is the strict adherence to a fixed radius of influence for certain types of buildings. It makes the games feel like a puzzle to be optimized instead of an enjoyable construction set to build a city. It also doesn't make that much sense. If there is only one church in town and you're one house too far away from it, you're probably not going to decide that you won't go to church, right?
I really hope we get more city builders in the near future that allow less rigidly structured building. While you don't have to adhere to a strict grid in most city-builders, you are often giving up so much space that it both doesn't look very nice or sensible since everything that does fill in around the edges is still trying to smash itself in to a grid.
Tropico manages to keep the maps at a scale that they really do build out and look like a city, but the citizens/agents are still represented in a way that makes them matter individually in some cases. The way tourism works as a means to base the economy on is also something pretty unique to Tropico, largely down to the thematic elements.
One thing that really bothers me about a lot of city builders (The Anno games are where this really stuck out to me but a lot of them do this) is the strict adherence to a fixed radius of influence for certain types of buildings. It makes the games feel like a puzzle to be optimized instead of an enjoyable construction set to build a city. It also doesn't make that much sense. If there is only one church in town and you're one house too far away from it, you're probably not going to decide that you won't go to church, right?
I really hope we get more city builders in the near future that allow less rigidly structured building. While you don't have to adhere to a strict grid in most city-builders, you are often giving up so much space that it both doesn't look very nice or sensible since everything that does fill in around the edges is still trying to smash itself in to a grid.
For those unaware: Tropico sits approximately one step higher than "The Sims", and one step lower than "Sim City".
You don't have as many personalities / needs details per citizen as "The Sims". But every single citizen's life is completely simulated (home, walking, work, walking, church, walking, eating, walking, home. Yes, there's a lot of walking: you'll be thinking of transportation / infrastructure to make things better). Citizens also have full life cycles from birth, to children, to adulthood, and finally death.
A "Big" Tropico has maybe 2000 citizens. At this point, you need significant thought into transportation to keep things working (and one transportation hiccup can topple your entire economy). Tropico 6 is a bit better about it, but Tropico always "scaled poorly" at the end of simulations. (While Sim City / City Skylines felt like games you could keep watching for many months, I don't think I ever put much more than a few weeks of effort into any particular Tropico playthrough).
Tropico is more about playing, reaching the modern era, and then starting over again. Tropico has a "poor steady state", but an excellent "growth" phase that feels very natural. (Ex: setting up a Pro-Communism Newspaper in a neighborhood will slowly turn that neighborhood into pro-communists, pleasing the USSR. Seeing these trends play out over 10+ in-game years is very pleasing)
In contrast, Sim City / City Skylines feel like they "hold steady state" very well, but are kind of unrealistic from a growth perspective.
You don't have as many personalities / needs details per citizen as "The Sims". But every single citizen's life is completely simulated (home, walking, work, walking, church, walking, eating, walking, home. Yes, there's a lot of walking: you'll be thinking of transportation / infrastructure to make things better). Citizens also have full life cycles from birth, to children, to adulthood, and finally death.
A "Big" Tropico has maybe 2000 citizens. At this point, you need significant thought into transportation to keep things working (and one transportation hiccup can topple your entire economy). Tropico 6 is a bit better about it, but Tropico always "scaled poorly" at the end of simulations. (While Sim City / City Skylines felt like games you could keep watching for many months, I don't think I ever put much more than a few weeks of effort into any particular Tropico playthrough).
Tropico is more about playing, reaching the modern era, and then starting over again. Tropico has a "poor steady state", but an excellent "growth" phase that feels very natural. (Ex: setting up a Pro-Communism Newspaper in a neighborhood will slowly turn that neighborhood into pro-communists, pleasing the USSR. Seeing these trends play out over 10+ in-game years is very pleasing)
In contrast, Sim City / City Skylines feel like they "hold steady state" very well, but are kind of unrealistic from a growth perspective.
I just want Banished, but with better performance and with some basic AoE elements of an RTS. Fend off raiders, create military units, deal with pillaging. I remember the guy at CrystalRock talking about it saying the way the AI determines what to do is the primary reason it's a little slow as populations get larger since they dynamically change the items they get and where they go on the fly.
Songs of Syx however seems like the real deal. I haven't bought it but it looks very promising in terms of what Banished couldn't entirely deliver.
Songs of Syx however seems like the real deal. I haven't bought it but it looks very promising in terms of what Banished couldn't entirely deliver.
> And finally, something that would, in my opinion, really add to the realism and historical flavor of a medieval-themed city builder would be the introduction of mechanisms in which agricultural surpluses are skimmed by the church and the feudal lord. Tithes, taxes and rents! Instead of merely abstracting the taxes into an income modifier or letting the player be the extractor himself, we could be shown the tax collector visiting the village, counting the sheaves by the side of the road, selecting the calves and chickens. This way, the experiences of our medieval forebears are visualized and may help to educate the public about medieval village life.
This is the part that's most interesting to me. I always feel tax policy & land use is very rarely explored in games; in most of these games if you can set tax rates at all it always seems to be a straight tax on productivity so you just have to pick the amount of deadweight loss you're willing to accept to generate the revenue you need to run your government. There's also very rarely any distinction between government spending and private spending, and how government spending on public goods influences the asset values of private interests. You could make an entire game about just that subject.
EDIT: As a follow-up, I found this history of land & tax policy in Denmark going back to the middle ages to be quite fascinating and might be a useful point of contact for this sort of thing: https://bibliotek1.dk/english/history/centuries-of-experienc...
This is the part that's most interesting to me. I always feel tax policy & land use is very rarely explored in games; in most of these games if you can set tax rates at all it always seems to be a straight tax on productivity so you just have to pick the amount of deadweight loss you're willing to accept to generate the revenue you need to run your government. There's also very rarely any distinction between government spending and private spending, and how government spending on public goods influences the asset values of private interests. You could make an entire game about just that subject.
EDIT: As a follow-up, I found this history of land & tax policy in Denmark going back to the middle ages to be quite fascinating and might be a useful point of contact for this sort of thing: https://bibliotek1.dk/english/history/centuries-of-experienc...
I always figured that game makers didn't do this because it wouldn't actually be fun to play with. Reminds me of when I played Medieval: Total War and spent most of my time dealing with uprisings. Like, do we want to deal with regulation bloat that causes greater infrastructure costs, so you have to pay billions to build a big road or whatever? Can you account for a Whiskey Rebellion sort of scenario in a SimCity sort of game?
Plus, most of these are predicated on the idea that you're the supreme despot. People can protest if you increase taxes, but they can't vote you out/execute you in public and put in new leaders who knock down the tax rate.
Maybe it's the difference between Kerbal Space Program and Galaga. There are certainly markets for both, but less for the former.
Plus, most of these are predicated on the idea that you're the supreme despot. People can protest if you increase taxes, but they can't vote you out/execute you in public and put in new leaders who knock down the tax rate.
Maybe it's the difference between Kerbal Space Program and Galaga. There are certainly markets for both, but less for the former.
I agree with your assessment, but I'm also glad that games like Kerbal Space Program exist.
There should be room for experimental, simulationist and niche games too, not just for the tried and true crowd pleasers, because how dreadfully boring would it be otherwise?
There should be room for experimental, simulationist and niche games too, not just for the tried and true crowd pleasers, because how dreadfully boring would it be otherwise?
Kerbal Space Program is one of the most popular paid games on Steam, far ahead of every arcadey Galaga-like game on Steam.
I agree with your point though. Kerbal Space Program, like all games, also sacrifices realism for fun in places. Like how you can send astronauts on multi-year voyages without any concerns about food, water, life support, radiation shielding, etc.
I agree with your point though. Kerbal Space Program, like all games, also sacrifices realism for fun in places. Like how you can send astronauts on multi-year voyages without any concerns about food, water, life support, radiation shielding, etc.
There are mods that add support for those things, but most people don't use them.
Similarly, you can play on difficulty settings that forbid reverts, but most people just want to build rockets and try again if they fail rather than meticulously engineer every aspect of the mission.
I joke that the Revert button is the "never mind, that was a simulation. The next one is the actual mission" button.
