The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games
leidenmedievalistsblog.nl
leidenmedievalistsblog.nl
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’m sure the whole story is much more nuanced than that outline.
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.
* https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Tax
There are entire Youtube tutorials on it.
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.
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"...
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.
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.)
Haha - If you ever end up writing that game, send me a beta invite!
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 :~)
This may cause you to crash and burn with your kingdom, but it's probably more akin to how humans (and rulers) actually operated.
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.
Its the only settler game I've played where I enjoyed the siege warfare at all.
Direct link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_(revenue_leasing)
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...
Are Pharaoh's Hippos related to Dwarf Fortress Carp, perchance? Because this situation sounds familiar.
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.
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.
And my point about carrots was deliberately cartoonish. The point is that revenue, not profit, was taxed.
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 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.
...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.
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)
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.
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).
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
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origi...
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)
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.
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?
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 joke that the Revert button is the "never mind, that was a simulation. The next one is the actual mission" button.
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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...
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.
Even ancient people threw gravel down (or logs) to help address this problem. But that’s a heck of a lot of work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Just to point out, virgin-demanding dragons are an entirely separate mythic tradition from hoarding dragons, which spend their time hibernating.
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.
[1] - https://play0ad.com/ [2] - https://github.com/0ad/0ad
(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...
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
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.
https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii-real-c...
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.
History of Private Life, edited by Aries and Duby - volumes 2 and 3 cover the medieval and renaissance period.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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 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.
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.
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).
* Praise a faction (ex: Religious, Academic, Military)
* Chastise a faction
* Praise a superpower
* Acknowledge an issue.
* Make a promise
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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.
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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.
This breaks the immersion.
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.
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.
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'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.
It's an absolute gem.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 Glad the author sees into that very clearly.
* Could be an interesting art game tho as someone pointed out below
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MjQRqEk5M Spoilers possible if you haven't seen the show. Definitely recommend it btw.
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.
Dwarf Fortress has shown that this would in fact be quite exciting, 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.
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.
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.
googling doesn't disabuse you of ingrained lies.
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).
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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
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.).
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!
An apparent city builder at first glance, it lands firmly in "survival" territory. The ultra-simple control scheme belies surprising depth and brutal difficulty.
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).
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
Upcoming Manor Lords
There are many of these games, with varying levels of quality.
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.
Hey! No way, man. Working, we're all working, honest.
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.
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.
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...
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.
(Holy shit I had a lot of free time before I had 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.
I wonder what the author would think of Dwarf Fortress forts that have been played on the surface.
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?
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].
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry! Your villagers all died by a plague. Game over!
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.
I'd say the author understands perfectly well. It's still interesting to discuss where they deviate from reality and to what extent.
However to stop titles like "Why are 9/10 moms using XYZ?" that are badly disguised ads, HN strips opening questions from titles.