[HN Gopher] The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder vid...
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The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games
Author : jsnell
Score : 320 points
Date : 2021-08-04 16:08 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl)
| sprafa wrote:
| 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
| a4isms wrote:
| 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.
| mncharity wrote:
| 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?
| sprafa wrote:
| 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.
| mastax wrote:
| 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.
| cryptoz wrote:
| 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| Wow, that was very entertaining though obviously a bit
| comedic. Both characters also seem to have much better
| technique than conditioning.
| sprafa wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The same episode, hilariously, includes one of their _least_
| realistic fight scenes. Wild ride.
| 0xdada wrote:
| > 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.
| eigenket wrote:
| 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.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > 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.
| Aerroon wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| sprafa wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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!"
| skmurphy wrote:
| 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 "The Lunar Men" by
| Jenny Uglow "The Lever of Riches" by Joel Mokyr
| "Turning points in Western Technology by Donald Cardwell
|
| you get a very different impression. This could tie in to
| "Science of Progress" thinking in
| https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-...
| finwhat wrote:
| 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?
| freemint wrote:
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
| hellotomyrars wrote:
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
| tills13 wrote:
| I feel like the author doesn't understand the point of games...
|
| Sorry! Your villagers all died by a plague. Game over!
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
| mcphage wrote:
| Given the popularity of Dwarf Fortress, I'm not sure that the
| author is wrong.
| stordoff wrote:
| 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.
| anyfoo wrote:
| The author addresses in a section how well or not well this
| realism could potentially interact with actual gameplay and
| fun.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| 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.
| mastax wrote:
| The Anno series is somewhat in this direction.
| mastax wrote:
| Rise to Ruins is also somewhat in that vein - more of a city-
| builder combined with a tower-defense game.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| > 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...
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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)
| jvanderbot wrote:
| 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
| baud147258 wrote:
| Steam also a version that runs on modern systems
| mrandolph wrote:
| seems like an opportunity for some fun game mechanics!
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| 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.
| learc83 wrote:
| >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.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| setr wrote:
| 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)
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| Some bits on roman taxation:
| https://www.unrv.com/economy/roman-taxes.php
| mcphage wrote:
| > 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.
| Macha wrote:
| 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.
| perihelions wrote:
| > _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)
| Brendinooo wrote:
| 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.
| Arnavion wrote:
| 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.
| tigertigerbb wrote:
| You should check out 'tax farming'. There's probably a
| wikipedia page for the 20,000 ft view.
| jaytaylor wrote:
| ...
|
| Direct link:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_(revenue_leasing)
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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...
| jonshariat wrote:
| I learned so much from that game as a kid: Taxes, real estate
| values, city planning issues, money management, so many more
| tomwojcik wrote:
| 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.
| cellis wrote:
| 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 )
| datameta wrote:
| 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.
| mrVentures2 wrote:
| 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.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| That's cool! Does it say what exactly you are taxing (labor,
| land, capital, income, wealth)?, or is that left abstract?
| rebuilder wrote:
| 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.
| bserge wrote:
| And I thought debt collection agencies are shit. We
| really do live in the best times so far.
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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
| generale_ , the privatized tax system of the time.
| depaya wrote:
| This is how parking enforcement works in some major
| cities (e.g. Chicago).
| mrVentures2 wrote:
| 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 =)
| unbalancedevh wrote:
| > 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.
| throw0101a wrote:
| Europa Universalis IV has a bunch of tax stuff:
|
| * https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Tax
|
| There are entire Youtube tutorials on it.
| shakezula wrote:
| Makes sense that they also developed Stellaris. Looks like I
| have a new game to buy and play.
| gspr wrote:
| 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).
| mmcdermott wrote:
| 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.
| semperdark wrote:
| 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.
| lovecg wrote:
| Under no circumstances you should get Crusader Kings 3.
| If you value your time at all that is.
| ajuc wrote:
| I was kinda disappointed in it. Crusader Kings 2 were
| much better.
| Davidbrcz wrote:
| 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 :~)
| cwdegidio wrote:
| 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.
| throw0101a wrote:
| 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.
| mttyng wrote:
| 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).
| shakezula wrote:
| 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.
| daltonlp wrote:
| A remarkably fun and educational medieval city-builder game:
| https://scriptwelder.itch.io/waterworks
|
| It's an absolute gem.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| "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.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I could read a entire book on this topic.
| malkia wrote:
| I dunno about historical accuracy, but seeing K&M again brings
| good memories - also such good graphics that hasn't dated (IMHO).
| danso wrote:
| 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
| publicola1990 wrote:
| 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?