I joke that the Revert button is the "never mind, that was a simulation. The next one is the actual mission" button.
I recall back in the early 90s my buddy (who is now an EVP of games dev at blizzard) - was asking me why I didn't like playing masters of Orion- I told him "it's no fun to play a spreadsheet"
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Then I read this interesting article about a guy in SF several years ago and he was the key accountant, strategist for (whatever that massive space battle game is that was hyper popular with the russians) - and he didn't even play the actual game! All he did was manage the massive assets of their guild faction with excel and other tools and they were making hundreds of thousands in real dollars per year and that was his actual IRL full time job.
The one where they had that massive battle and thousand and thousand of real money was lost on the eradication of huge digital fleets...
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Then I read this interesting article about a guy in SF several years ago and he was the key accountant, strategist for (whatever that massive space battle game is that was hyper popular with the russians) - and he didn't even play the actual game! All he did was manage the massive assets of their guild faction with excel and other tools and they were making hundreds of thousands in real dollars per year and that was his actual IRL full time job.
The one where they had that massive battle and thousand and thousand of real money was lost on the eradication of huge digital fleets...
I find that there are games that transition from low to high complexity over time, and I often dislike it, for example in Crusader Kings. I always love the early part of the game where I'm looking out for my family, building nice stuff in my domain, earning money, murdering siblings etc. Life is simple. I absolutely hate when you (either deliberately or by accident) end up in charge of a large kingdom or empire and suddenly you're having to manage hundreds of counties and deal with dozens of people who hate you. Feels far too much like work.
Many strategy games do scaling badly. You micromanage at first, but then your kingdom grows and you're supposed to use the same tools to manage much more. Real life doesn't work like that. If you go up in hierarchy, you generally delegate tasks. Time is not made out of rubber. Real life is not turn-based. You can't take as much time as you want planning your next move.
Shadow Empire I think tries to model that, but I cannot tell if it's really bare-bones or if it just isn't surfaced enough so it looks too simplistic and you rarely interact with it, other than using political power to boost private economy, or raise public workers' salary to match private salaries. Or maybe I'm a beginner player so I don't "see" it yet.
In "Cities: Skylines" you work with taxes and land use. It sure would be cool if there was a medieval version of it.
The closest to modelling this skimming comes from Tropico, where the player's offshore bank account is effectively the player's "score", but the process of skimming off money to the bank account causes problems for your settlement.
See the the Caesar franchise (Caesar IV, 2006). You have to hire tax collectors, set taxes, and yes you also have a separate income as a governor. It does all of this.
That's cool! Does it say what exactly you are taxing (labor, land, capital, income, wealth)?, or is that left abstract?
You said taxes for the different markets (such as luxury goods, Granary, and imports) all of the citizen shop at, and then you set separate real estate taxes for the patricians which are the wealthiest class in the society. And you can see the little dude walk around and get the taxes. The game really holds up, it's my fav =)
There were times that the Romans auctioned off the right to tax a region. So you’d pay the state some sum and then have the right to extract whatever you can from the population.
I’m sure the whole story is much more nuanced than that outline.
I’m sure the whole story is much more nuanced than that outline.
This is how parking enforcement works in some major cities (e.g. Chicago).
And I thought debt collection agencies are shit. We really do live in the best times so far.
Even 18th century pre-revolutionary France did this sort of thing. The great chemist Lavoisier was executed by revolutionaries, not because he was a chemist, but because he was also an administrator of the ferme générale, the privatized tax system of the time.
> You could make an entire game about just that subject.
Which is probably why it's abstracted away in most games. If I want to play a game of growth and conquest, I don't really want to have to micro-manage too many details of peasant life.
> mechanisms in which agricultural surpluses are skimmed by the church and the feudal lord
In these games you play as the feudal lord: you control all of the money, and dictate what can be built, where. Units in the game have no agency outside what you tell them to do, and they have no resources outside what you give to them to build, and they give to you from production.
In these games you play as the feudal lord: you control all of the money, and dictate what can be built, where. Units in the game have no agency outside what you tell them to do, and they have no resources outside what you give to them to build, and they give to you from production.
Europa Universalis IV has a bunch of tax stuff:
* https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Tax
There are entire Youtube tutorials on it.
* https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Tax
There are entire Youtube tutorials on it.
The tax stuff in EU4 is the exact kind of modifier-based abstraction of extraction that the article is saying is all-too-common of simulation/strategy games set in this period. EU4 is one of the most "board-gamey" Paradox games with probably the most abstraction of the individuals you're supposedly ruling over. The tax system is truly one of the most bland parts of the whole game. Saying this as someone with many hundreds of hours in EU4, it's a game I used to really enjoy.
Makes sense that they also developed Stellaris. Looks like I have a new game to buy and play.
Consider yourself warned: all Paradox games are highly addictive drugs. What you must have experienced with Stellaris is representative of most their games. EU IV is indeed a good choice if you liked Stellaris (I usually explain Stellaris to people as EU in spaaaaace).
I've been meaning to revisit Paradox games for a minute. Crusader Kings II hooked me the most. I never really delved into EU. The big problem I had with Stellaris is that I usually lose interest in the mid-game. I love the exploration, the building and even the initial diplomacy, but I just lose interest when everything levels out. I understand from AARs and the like that there are late game effects to disrupt the status quo, I've just never had the patience to wait for them.
You should adjust the "mid-game start year" and "late-game start year" sliders at game setup. Note that those are just the earliest possible start times, and the chance starts rolling yearly.
Definitely frustrating that you have to try to predict the game trajectory in advance. A game going well is almost a bad thing - you end up ahead of the curve and sit around doing nothing.
Definitely frustrating that you have to try to predict the game trajectory in advance. A game going well is almost a bad thing - you end up ahead of the curve and sit around doing nothing.
I personally find there's no depth to it: the winning strategy is to focus on growing your economic base and pump all spare capacity into research - by mid-game, you'll out-earn and out-tech every opponent other than the fallen empires.
In my last long playthrough, the second half of the game was literally me just racing against the victory condition clock to see how much megastructures I can cram in, so I can see what they do in a single game. It got briefly interesting for a moment, when a fallen empire decided to start their crusade at my doorstep - I had to engage in some micro-heavy delaying action for some of in-game years, until my exponential trajectory made me out-tech them and I could get back to building megastructures.
I mean, I like the game - but I wish there was some more meaning attached to things, for the actions to be more complex than scaling some numerical modifiers, for the tech tree to not be a tree and not be shared, for battles to be something more than "weapons are rock-paper-scissors, whoever brings more total points into the fight wins"...
In my last long playthrough, the second half of the game was literally me just racing against the victory condition clock to see how much megastructures I can cram in, so I can see what they do in a single game. It got briefly interesting for a moment, when a fallen empire decided to start their crusade at my doorstep - I had to engage in some micro-heavy delaying action for some of in-game years, until my exponential trajectory made me out-tech them and I could get back to building megastructures.
I mean, I like the game - but I wish there was some more meaning attached to things, for the actions to be more complex than scaling some numerical modifiers, for the tech tree to not be a tree and not be shared, for battles to be something more than "weapons are rock-paper-scissors, whoever brings more total points into the fight wins"...
Absolutely, it's been a long while since I booted up Stellaris. Something like Starnet and absurdly hard cling-to-life difficulties brings a little spice, but it's pretty much a solved game of tuning resource flows.
On launch they made a big deal about how they had the "cards" instead of a tech tree... turns out that's pretty much just a tech tree.
On launch they made a big deal about how they had the "cards" instead of a tech tree... turns out that's pretty much just a tech tree.
I don't feel like cards would be better :). I want the opposite - a kind of tech graph that's too large for any single player/NPC to explore thoroughly in a single playthrough, allowing a greater variety of opponents and games. I'd like different parts of the tree to offer different advantages, enabling different play styles.
Stellaris tries to enable variety by using "cards" to prevent you from seeing the entire tech tree - but you still know there is a tree. You'll still walk through most of it roughly in the same order. So will everyone else.
