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I feel like the author doesn't understand the point of games... Sorry! Your villagers all died by a plague. Game over!
I'd say the author understands perfectly well. It's still interesting to discuss where they deviate from reality and to what extent.
> 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 coll…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 area…
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…
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.
Figuring out how to take these realities and tweak the gameplay cycle to make it "fun" seems like a fantastic design challenge. I wonder what the author would think of Dwarf Fortress forts that have been played on the surface.
I'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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 tha…
Sim City btw, does the same thing with Residential / Commercial / Industrial zones. All "traffic" start from a residential zone, then goes to a industrial zone, and finally ends in commercial.
That means a singular tile of "Residential" zone can "feed" the entire industrial sector. While a singular "Commercial" tile can serve as where the industry drops off their goods.
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So I knew that fact for Sim City (and took advantage of it in some designs). I never really knew that for Caesar / Pharaoh.
> 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 coll…
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.
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