Side note, but I did not realize how unoriginal Warcraft was, until looking at these.
Medieval RTS games have a special place in my heart. But I'm almost convinced it's because of nothing but pure nostalgia, being the first RTS I ever played.
But no. It's the same reason I have a soft spot for the LotR movies, and for forests and earthy colored clothing in general, and wool clothing. There's something so... wholesome about it. Or simple. Or, je ne sais pas... preter-nostalgic?
Economics is something I think about all the time when playing these games or reading fantasy. We know that the ratio of farmers to non-farmers in the medieval period was something like 29:1. But so little thought is given to just the sheer amount of work and space it took to fill mouths and clothe bodies.
I'm glad there was a mention of Banished, which does a decent job of capturing the slow struggle of subsistence living. It cannot be understated how many games Banished inspired - of them Manor Lords probably comes the closest to something historically accurate. And definitely fits the author's interests in a non-linear, non-grid based city builder.
There is a more recent game that can be used as reference to a city-building experience called Manor Lords. You are basically building your village from scratch in the wilderness and it really looks like a medieval village.
It is fascinating that players would actually reject the game if it showed the true straight roads and planned layouts. We have a mental model of the Middle Ages that is wrong but we still demand that products match our expectations. The truth feels like a glitch because it breaks our immersion. We care more about the feeling of the past than the data.
Also, it is logical that we optimize the past to make the gameplay loop satisfying. Real history was full of system failures like floods and unfair taxes that prevented any real progress. We code these simulations to give players a sense of progression that the actual people never had.
That "truth feels like a glitch" line really nails it. It's striking how quickly historical accuracy becomes uncanny when it clashes with our internalized image of the past
Interesting insight, I personally am not a fan of medieval builders for that many kinda seem like reskinned modern builders, though to be fair modern city builders are also historically inaccurate, you can basically do anything without political ramification, no nimbys, hoas, ceqa…
The "Johnny and the Dead" series by Terry Pratchett included a school mate of Johnny who liked to make computer games.. and he created a realistic game about flying your spaceship to some nearby star or somewhere. Everything was realistic.. you would stare at the black night of space for thousands of years (literally) while going there. For some reason people didn't flock to that game.
In particular, the complaint that 'most villages didn't grow into towns' is a pretty terrible one from a game design point of view, because you could say "Most X don't Y" about almost every game, because players want to do the _exceptional_, not the _every day_.
Also there is the question of _who you are_ in a city builder, because he seems to be assuming that the player is playing as an average villager, and not the people who actually make planning decisions (monasteries and lords, etc).
Most of these games are sort of explicitly designed to be power fantasies on some level. I am sure you could make a truly great game that is sort of down in the muck, a villager eye view, or whatever, but it might not be as popular or fun.
RTS like Age of Empires were more geared towards combat, and base building existed only to supplement that. Whereas in games like Pharaoh and Caeser you could plan your city if you wanted to.
My iteration of The Settlers was The Settlers II (also its later 3D remake) which is very much designed around roads that units mostly had to use! This was found in other early instances of RTS but later discarded (including in The Settlers series).
It's true, however, that events like floods or the tax collector were missing. Those are more easily found in board games.
I enjoy going into a city building game and thinking out exactly what I’d like the city to look like beforehand. But, it doesn’t always work because the city will eventually outgrow the original design.
The need to have the city constantly growing is a real killer for realism here, I think. It basically makes super careful planning impractical.
I think most of the problems are downstream of this. For example, your fields will probably have to be moved after a couple years. The city will expand and you’ll want to replace it with higher-value industry. And you’ll be scouting out a new massive area for your new fields, which will make your old ones obsolete. So, you’ll move your fields every few years. Now, crop rotation doesn’t make sense, unless the crops destroy the soil at some ridiculous rate.
Why they're inaccurate is down to some combination of lack of research, lack of interest, or apparent conflict with making the game fun to play. (Possibly other things that don't occur to me at the moment.)
Most of these games are based around castles and towns, and so one thing they rarely feature is how monasteries were major drivers of development in their day. Not only did they keep the written records, but they pioneered certain forms of manufacturing, agricultural improvement and engineering. Some became very wealthy as a result.
There is a strong incentive to displace the existing one, but if you're strong enough to do so, wouldn't you rather become the belligerent parasite rather than eliminate the idea of belligerent parasites? And so the cycle begins anew [0].
Games and articles and anime all include "lords", as far as I can tell. But feudalism wasn't universal, there were lot of (what we today would call) countries without feudalism. There could still be (fairly local) kings, but farmers owned their lands and nobility didn't necessarily exist at all, in some places. But games (including anime) tend to focus 100% on the feudal system.
“This is the first post in a series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families. Prior to the industrial revolution, peasant farmers of varying types made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies (the sort with cities and writing). And when I say overwhelming, I mean overwhelming: we generally estimate these societies to have consisted of upwards of 80% peasant farmers, often as high as 90 or even 95%. Yet when we talk about these periods, we are often focused on aristocrats, priests, knights, warriors, kings and literate bureaucrats, the sort of folks who write to us or on smiths, masons and artists, the sort of folk whose work sometimes survives for us to see. But this series is going to be about what life was like for the great majority of people who lived in small farming households.”