In this sense, my dream 4x is to Stellaris what StarCraft was to Dark Colony. Where StarCraft gave you 3 completely unique tech trees, each with its own mechanics, playstyle and lore, Dark Colony gave you 2 species that were really just clones with different sprites for the same units (and in few cases, slightly different stats).
(I could rant on and on. One day maybe I'll just write the damn game myself. I already have a sketch of a design doc assembled over the years.)
Stellaris tries to enable variety by using "cards" to prevent you from seeing the entire tech tree - but you still know there is a tree. You'll still walk through most of it roughly in the same order. So will everyone else.
In this sense, my dream 4x is to Stellaris what StarCraft was to Dark Colony. Where StarCraft gave you 3 completely unique tech trees, each with its own mechanics, playstyle and lore, Dark Colony gave you 2 species that were really just clones with different sprites for the same units (and in few cases, slightly different stats).
(I could rant on and on. One day maybe I'll just write the damn game myself. I already have a sketch of a design doc assembled over the years.)
Exactly what I mean - the cards end up just being a tech tree in practice. The PDX games really do just need more _content_.
Haha - If you ever end up writing that game, send me a beta invite!
Haha - If you ever end up writing that game, send me a beta invite!
I agree that midgame is a bit of a slog: the most generic events, plus you're typically dominating the computer players. The for former, the Khan and L-cluster stuff have helped a bit (don't know if that was added before or after you tried it). For the latter, I've found that playing at max difficulty helps.
Under no circumstances you should get Crusader Kings 3. If you value your time at all that is.
I was kinda disappointed in it. Crusader Kings 2 were much better.
I once heard someone remark that for CK3 it is better dial back the grand strategy component and dial up the role playing aspect. Not to try to optimize an awesome long-term winning strategy, but to make choices with each ruler along their personality traits.
This may cause you to crash and burn with your kingdom, but it's probably more akin to how humans (and rulers) actually operated.
This may cause you to crash and burn with your kingdom, but it's probably more akin to how humans (and rulers) actually operated.
Ck2 was released roughly 10 years ago amd had tons of extensions.
I played recently ck3 and, even if the vanilla gamw is better than ck2, i got the same dull - boredom after 20 hours than i had when i played vanilla ck2 for thr first time. Give it some time :~)
I played recently ck3 and, even if the vanilla gamw is better than ck2, i got the same dull - boredom after 20 hours than i had when i played vanilla ck2 for thr first time. Give it some time :~)
Crusader Kings 2 and 3 are the only games that have ever recaptured the accidental all-night gaming session for me like Civ I and II did back in the day. Since discovering CK, I can't tell you how many times I innocently started a game on a Saturday night, have my partner come in and say good night... just to have my partner walk in the office and ask when I was going to sleep only to realize it's morning (my office has no windows). God I love it.
All you need to do is inject 3 Factorios and you'll be feeling all-nighters like it's your first time again.
Personally, I prefer Aurora and Distant Worlds: Universe. Paradox games are fantastic but these are Dwarf Fortress-level detail (if you’re into that sort of thing).
> I prefer Aurora
Is this that VB game that got eventually rebooted(?) in C#, that's full of annoying little glitches[0] that would be trivial to fix if the author wasn't aggressively against any and all kinds of modding?
I'm definitely looking for a 4X equivalent of Dwarf Fortress. Stellaris ain't it - I like it, but it gets too repetitive after first longer game, because the mechanics is just rock-paper-scissors with a hundred thousand numerical modifiers that have little qualitative impact on gameplay.
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Like some number handling within the game being locale-dependent, so that unless you set your system locale to en_GB, it might behave unpredictably.
Is this that VB game that got eventually rebooted(?) in C#, that's full of annoying little glitches[0] that would be trivial to fix if the author wasn't aggressively against any and all kinds of modding?
I'm definitely looking for a 4X equivalent of Dwarf Fortress. Stellaris ain't it - I like it, but it gets too repetitive after first longer game, because the mechanics is just rock-paper-scissors with a hundred thousand numerical modifiers that have little qualitative impact on gameplay.
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Like some number handling within the game being locale-dependent, so that unless you set your system locale to en_GB, it might behave unpredictably.
Ooh, interesting. I see Distant Worlds 2 is slated for release this year. I'll try it when it's out! Thanks.
Can't possibly be as good. We know how this goes.
AoE2 was better than AOE though. Same goes for Civ 5 vs Civ 4.
God, don't I know it. Between Crusader Kings and Stellaris I've burned a good-sized hole in my time budget haha. Great games, though. Stellaris' political modeling is one of my favorites in any sim game.
I believe Pharaoh (mentioned in the previous paragraph) did actually have taxmen that would go out and collect taxes, and could be ambushed and killed by the people if they were sufficiently upset by the living conditions.
But really, they were mostly just killed by Hippos. Just like everyone else in town.
I do believe you require approximately two fully-equipped and high-morale legions to kill a singular Hippo in that game, no joke. If you see 2 or 3 Hippos in a singular area, you'll need a substantial Army to clear them out.
EDIT: If you're lucky and can push the Hippos out to the river somehow, your Navy can bombard the Hippos with impunity, but it takes a long time for those ships to kill a Hippo. (I've literally built the Pyramids before the Hippos died. So a really, really long time)
The other plan is to set up a lot of Police Stations. Police don't have morale-stat and will fight to the death (in contrast: your armies will break formation and retreat). Each time a Police dies, they hire a new citizen rather quickly, eventually your infinite stream of Policemen kill the Hippo. This works because Hippos only attack citizens, never buildings. (In contrast, if you actually had an approaching army, the Police would die, and then they'd destroy the Police Station... so no new Police would come out to defend.)
Also, immigrants come extremely quickly in Pharaoh. You pretty much convert immigrants into Police (and then subsequently dying) at unrealistically high speeds. Armies actually need "training", "Morale" and all that stuff...
I do believe you require approximately two fully-equipped and high-morale legions to kill a singular Hippo in that game, no joke. If you see 2 or 3 Hippos in a singular area, you'll need a substantial Army to clear them out.
EDIT: If you're lucky and can push the Hippos out to the river somehow, your Navy can bombard the Hippos with impunity, but it takes a long time for those ships to kill a Hippo. (I've literally built the Pyramids before the Hippos died. So a really, really long time)
The other plan is to set up a lot of Police Stations. Police don't have morale-stat and will fight to the death (in contrast: your armies will break formation and retreat). Each time a Police dies, they hire a new citizen rather quickly, eventually your infinite stream of Policemen kill the Hippo. This works because Hippos only attack citizens, never buildings. (In contrast, if you actually had an approaching army, the Police would die, and then they'd destroy the Police Station... so no new Police would come out to defend.)
Also, immigrants come extremely quickly in Pharaoh. You pretty much convert immigrants into Police (and then subsequently dying) at unrealistically high speeds. Armies actually need "training", "Morale" and all that stuff...
> I do believe you require approximately two fully-equipped and high-morale legions to kill a singular Hippo in that game, no joke. If you see 2 or 3 Hippos in a singular area, you'll need a substantial Army to clear them out.
Are Pharaoh's Hippos related to Dwarf Fortress Carp, perchance? Because this situation sounds familiar.
Are Pharaoh's Hippos related to Dwarf Fortress Carp, perchance? Because this situation sounds familiar.
I learned so much from that game as a kid: Taxes, real estate values, city planning issues, money management, so many more
Pharaoh, Cleopatra, Zeus, Poseidon, Stronghold, Tzar: The burden of the crown, Theocracy, Settlers, SimCity, Cossacks, AoE2, HoMM3... There were many great city builders/strategy games back when we were kids :) and I owe them a lot as well. I'm glad we havent been raised in an era of battle royals.
Caesar III was one of my favorite games, but Aoe2 and Civ II ( both came out around the same time IIRC ) are the best strategy games of all time imo, followed closely by Civ 5 ( but I have no time for games anymore haha )
Mmm, Stronghold. Tax and ration tiers were an interesting mechanic for morale management. That game also had perhaps the most intricate siege simulation I've seen (ignoring the fact that many historical sieges had attrition as the goal). Had quite the large community of map and castle makers.