| mountainb wrote:
| 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.
| ecshafer wrote:
| 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.
| ThePadawan wrote:
| > 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/
| Derek_Mudaxe wrote:
| 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.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| You make an excellent point.
| grawprog wrote:
| >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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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)
| mbg721 wrote:
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
|
| ----------
|
| So I knew that fact for Sim City (and took advantage of
| it in some designs). I never really knew that for Caesar
| / Pharaoh.
| grawprog wrote:
| 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.
| modernerd wrote:
| 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.).
| agentwiggles wrote:
| 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!
| r0s wrote:
| 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.
| goda90 wrote:
| 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.
| jhgb wrote:
| Clearly the environment in KC:D is historically accurate
| because it's derived from extant historical records.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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.
| unglaublich wrote:
| If you find this interesting, you might want to read:
| https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/16152.html
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| 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).
| tshaddox wrote:
| 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.
| max_alquzt wrote:
| Ostriv! It is developed by one guy and incredibly addictive.
| Set in the 18th century.
| drran wrote:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/773790/Ostriv/
| [deleted]
| mpfundstein wrote:
| The settlers.did this AFAIK
| skitter wrote:
| Specifically Settlers 3 & 4. In 1, 2, 6 and I believe 7,
| paths are build manually; 5 doesn't have roads.
| FooHentai wrote:
| 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.
| paavohtl wrote:
| 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/
| Aperocky wrote:
| Looks like it's windows only..
| paavohtl wrote:
| 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
| jaytaylor wrote:
| Proton [0] looks like a really nice exanple of Open
| Source collaboration.
|
| [0] https://www.protondb.com/
| [deleted]
| mcjoken wrote:
| Civilization 6 does this a bit, where roads are constructed by
| running trade routes, not built manually.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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))
| dntrkv wrote:
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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?)
|
| ----------
|
| 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.
| bspammer wrote:
| 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.
| Jowsey wrote:
| I believe this is coming in Manor Lords.
| mastax wrote:
| Wow, that game looks impressive especially for a solo
| developer.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Before we leave has this:
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1073910/Before_We_Leave/
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| setr wrote:
| 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.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| Rise Of Nations did it like this.
| dunnevens wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| INTPenis wrote:
| That's how roads are formed in ostriv, an alpha title.
| samstave wrote:
| 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.
| brutus1213 wrote:
| 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).
| SimianLogic2 wrote:
| 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.)
| pphysch wrote:
| 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.
| svachalek wrote:
| 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.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| pphysch wrote:
| 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.
| slingnow wrote:
| This just in: video game discovered that doesn't completely
| adhere to <history / physics / reality / etc>. More at 11.
| Macha wrote:
| 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.
| jonbaer wrote:
| 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
| INTPenis wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| duxup wrote:
| 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 ;)
| drewzero1 wrote:
| 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.
| eigenket wrote:
| 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).
| krab wrote:
| Tropico has this component of elections.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
| biryani_chicken wrote:
| > otherwise the people will remember
|
| This breaks the immersion.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
| DaedPsyker wrote:
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
| afterburner wrote:
| > 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).
| myself248 wrote:
| 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.
| mimixco wrote:
| 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.
| jorblumesea wrote:
| > 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...
| SahAssar wrote:
| > 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.
| mxfh wrote:
| 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.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| 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.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _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.
| svachalek wrote:
| Interesting. We actually had an Intellivision back in the day,
| but not this game. I think I would have loved it.
| xbar wrote:
| I still play this game against my brother-in-law when I visit
| for the holidays. He's gotten really good, and I haven't
| played it consistently since 1984.
| [deleted]
| cupcake-unicorn wrote:
| 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
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| occupy_paul_st wrote:
| 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!
| MaxLeiter wrote:
| 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...
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| 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
| mastax wrote:
| ACoUP is incredible, though not specific to that time period:
| https://acoup.blog/resources-for-world-builders/
| veddox wrote:
| I was waiting for ACOUP to pop up in this thread - surprised
| it took so long :D
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| thewebcount wrote:
| 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
| hyperion2010 wrote:
| 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.
| mLuby wrote:
| 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.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| 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.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| 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?
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| 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.
| cperciva wrote:
| _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.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| 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.
| ygjb wrote:
| 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.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| In case anyone is wondering.
|
| seigneury the linguistic equivalent in other latin languages as
| Don, Senor, 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
| blunte wrote:
| The point is not to be historically accurate. Ideally you strike
| a good balance of fun, challenging, and historically accurate -
| in that order.
|
| 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.
| mmcdermott wrote:
| 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.
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