I suspect we focus too much here with good old Methodist values around improvement and work. I seem to recall a study in Arnemland (North (wet) Australia) where the indigenous population spent about 10% of their time hunting and gathering - not an 8 hour day by any means. Two points: this was normal, but of course their numbers were controlled by inconsistent weather. The feast and famine cycle over the year mean even that 10 was not evenly distributed. The people are also of course nomadic, but not as much as you might think in that the procession follows a 'route' which looks much like the seasons in agricultural society. I suspect medieval society also partied hard, and bitched about their love life mostly, with the local brute squad creaming off most of the men for their wars, or disease or crop failure decimating the population every few generations.
I love the line drawings. They immediately seem more real than current games. Just the land use aspect alone (buildings vs farmed land). Modern sims never get that right, either, with coal power plants the same size as a high school. And so many other things out of proportion.
As a Spaniard, I have to say that medieval ages are very different over centuries. The 7th century has nothing to do with the 13th one, which is a bit closer on mindset with the Enlightenment than the obscurity times.
Of course you have no way to get some/improvement in your life as a peasant except if you wanted to join a church which could give you some education and literacy. And a granted dinning table for sure.
The tension between historical accuracy and game design is interesting because it reveals what we actually want from these games. We don't want to simulate medieval life - we want the aesthetic of medieval life with modern assumptions about growth, progress, and control. The same 'inaccuracies' appear in fantasy novels, historical films, any media that uses the past as a stage for modern stories.
Problem is, these kinds of media end up pushing nostalgia for a warped version of an old time. It's like anything based in the 50s or 60s in USA and is not full of racism. My go-to example these days is the Fallout tv show.
That said, you actually can create something positive set in that time while also portraying the bad. For instance, in Bill Burr's F Is For Family.
Ultimately the goal of a game is "have fun", so anything that goes against that, including historical accuracy, has to make room for the fundamental property every game has to have. Even the 4x games like Victoria and Europa Universalies, no matter how accurate they try to be, is actually just about "being fun".
OMG now I think about it, Populous is inaccurate too. I think if I was a godlike entity I would do a lot more than raise and lower land all day just to farm manna.
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 56.1 ms ] threadMedieval RTS games have a special place in my heart. But I'm almost convinced it's because of nothing but pure nostalgia, being the first RTS I ever played.
But no. It's the same reason I have a soft spot for the LotR movies, and for forests and earthy colored clothing in general, and wool clothing. There's something so... wholesome about it. Or simple. Or, je ne sais pas... preter-nostalgic?
I'm glad there was a mention of Banished, which does a decent job of capturing the slow struggle of subsistence living. It cannot be understated how many games Banished inspired - of them Manor Lords probably comes the closest to something historically accurate. And definitely fits the author's interests in a non-linear, non-grid based city builder.
Also, it is logical that we optimize the past to make the gameplay loop satisfying. Real history was full of system failures like floods and unfair taxes that prevented any real progress. We code these simulations to give players a sense of progression that the actual people never had.
It's surprising really, since Mario Kart is a completely realistic driving simulator.
A lot of realism mechanics make gameplay dreadful, boring, tedious, or frustrating. A simulation is one thing, but a game is another.
Also there is the question of _who you are_ in a city builder, because he seems to be assuming that the player is playing as an average villager, and not the people who actually make planning decisions (monasteries and lords, etc).
Most of these games are sort of explicitly designed to be power fantasies on some level. I am sure you could make a truly great game that is sort of down in the muck, a villager eye view, or whatever, but it might not be as popular or fun.
My iteration of The Settlers was The Settlers II (also its later 3D remake) which is very much designed around roads that units mostly had to use! This was found in other early instances of RTS but later discarded (including in The Settlers series).
It's true, however, that events like floods or the tax collector were missing. Those are more easily found in board games.
The need to have the city constantly growing is a real killer for realism here, I think. It basically makes super careful planning impractical.
I think most of the problems are downstream of this. For example, your fields will probably have to be moved after a couple years. The city will expand and you’ll want to replace it with higher-value industry. And you’ll be scouting out a new massive area for your new fields, which will make your old ones obsolete. So, you’ll move your fields every few years. Now, crop rotation doesn’t make sense, unless the crops destroy the soil at some ridiculous rate.
Why they're inaccurate is down to some combination of lack of research, lack of interest, or apparent conflict with making the game fun to play. (Possibly other things that don't occur to me at the moment.)
2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28062677
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracks_emperor
It begins:
“This is the first post in a series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families. Prior to the industrial revolution, peasant farmers of varying types made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies (the sort with cities and writing). And when I say overwhelming, I mean overwhelming: we generally estimate these societies to have consisted of upwards of 80% peasant farmers, often as high as 90 or even 95%. Yet when we talk about these periods, we are often focused on aristocrats, priests, knights, warriors, kings and literate bureaucrats, the sort of folks who write to us or on smiths, masons and artists, the sort of folk whose work sometimes survives for us to see. But this series is going to be about what life was like for the great majority of people who lived in small farming households.”
You could make it as a mod to CK3. Instead of a royal household, you manage a peasant one.
Most of the same mechanics of personnel and resource management, decisions and succession still apply.
Of course you have no way to get some/improvement in your life as a peasant except if you wanted to join a church which could give you some education and literacy. And a granted dinning table for sure.
I don't think the same geometric approach could be taken in a town established somewhere in the Alps or modern day Norway for instance.
That said, you actually can create something positive set in that time while also portraying the bad. For instance, in Bill Burr's F Is For Family.