Yeah Ive come to learn that Stronghold is something of a semi-hidden gem that only really gained the popularity it deserved a good decade or more after its inception (I wager due to Steam and the efforts to renew its name). This game felt the most medieval to me when I first got it, not that I knew what realistic medieval settlements were like :)
Its the only settler game I've played where I enjoyed the siege warfare at all.
Its the only settler game I've played where I enjoyed the siege warfare at all.
I still remember Tzar fondly for it's in game cut scenes. Also, it's one of those games where assassins could could climb walls so even completely turtled up you couldn't be 100% sure that you are safe.
You should check out 'tax farming'. There's probably a wikipedia page for the 20,000 ft view.
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Direct link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_(revenue_leasing)
Direct link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_(revenue_leasing)
My historical accuracy may be lacking here, but IIRC weren't "tax rates" in roman and subsequent medieval times relatively light as a percentage of one's wages? Specifically in Mideval england, the taxes were mostly on land, which the majority of the population would have had to pay, since most weren't land owners. I mean obviously taking a dollar when you only make 100 a year will feel disastrous, but I mean, it's nothing compared to what we experience today in the developed world. It might be one reason for why this particular mechanic isn't so prominent. I would imagine if you were making an industrial age/Americana game some 100-200 years in the future, tax policy would be a primary mechanic.
>subsequent medieval times relatively light as a percentage of one's wages?
You owed the lord a percentage of what you produced as rent. You owed the church a tithe. You also potentially owed service to the lord and the church. Taxes were also paid on certain goods purchased. Taxes that in many cases nobles were exempt from. Kings and feudal lords could also enact special taxes to pay for specific projects.
If you were a merchant of some kind and you wanted to float your barge down a river, you had to pay nearly every town you passed through.
>it's nothing compared to what we experience today in the developed world.
Your overall tax burden could still be tremendous even if it's not paid to 1 central taxing authority.
You owed the lord a percentage of what you produced as rent. You owed the church a tithe. You also potentially owed service to the lord and the church. Taxes were also paid on certain goods purchased. Taxes that in many cases nobles were exempt from. Kings and feudal lords could also enact special taxes to pay for specific projects.
If you were a merchant of some kind and you wanted to float your barge down a river, you had to pay nearly every town you passed through.
>it's nothing compared to what we experience today in the developed world.
Your overall tax burden could still be tremendous even if it's not paid to 1 central taxing authority.
Yeah, and from what I understand, it was a tax on revenue, not profit. If you harvested 10 carrots and had to give 3 or 8 carrots to your horses, you were still tithed 1 carrot.
Only the very wealthiest of land-cultivating peasants owned large animals at the time, though (and pretty much never horses). Also, you wouldn’t feed human edible vegetables to animals, that would be very wasteful.
More importantly, these income taxes were based on rather small fraction of revenues, since they were only based on agricultural production, and not on household production. Obviously, it was extremely impractical to tax household production, and it still is. Importantly though, back then, typical household consumed much more of its own production as a fraction of all consumption than today, and as a result, less of their real income was taxed.
Here is a way to think about it: if you buy a shirt from someone, you might need to pay the sales tax. However, if you make your own shirt, you aren’t going to pay tax on it. Today, you wouldn’t actually do it, because other people can make a shirt with much less effort than you ever could, so it’s still worth it for you to buy someone else’s product and pay the tax, because the productivity gains of trade will more than pay for what government skims from the transaction. However, back before industrial revolution, the differences in productivity weren’t nearly as big, so it didn’t alway make much sense to specialize in everything and trade.
More importantly, these income taxes were based on rather small fraction of revenues, since they were only based on agricultural production, and not on household production. Obviously, it was extremely impractical to tax household production, and it still is. Importantly though, back then, typical household consumed much more of its own production as a fraction of all consumption than today, and as a result, less of their real income was taxed.
Here is a way to think about it: if you buy a shirt from someone, you might need to pay the sales tax. However, if you make your own shirt, you aren’t going to pay tax on it. Today, you wouldn’t actually do it, because other people can make a shirt with much less effort than you ever could, so it’s still worth it for you to buy someone else’s product and pay the tax, because the productivity gains of trade will more than pay for what government skims from the transaction. However, back before industrial revolution, the differences in productivity weren’t nearly as big, so it didn’t alway make much sense to specialize in everything and trade.
We don’t tax household consumption today, either. If you grow veggies, cook, mend/sew your own clothes, wash your own clothes, change your own oil, mow your own lawn, 3D print your own stuff, or produce your own solar power, you’re not taxed on it (although that doesn’t stop some folk, whether utilities or whatever, from trying to effectively tax you on it). Of course, household production is massively less efficient for many things, although people are forced into becoming DIYers if tax rates are high, prices are artificially high (think rent-seeking behavior by monopolies like utilities), or if money is scarce (ie if there’s a recession/depression).
And my point about carrots was deliberately cartoonish. The point is that revenue, not profit, was taxed.
And my point about carrots was deliberately cartoonish. The point is that revenue, not profit, was taxed.
Fun fact: At least in Germany you often end up paying taxes on self-consumed solar. They calculate the tax based on what you would have payed your regular supplier (or 20c/kWh). But otoh you get to declare your "solar plant" a business, with some nice perks:
If you buy the solar equipment for net 20k€ you'll pay 19% or 3.8k€ taxes. You get that money back. In addition, the 20k€ are a business expense and reduce your taxable income (there are two modes for this, either 5%/year for 20 years or a huge block [50%?] the first year and some smaller blocks the next two or three years - I believe). So if you pay 30% income tax, you'll save about 6k€. All other expenses related to the solar plant (service, repairs, insurance,...) also count as business expenses, with the same effect.
If you're not earning more than 17.5k€/a in addition to your regular income, you can opt to forfeit the whole stuff in favor of the "Kleinunternehmerregelung" (small business provisions), but then you don't get the above business perks. Though after a few years you can change from a full business to a small business, so you'll have to do the math.
Sounds complicated? Welcome to Germany! :D
(Disclaimer: This might be not 100% accurate, so talk to your tax consultant if you're doing solar in Germany)
If you're not earning more than 17.5k€/a in addition to your regular income, you can opt to forfeit the whole stuff in favor of the "Kleinunternehmerregelung" (small business provisions), but then you don't get the above business perks. Though after a few years you can change from a full business to a small business, so you'll have to do the math.
Sounds complicated? Welcome to Germany! :D
(Disclaimer: This might be not 100% accurate, so talk to your tax consultant if you're doing solar in Germany)
AFAIK this is only true if you pass the power you generate back to the grid - which most people did as it used to be heavily subsidized. If you run your solar without powering the grid, you won‘t be taxed on the used power.
The subsidies still exist. And while in absolute numbers they seem low, the reduced costs for solar modules still make them worthwhile.
If you don't feed into the grid as a normal person you're right (that's either "Kleinunternehmerregelung" or, if it's obviously not producing any profit, "Liebhaberei"). But if I built a fictive 500kWp solar plant to power my fictive compute center I would have to pay taxes on the self consumed power. Mind I'm a layman, so I might have gotten that wrong, but I'm 80% sure I got it right.
If you don't feed into the grid as a normal person you're right (that's either "Kleinunternehmerregelung" or, if it's obviously not producing any profit, "Liebhaberei"). But if I built a fictive 500kWp solar plant to power my fictive compute center I would have to pay taxes on the self consumed power. Mind I'm a layman, so I might have gotten that wrong, but I'm 80% sure I got it right.
> Also, you wouldn’t feed human edible vegetables to animals, that would be very wasteful.
...yes, you would. What else could you feed them?
Animals get lower-quality stuff. Wheat for people and oats for horses. But it's not like people can't eat oats.
...yes, you would. What else could you feed them?
Animals get lower-quality stuff. Wheat for people and oats for horses. But it's not like people can't eat oats.
Grass. I believe oats and seed is fairly recent development. Historically, you had animals grazing by rotating pastures, or consuming dried grass (hay) when you couldn’t graze (eg winter).
Also interesting tidbit — apparently horses of modern sizes cannot eat grass fast enough to sustain their size. They require the higher calorie density of oats and such. Horses that get back into the wild apparently quickly revert to much smaller sizes with a couple generations (according to acoup.net, which I never verified further)
Also interesting tidbit — apparently horses of modern sizes cannot eat grass fast enough to sustain their size. They require the higher calorie density of oats and such. Horses that get back into the wild apparently quickly revert to much smaller sizes with a couple generations (according to acoup.net, which I never verified further)
That assumes you have a lot of free pasture lying around. Odds are, the pasture is already in use, likely for sheep or cows.
All that's really necessary for the draft horse to wind up eating oats is that its economic contribution exceeds the value of the oats.
All that's really necessary for the draft horse to wind up eating oats is that its economic contribution exceeds the value of the oats.
Yes, that’s why, as I said, no peasants owned draft horses before modern times, and very few land-cultivating ones owned any large animals at all.
I have the vague idea that in medieval Europe there would usually be one draft team which farmers would rent from whoever owned it. That supports the idea that owning draft animals was rare. But it doesn't so much support the idea that you wouldn't feed human-edible food to them.
Note that I said “human edible vegetables”, not “human edible food”, in context of a historical absurdity of a peasant feeding carrots to his horse. It’s as absurd as if 500 years from now, people on future equivalent of Hacker News claimed that in early 21st century, the poor complained about rising alcohol prices that they used to run their private jets on.
Now, I’m happy that your knowledge already allows you to infer that regular peasants did not, in fact, own draft animals, and I’m sad that it does not allow you to infer that the draft animals were not fed human edible food. Alas, that was the case: draft animals, which were universally oxen, would eat pasture grass, cut hay, and waste biomass like straw left over after growing grains. Human edible food was much too valuable to feed it to animals on a regular basis, and vegetables even more so, considering how little vegetables a typical peasant consumed himself (his diet was overwhelmingly grain based).
Now, I’m happy that your knowledge already allows you to infer that regular peasants did not, in fact, own draft animals, and I’m sad that it does not allow you to infer that the draft animals were not fed human edible food. Alas, that was the case: draft animals, which were universally oxen, would eat pasture grass, cut hay, and waste biomass like straw left over after growing grains. Human edible food was much too valuable to feed it to animals on a regular basis, and vegetables even more so, considering how little vegetables a typical peasant consumed himself (his diet was overwhelmingly grain based).
Some bits on roman taxation:
https://www.unrv.com/economy/roman-taxes.php
Government is always abstracted in games, rather than being material. If a game had a tax collector, it would have to figure out what would happen if you killed the tax collector. What if the tax collector is actually a tax farmer[1]? Would his gang go after you? If the gang was too afraid of you, would they raise taxes on your neighbors to compensate?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_(revenue_leasing)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_(revenue_leasing)
Majesty had tax collectors, a market economy, and a hands-off governing policy: You funded creation of main buildings, but they were or were not occupied based on demand for those buildings. You put up rewards for actions, but those were or were not acted on based on whatever your citizens were doing. You funded (from treasury) upgrades to goods producers, but nobody got those upgrades until they went and purchased those things from their own money.
You had a little tax collector dude (or dudes) that went around knocking on doors and collecting a % their on-hand assets (which you set). You could exclude areas if they were too far away, or too dangerous. Your tax collector(s) could be ambushed, which frankly was the primary reason to build defenses.
And, you could tolerate some thievery so that you could occasionally extort money from the thieves guild in sort of an unofficial tax collection of unreported income.
All that in a fantasy game. It can be done.
I believe there's a modern revamp version for mobile: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/majesty/9nblggh1850p
You had a little tax collector dude (or dudes) that went around knocking on doors and collecting a % their on-hand assets (which you set). You could exclude areas if they were too far away, or too dangerous. Your tax collector(s) could be ambushed, which frankly was the primary reason to build defenses.
And, you could tolerate some thievery so that you could occasionally extort money from the thieves guild in sort of an unofficial tax collection of unreported income.
All that in a fantasy game. It can be done.
I believe there's a modern revamp version for mobile: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/majesty/9nblggh1850p
Majesty was a really great game that I spend a lot of time on in my youth. I'd love to see more games that work similarly: every entity is semi-autonomous - gameplay is about incentivizing, guiding progress and managing resources, but the entities don't need input to act.
And the the tax collector had a very distinctive "tAx collECTor~" sound byte that he said OVER AND OVER. It is drilled deeply into my psyche
The voice acting was good, but they didn't have many sound bytes so it got pretty repetitive. Also whenever a gnome died they'd say "But I'm just a gnome...". When minotaurs were trampling your kingdom, it could get pretty annoying.
The voice acting was good, but they didn't have many sound bytes so it got pretty repetitive. Also whenever a gnome died they'd say "But I'm just a gnome...". When minotaurs were trampling your kingdom, it could get pretty annoying.
First I've heard of this game since I got it in a discount multipack with AoE, and something else I can't remember. I had absolutely no idea what was happening when I tried to play (age 9 or so).
Majesty was amazing! I think i got the expansion pack as well, I can't tell you how much I played that game, still remember taking it out the plastic cd wrap from Walmart
Steam also a version that runs on modern systems
I would like to QA the game using the cobra effect - if my kingly subjects start farming cobras then I know the game-AI is seriously good !
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origi...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origi...
seems like an opportunity for some fun game mechanics!
>EDIT: As a follow-up, I found this history of land & tax policy in Denmark going back to the middle ages to be quite fascinating and might be a useful point of contact for this sort of thing: https://bibliotek1.dk/english/history/centuries-of-experienc...
Tangentially, there's a remarkable painting of a tax collection in medieval Denmark:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valdemar_Atterdag_holding_Visb...
("Valdemar Atterdag holding Visby to ransom, 1361", by Carl Gustaf Hellqvist in 1882)
Tangentially, there's a remarkable painting of a tax collection in medieval Denmark:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valdemar_Atterdag_holding_Visb...
.jpg){kind=link}
("Valdemar Atterdag holding Visby to ransom, 1361", by Carl Gustaf Hellqvist in 1882)
I'd be curious to hear this professor's take on the villages of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, which is a medieval RPG that attempts to bring some aspects of realism. It even has a DLC where a lord appoints the player to be the bailiff for an effort to rebuild an abandoned fort town, and you work with the "master builder" to choose what industries to foster, while bringing in money and skilled workers from elsewhere.
Clearly the environment in KC:D is historically accurate because it's derived from extant historical records.
My favorite medieval city-builders aren't historically accurate at all: namely Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress keep me coming back for more. I've never been a huge fan of 4x titles or real-time strategy, but the gameplay loop of these titles feels the most "authentic" to me. I think most people will agree, too: confining a role-playing game to the accuracy of non-fiction isn't much of a roleplaying game at all.
I feel like the author doesn't understand the point of games...
Sorry! Your villagers all died by a plague. Game over!
Sorry! Your villagers all died by a plague. Game over!
Given the popularity of Dwarf Fortress, I'm not sure that the author is wrong.
I mean... I found Oregon Trail fun despite dying of dysentery more times than I could count.
The thing about games is that when everyone dies, you just click the "New Game" button and try again. Failing over-and-over again in a game is allowed. In fact, I dare say that modern games don't provide enough room for failure compared to older games.
The thing about games is that when everyone dies, you just click the "New Game" button and try again. Failing over-and-over again in a game is allowed. In fact, I dare say that modern games don't provide enough room for failure compared to older games.
See the "Why not?" section: "There are some good reasons why city building games are not that historically accurate and instead adhere to the established formula of the city building game."
I'd say the author understands perfectly well. It's still interesting to discuss where they deviate from reality and to what extent.
I'd say the author understands perfectly well. It's still interesting to discuss where they deviate from reality and to what extent.
The author addresses in a section how well or not well this realism could potentially interact with actual gameplay and fun.
My first reaction to this headline was "Oh my god, there exists a blog that combines my 2 favorite rabbit holes: computer games and ancient history" — i.e. filfre.net and acoup.blog
Townscaper and Dorfromantik are more fun for me than any city builder or Sim game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1291340/Townscaper/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1455840/Dorfromantik/
I like them because they're _not_ rooted in realism, so they're free from the things that some days feel more like work than play (tax collection, agricultural shortfalls, physical material limits etc.).
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1291340/Townscaper/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1455840/Dorfromantik/
I like them because they're _not_ rooted in realism, so they're free from the things that some days feel more like work than play (tax collection, agricultural shortfalls, physical material limits etc.).
Those both look really cool, thanks for sharing! I especially love Townscaper's self description as being more of a toy than a game.
I love toys! Whether they are physical objects or programs there is something so _lovable_ to me about using craftsmanship and creativity to create something for the sole (and very noble) purpose of just being fun to play with. I think I'll have to buy Townscaper and engage in some goal-free play tonight!
I love toys! Whether they are physical objects or programs there is something so _lovable_ to me about using craftsmanship and creativity to create something for the sole (and very noble) purpose of just being fun to play with. I think I'll have to buy Townscaper and engage in some goal-free play tonight!
No mention of Ostriv. That Cities Skylines screenshot is amazing but definitely heavily modded.
But I'd love to see the author try Ostriv because while it is very unpolished it does allow for free placement of buildings. You can actually construct a little place similar to that screenshot from Cities skylines in Ostriv with ease.
The problem of course is that you want good supply lines and he illustrates that in his medieval village plans from real archaeology. How they all fan out from a central point.
But I'd love to see the author try Ostriv because while it is very unpolished it does allow for free placement of buildings. You can actually construct a little place similar to that screenshot from Cities skylines in Ostriv with ease.
The problem of course is that you want good supply lines and he illustrates that in his medieval village plans from real archaeology. How they all fan out from a central point.
I dunno about historical accuracy, but seeing K&M again brings good memories - also such good graphics that hasn't dated (IMHO).
OH MY GOD!
The FIRST game (and one I LOVE so much) that popped into my head just upon reading the post title was "Knights and Merchants" -- Played the SHIT out of that game while at Intel... All nighters and such.
Clicked the link thinking no way that game would be in here -- and its the FIRST image on the submission!
Great post.
The FIRST game (and one I LOVE so much) that popped into my head just upon reading the post title was "Knights and Merchants" -- Played the SHIT out of that game while at Intel... All nighters and such.
Clicked the link thinking no way that game would be in here -- and its the FIRST image on the submission!
Great post.
[deleted]
I love these kind of games and others have mentioned Tropico 6 as a standout in the field.
I've put lots of hours in that game and it's amazingly subtle and complex. There are many, many ways to achieve whatever you want, but also several hard constraints that you have to work around.
If you want to be rich (treasury over $1M, for example), you have let people live in shacks while you build up foreign relations until you can get ridiculous prices for your goods. If you don't have several contracts at 70% over standard price, you can't really get big. You also can't be totally arbitrary in what industries you decide to develop. If you get in good with a country and your island can produce what they will pay (extra) for, you kind of have to do it, regardless of whether it makes your island ugly or puts people in shacks to work there. If you don't give in on the natural resources and foreign demands, you'll never have enough in the treasury to really help people. Kind of a disturbing realism there.
Getting those contracts means you have to give in to foreign demands, like building a $2,000 embassy for China when you'd probably, as a person, think you should buy houses for your workers. Turns out, they'd rather have bread and circuses and a strong economy and you're better off pleasing your betters until you have lots of steady cash flow coming in every month.
And this is just one scenario. There are many ways to play the game that aren't even about the economy. You can run it as a prison island, a military scenario, a spy vs. spy setup, or any combination of these. I think the best thing about Tropico is that, rather than one goal, you as the dictator choose what kind of goals you want and that leads to entirely different kinds of island setups and gameplay.
I've put lots of hours in that game and it's amazingly subtle and complex. There are many, many ways to achieve whatever you want, but also several hard constraints that you have to work around.
If you want to be rich (treasury over $1M, for example), you have let people live in shacks while you build up foreign relations until you can get ridiculous prices for your goods. If you don't have several contracts at 70% over standard price, you can't really get big. You also can't be totally arbitrary in what industries you decide to develop. If you get in good with a country and your island can produce what they will pay (extra) for, you kind of have to do it, regardless of whether it makes your island ugly or puts people in shacks to work there. If you don't give in on the natural resources and foreign demands, you'll never have enough in the treasury to really help people. Kind of a disturbing realism there.
Getting those contracts means you have to give in to foreign demands, like building a $2,000 embassy for China when you'd probably, as a person, think you should buy houses for your workers. Turns out, they'd rather have bread and circuses and a strong economy and you're better off pleasing your betters until you have lots of steady cash flow coming in every month.
And this is just one scenario. There are many ways to play the game that aren't even about the economy. You can run it as a prison island, a military scenario, a spy vs. spy setup, or any combination of these. I think the best thing about Tropico is that, rather than one goal, you as the dictator choose what kind of goals you want and that leads to entirely different kinds of island setups and gameplay.
Making stuff that historically accurate also would make it less fun, I think, even with the Sims and stuff and SimCity a lot of stuff is abstracted away. Otherwise you're just doing work :)
This is such a funny youtube channel about a game, Saelig, that I think it supposed to be more accurate than most, but of course since it's a game (and in beta) you can do pretty ridiculous things with it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxRPirVgkpU
This is such a funny youtube channel about a game, Saelig, that I think it supposed to be more accurate than most, but of course since it's a game (and in beta) you can do pretty ridiculous things with it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxRPirVgkpU
Since a common critique of city sims is that they are not organic enough, it's exciting to see this case where the mechanics are TOO organic!
This was a really cool article! Fascinating to learn how some of this stuff really worked. That said, game makers need to balance making their game fun, having a goal, and not being too tedious. It takes a lot to run a town and most of it isn't fun, so it's understandable that they simplify and leave things out.
I've had a lot of fun playing Outlanders[0] on Apple Arcade. It's similar to what's described here. You get a small island and a few people and have to make a town using only resources from the island. Looks like it's set in maybe the 1700s or 1800s. Works on the iPhone and is a great time killer.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/outlanders/id1463407936
I've had a lot of fun playing Outlanders[0] on Apple Arcade. It's similar to what's described here. You get a small island and a few people and have to make a town using only resources from the island. Looks like it's set in maybe the 1700s or 1800s. Works on the iPhone and is a great time killer.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/outlanders/id1463407936
Hrm. My opinion is that complete accuracy isn't all that fun. Folks have used tax records to do analysis of, say, how many farmers it takes in a village for a blacksmith to be present, and so on and so forth. It was a lot more than you might imagine.
On the other hand, looking at the D&D 3.5 Dungeon Masters Guide 2, they have finally fleshed out Saltmarsh. Bizarrely, a town of less than four thousand people actually has an assassins' guild, with roughly ten members. Do they take turns, each assassinating one person a year? Because that's roughly how infrequently it would have to occur for their little club to escape notice. Hardly worth paying dues for, sitting around, discussing that murder you managed five years ago and how you look forward to one in another five.
Take a look at city-building ... in most games you rarely see the hub-and-spoke develop around a port city, despite that being a prevalent pattern, or the unique feel of isoheight versus steep streets in a hilly region (the San Francisco pattern). If you watch city maps over hundreds of years, many forces are at work, and I think they might be simulable but I don't know if the end result would be enjoyable enjoy to warrant it.
If you look at our actual cave ecosystems, troglobionts, which are adapted for living strictly in caves, are typically quite tiny. There's simply no food down there! Resources are scarce. Hence you would get no gelatinous cubes or hook horrors or carrion crawlers stumbling around the caves, lurking about, waiting for adventurers or the average bear. Instead you get some very small, pale shrimp. This is not exciting for the adventurer. Some handwaving of a source of energy called "Faerzress" eventually takes place and is only vaguely acceptable if one does not look hard, serving as kind of a bottom trophic level for the game.
The balance between actual plausibilty and what one might call "fantastical satiation" is quite difficult. Your large-sized dragon, perhaps your standard-issue Vermithrax Pejorative, would need something like a log flume ride of virgins delivered straight to its gullet to sustain its bulk, not to mention the caloric expenditure. Clearly, this isn't very satisfying for your story-telling, either.
The balance is rough and I suspect that nitpicking in the name of accuracy can undermine most of what is constructed.
On the other hand, looking at the D&D 3.5 Dungeon Masters Guide 2, they have finally fleshed out Saltmarsh. Bizarrely, a town of less than four thousand people actually has an assassins' guild, with roughly ten members. Do they take turns, each assassinating one person a year? Because that's roughly how infrequently it would have to occur for their little club to escape notice. Hardly worth paying dues for, sitting around, discussing that murder you managed five years ago and how you look forward to one in another five.
Take a look at city-building ... in most games you rarely see the hub-and-spoke develop around a port city, despite that being a prevalent pattern, or the unique feel of isoheight versus steep streets in a hilly region (the San Francisco pattern). If you watch city maps over hundreds of years, many forces are at work, and I think they might be simulable but I don't know if the end result would be enjoyable enjoy to warrant it.
If you look at our actual cave ecosystems, troglobionts, which are adapted for living strictly in caves, are typically quite tiny. There's simply no food down there! Resources are scarce. Hence you would get no gelatinous cubes or hook horrors or carrion crawlers stumbling around the caves, lurking about, waiting for adventurers or the average bear. Instead you get some very small, pale shrimp. This is not exciting for the adventurer. Some handwaving of a source of energy called "Faerzress" eventually takes place and is only vaguely acceptable if one does not look hard, serving as kind of a bottom trophic level for the game.
The balance between actual plausibilty and what one might call "fantastical satiation" is quite difficult. Your large-sized dragon, perhaps your standard-issue Vermithrax Pejorative, would need something like a log flume ride of virgins delivered straight to its gullet to sustain its bulk, not to mention the caloric expenditure. Clearly, this isn't very satisfying for your story-telling, either.
The balance is rough and I suspect that nitpicking in the name of accuracy can undermine most of what is constructed.
Bizarrely, a town of less than four thousand people actually has an assassins' guild, with roughly ten members. Do they take turns, each assassinating one person a year?
The charitable interpretation might be that, in addition to being responsible for assassinations in the town, the guild is also responsible for assassinations in the surrounding countryside; in medieval times the rural population significantly outnumbered the urban population. (Also, a world with Raise Dead might be able to sustain a greater rate of assassinations per capital per year...)
But yes, plausibility gets distorted in favour of playability.
The charitable interpretation might be that, in addition to being responsible for assassinations in the town, the guild is also responsible for assassinations in the surrounding countryside; in medieval times the rural population significantly outnumbered the urban population. (Also, a world with Raise Dead might be able to sustain a greater rate of assassinations per capital per year...)
But yes, plausibility gets distorted in favour of playability.
Well, Raise Dead is pretty pricey. And face it, nobody is out there paying to assassinate farmers. If you really want a particular farmer dead, ask some of the nearby lizardfolk to do it for a song.
Farmers are really interesting in the tax records, at least a function of property. They're the plankton of feudal society: necessary but otherwise nobody pays much attention to them. The miserable hamlets of D&D have an over-representation of every conceivable occupation but that of the farmer. Aside from being menaced by various low hit die creatures or being subject to the odd bout of lycanthropy, they're background figures only. Sad, but true.
Farmers are really interesting in the tax records, at least a function of property. They're the plankton of feudal society: necessary but otherwise nobody pays much attention to them. The miserable hamlets of D&D have an over-representation of every conceivable occupation but that of the farmer. Aside from being menaced by various low hit die creatures or being subject to the odd bout of lycanthropy, they're background figures only. Sad, but true.
> And face it, nobody is out there paying to assassinate farmers.
Ah, but in small towns essential services are often performed by volunteers. You've got your volunteer fire department, volunteer EMTs, volunteer assassin's guild, the usual.
Ah, but in small towns essential services are often performed by volunteers. You've got your volunteer fire department, volunteer EMTs, volunteer assassin's guild, the usual.
Those with associates willing to pay for Raise Dead would be VIPs - prime targets for assassination.
In one of my campaign worlds the assassins guild was run by a church; you had to pay once to kill them, and again to make sure they stayed dead :P
Introducing magic, or any kind of efficient machine or analog for modern medicine that might appear as magic in a fantasy setting means you get to throw out most of the rules that are learned from historical observations, except where you base those lessons learned on post-industrial revolution studies where the availability of electricity and modern industrial tools haven't been made readily available to developing communities and countries.
Introducing magic, or any kind of efficient machine or analog for modern medicine that might appear as magic in a fantasy setting means you get to throw out most of the rules that are learned from historical observations, except where you base those lessons learned on post-industrial revolution studies where the availability of electricity and modern industrial tools haven't been made readily available to developing communities and countries.
Also an assassin guild may be paid to do it discretely - i.e. disappear someone rather than just kill. That would allow for more assassinations per year to go unnoticed.
This assumes the differences are purposefully designed rather than out of ignorance of the past. I think you can create a unique game by looking at the historical time periods these games were made about and going from there. This is because most of these games actually start with something like DnD and go from there.
As a simple example of where this can lead you into historical inaccuricies... the long sword. Long swords are two handed swords. It's not a hill I'm gonna die on but the reason why people think long swords are 1 handed is completely because of DnD and everyone copying them.
As a simple example of where this can lead you into historical inaccuricies... the long sword. Long swords are two handed swords. It's not a hill I'm gonna die on but the reason why people think long swords are 1 handed is completely because of DnD and everyone copying them.
my DnD book from many yeara ago has a two-handed longsword.
Ars Magica the RPG was set in a low-fantasy version of Europe, you had three different characters you could play during a story - a magus of the Order of Hermes, a companion of the mage's covenant (knights, scholars, churchmen and other important people), and one of the "grogs" who lived and worked at or around the covenant - peasants, maids, men at arms and thieves. It certainly wasn't an accurate depiction of the Middle Ages, but it came a lot closer in trying to make the setting more historical, and on top of that make it so that being more historical was an integral part of the game.
Yeah, success in this type of game is definitely about channeling a very specific set of power fantasies, delivered along with all those addictive brain reward feedback loop game mechanisms.
You're totally right about the limited potential for enjoy-ability of realistic forces in city/system simulation games. After all, the best examples of these games usually simplify. Like, the old SimCity games focus just on the zoning mixed with some taxes. Or, the Anno games depict colonization of (unsettled - haha) land mixed with maintenance of trade routes to reward the player with 'growth'.
The article however does deliver a pretty good idea of how one could go about depicting the specific area of interest studied by the author - medieval farming and village planning. I think all of us can easily imagine a very enjoyable game there.
The question of balance is interesting, and IMO highly dependent on how strong and original the selected set of core mechanics is. The better they are, the less of this 'fantastical satiation' aspect is needed to cover them up. But what is most interesting to me is the question of what should mechanics in such games themselves actually depict? Like, to actually be worth spending time playing?
You're totally right about the limited potential for enjoy-ability of realistic forces in city/system simulation games. After all, the best examples of these games usually simplify. Like, the old SimCity games focus just on the zoning mixed with some taxes. Or, the Anno games depict colonization of (unsettled - haha) land mixed with maintenance of trade routes to reward the player with 'growth'.
The article however does deliver a pretty good idea of how one could go about depicting the specific area of interest studied by the author - medieval farming and village planning. I think all of us can easily imagine a very enjoyable game there.
The question of balance is interesting, and IMO highly dependent on how strong and original the selected set of core mechanics is. The better they are, the less of this 'fantastical satiation' aspect is needed to cover them up. But what is most interesting to me is the question of what should mechanics in such games themselves actually depict? Like, to actually be worth spending time playing?
> Your large-sized dragon would need something like a log flume ride of virgins delivered straight to its gullet to sustain its bulk, not to mention the caloric expenditure.
Just to point out, virgin-demanding dragons are an entirely separate mythic tradition from hoarding dragons, which spend their time hibernating.
Just to point out, virgin-demanding dragons are an entirely separate mythic tradition from hoarding dragons, which spend their time hibernating.
>If you look at our actual cave ecosystems, troglobionts, which are adapted for living strictly in caves, are typically quite tiny. There's simply no food down there! Resources are scarce. Hence you would get no gelatinous cubes or hook horrors or carrion crawlers stumbling around the caves, lurking about, waiting for adventurers or the average bear. Instead you get some very small, pale shrimp. This is not exciting for the adventurer. Some handwaving of a source of energy called "Faerzress" eventually takes place and is only vaguely acceptable if one does not look hard, serving as kind of a bottom trophic level for the game.
Actually it would be worse. The most populated caves would be made by ant or termite colonies so if there were ant like monsters as big as humans then a small dungeon would have hundreds of monsters. Way too much for a single adventurer.
Actually it would be worse. The most populated caves would be made by ant or termite colonies so if there were ant like monsters as big as humans then a small dungeon would have hundreds of monsters. Way too much for a single adventurer.
I wonder how much of our focus on growth in 'city builder' games stems from the US's past with colonization, and its current cultural heft. if the americas and 'virgin' (i.e. easily depopulated) areas existed, would this concept be so popular?
I personally doubt it. The 4x play loop emerges naturally once you start to populate an empty map. There is also enough excuses about historic (pre medieval) colonialism that this give similar justification independent from whatever happened in the USA.
I could read a entire book on this topic.
> the demography of many European villages remained relatively stable between the twelfth and the eighteenth century
I don't think this is true. Medieval demographics is a very interesting subject and seems to have fluctuated a fair amount. Medieval populations doubled between 1100 and 1300.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography#High_Middl...
I don't think this is true. Medieval demographics is a very interesting subject and seems to have fluctuated a fair amount. Medieval populations doubled between 1100 and 1300.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography#High_Middl...
A realistic Medieval city game could do a good job of teaching key aspects of history. I learned a lot from SimCity about thinking in systems. I think well-designed games can teach quite a bit.
It would also be an interesting challenge to model the Industrial Revolution accurately. The Civilization tech tree is a good first approximation but in reading
It would also be an interesting challenge to model the Industrial Revolution accurately. The Civilization tech tree is a good first approximation but in reading
"The Lunar Men" by Jenny Uglow
"The Lever of Riches" by Joel Mokyr
"Turning points in Western Technology by Donald Cardwell A remarkably fun and educational medieval city-builder game:
https://scriptwelder.itch.io/waterworks
It's an absolute gem.
It's an absolute gem.
After the Black Death, many villages were too small to be functional. You needed a cobbler, smith, cooper, farmers, bakers etc. So Lords just moved peasants around like pawns and consolidated villages. Also they changed from farmholds to large grazing areas and obsoleted some villages. Obsolete villagers were just 'let go' meaning "Load up the wagon and leave! Good luck finding another home!"
The Scottish Highland Clearances resulted in the wholesale exportation of entire populations to Nova Scotia. At least they had a chance of finding some land to homestead.
These kind of arbitrary actions served more to sculpt the landscape of villages and towns, than all the Villager's efforts ever did.
The Scottish Highland Clearances resulted in the wholesale exportation of entire populations to Nova Scotia. At least they had a chance of finding some land to homestead.
These kind of arbitrary actions served more to sculpt the landscape of villages and towns, than all the Villager's efforts ever did.
I love this genre and RTSes. I want to recommend a game called Northgard (really an RTS and if you into vikings, norse mythology) but has some interesting and novel game mechanics. These include the effects of Winter and periodic calamities (fire, frozen waterways).
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I just recall that Stronghold (2001) was being quite honest with that all you economic settling exploits are just there to bet taxed into oblivion to fuel your local feudal war machine.
In case anyone is wondering.
seigneury the linguistic equivalent in other latin languages as Don, Señor, Monsieur, or less so as senior (Mister) in english, in the context of the article its understood to mean the "employee" duties owed to the lord/boss
seigneury the linguistic equivalent in other latin languages as Don, Señor, Monsieur, or less so as senior (Mister) in english, in the context of the article its understood to mean the "employee" duties owed to the lord/boss
I'd like to recommend Kingdom for an unusually elegant take on these game tropes https://www.kingdomthegame.com/
An apparent city builder at first glance, it lands firmly in "survival" territory. The ultra-simple control scheme belies surprising depth and brutal difficulty.
An apparent city builder at first glance, it lands firmly in "survival" territory. The ultra-simple control scheme belies surprising depth and brutal difficulty.
If you find this interesting, you might want to read: https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/16152.html
I learned most of what I know about the Three Kingdoms era from playing hundreds (thousands?) of hours of Dynasty Warriors. I later read Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the game was pretty close!
(Holy shit I had a lot of free time before I had kids.)
(Holy shit I had a lot of free time before I had kids.)
Amen! (To having free time pre kids).
Waiting for mine (currently 4 years old) to be old enough to play any and all video games, at which point I hope to have a good excuse to start gaming again myself.
Waiting for mine (currently 4 years old) to be old enough to play any and all video games, at which point I hope to have a good excuse to start gaming again myself.
Not directly related to the article, but it mentions one of my favorite games, Banished. The entire game, from the engine to the models to the music, was created by one developer. The dev log is no longer online, but I recommend scrolling through it on the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20201208071123/http://shiningroc...
(the posts in 2013-2015 are Banished related)
It's a great resource for anyone interested in game design, game development, or the fields involved in both (which is most).
Here's one of my more recent personal favorites: https://web.archive.org/web/20201208071205/https://www.shini...
(the posts in 2013-2015 are Banished related)
It's a great resource for anyone interested in game design, game development, or the fields involved in both (which is most).
Here's one of my more recent personal favorites: https://web.archive.org/web/20201208071205/https://www.shini...
> However, also in Banished it is your goal to overcome the stagnation and lead your settlement to expansion.
Is it? My view of banished was always that the goal was survival and living with the finite resources. Of course at some point you realize that with your foresters, miners, stonecutters, tailors, brewers, priests, teachers, blacksmiths and all the other people you need you have to build more food production, which requires more people and so on.
But I have never felt in banished that my goal is expansion, my goal was always a stable equilibrium that I could hold without touching it. It's sort of like software development for a specific problem, the best solution is one you never have to think about again.
Is it? My view of banished was always that the goal was survival and living with the finite resources. Of course at some point you realize that with your foresters, miners, stonecutters, tailors, brewers, priests, teachers, blacksmiths and all the other people you need you have to build more food production, which requires more people and so on.
But I have never felt in banished that my goal is expansion, my goal was always a stable equilibrium that I could hold without touching it. It's sort of like software development for a specific problem, the best solution is one you never have to think about again.
"Since many of us are working from home in these trying times, it seems safe to assume that more people than ever are indulging in playing the occasional computer game..."
Hey! No way, man. Working, we're all working, honest.
Hey! No way, man. Working, we're all working, honest.
‘Accuracy’ is a nonsensical idea in fiction. Like all fictional stories, the purpose of games is not to be ‘realistic’ or ‘accurate’. It’s to get you to willingly suspend disbelief. It’s light entertainment for goodness sake, not a doctoral thesis.
I'd like to see a treatment of Hamurabi - a very old text based game. not that it's a city building game or medieval times, but it's kind of a precursor in an ancient organism kind of way.
Ostriv (might scare the westerner for being set somewhere in ~Serbia)
Upcoming Manor Lords
There are many of these games, with varying levels of quality.
Upcoming Manor Lords
There are many of these games, with varying levels of quality.
For a historically accurate overview over how cities actually were, and on how they sustained their size, I recommend Bret Devereaux' excellent history blog: https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-pa...
One very interesting feature of older agriculture is the way the fields were split up. With tons and tons of narrow strips of land in the open-field system. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-field_system)
In Sweden the gradual reforms towards today's uniform, or at least closely situated fields. Took as long as until the 18th century to really become a thing. I suspect similar reforms elsewhere were just as late.
In Sweden the gradual reforms towards today's uniform, or at least closely situated fields. Took as long as until the 18th century to really become a thing. I suspect similar reforms elsewhere were just as late.
I can't speak for the games listed, but for the one AAA game I had the opportunity to work, "but is it fun?" was a question we would ask ourselves periodically. The natural tendency was to strive for correctness and simulation level accuracy. But that's usually very much not fun.