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Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate (2020)

248 points by benbreen 9mo ago

publicdebates 9mo ago
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?
- bluGill 9mo ago
  Earthly colored clothing was not normal. Sometimes it might be forced on slaves, but humans like colors and dying clothing is a tiny part of what is needed to make a garment so anyone allowed to would do it. of course we have a lot more colors available today, but there is every reason to think they would use all the color they could. Some of the colors decay fast (lasting longer than the garment if in use but not surviving to today if the garment was stored). Mostly this is something not written about in history so we have to guess but we have plenty of reason to think color was common.
  - zozbot234 9mo ago
    There's a whole lot of pictorial evidence from medieval times and it typically shows quite a bit of fancy colored clothing. Even traditional "folk" attire, that would've been restricted to cheaper choices, is not really all that brownish. Modern chemical dyes were only around starting in the mid-19th c. or so, hence prior to that you got a somewhat poorer color selection, but some variety was absolutely available.
    - bluGill 9mo ago
      Good point, I mostly look at written history but art is a valid source that I forgot about.
    - Aeolun 9mo ago
      Absolutely, all natural colors would be overwhelmingly available. But even brown is not the natural state of most clothes, so I’m not sure why that is surprising.
  - Ekaros 9mo ago
    In general I have understood that more colour the better in those times. That going also for interior decoration. The natural wood colour was later thing and mostly coming off when the paint had flaked away and the tapestries rotted. Partly also done with puritanism. In the end taste changes with time. 60s and 70s which are only 50 or 60 years ago look vastly different in decor than now.
sieabahlpark 9mo ago
[dead]
legitster 9mo ago
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.
- relaxing 9mo ago
  Reminds me of the Walking Dead tv show where they had communities being fed by a few raised beds with tomato cages and half a dozen corn stalks.
  - nitwit005 9mo ago
    People talk about some areas of the real world as boring because you just see endless wheat or corn fields. Things widely viewed as boring are not going to feature heavily in entertainment products.
    - bee_rider 9mo ago
      In a zombie setting the fact that agriculture takes up a lot of space could be really useful from a story-telling point of view. It provides a reason to expand past the walls of the settlement. It’s weird because in these settings a successful settlement is usually portrayed as basically impossible for the zombies to break into. Then, somebody has to do something stupid to let them in. Movies where things fall apart despite nobody making an obviously stupid mistake are a lot more satisfying IMO.
      - bluGill 9mo ago
        You don't expand beyond the settlement - your fields are already there. You leave the settlement to tend the fields. You can't wall all the fields but you can wall the village. expanding is done when the fields get too far to walk there and back in a day. Then you make a new village. more likely you practice what birth control you can to limit population. Your other choice is go to war and kill some other village so your kids can move there. There was essentially no unclaimed land you could expand into.
kattagarian 9mo ago
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.
- lovich 9mo ago
  To connect with another comment under this post, it even captures woman’s work of the era, with homes having small gardens or producing clothing that ends up being a significant portion of your economy, at least when I last played it.
dfajgljsldkjag 9mo ago
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.
- nine_k 9mo ago
  Players also find it fun and satisfying when an FPS player can carry five large weapons, with 100 pounds of ammo for it, run while carrying all that 20 mph in any direction without getting tired, pick anything from the floor without slowing down or ceasing fire, etc. A realistic shooter would be much harder, and having to limp slowly after taking a stray bullet in the leg would suck. And people play for fun, not for feeling the misery of war. Or, in that case, of the slow and restricted early medieval life.
  - dfajgljsldkjag 9mo ago
    People certainly also play milsim like arma, but that's definitely a minority. Meanwhile in Minecraft I'm carrying around 2000 cubic metres of gold in my pockets.
    - lloeki 9mo ago
      You don't have to go to milsim to not be able to carry an entire armoury of RPG-actually-full-blown-missile-launcher, grenade launcher, assault rifle, sniper rifle, DMR, submachine gun, multiple sidearms, plus various other alien weaponry, each complete with enough ammunition to fill an 18-wheeler trailer if desired to be stored with any sort of safety. It was fine when I was playing Doom ][ but that's something that started bothering the hell out of me back when Half-Life came out with its believable sci-fi setting, as it kept breaking my suspension of disbelief. "Can carry only two, maybe three tops with sidearm" seems to be the rule these days.
m4rtink 9mo ago
There were no electronic computers in the middle ages - so of all the computer games course are inaccurate! ;-)
forthwall 9mo ago
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…
musicale 9mo ago
Next they'll be telling us that dragons, wizards and elves are not accurately portrayed in medieval RPGs. It's surprising really, since Mario Kart is a completely realistic driving simulator.
- pteraspidomorph 9mo ago
  Of course not, everyone knows there were only five Istari in total, Saruman the White, Gandalf the Grey, Radagast the Brown and the two Blue ones that were kidnapped by aliens.
- chihuahua 9mo ago
  After playing it repeatedly since 2002, if I find out that Splinter Cell is not a 100% accurate simulation of an NSA employee's work day, I'm going to be very upset.
- nonethewiser 9mo ago
  Yeah this was my take. "Duh. Now so what?" One thing this article points out is that the growth of settlements is unrealistic. they follow a linear path of constant expansion whereas real medieval villages were very stable in a sort of subsistence mode for centuries. I mean... yeah. But it's not a simulator, right? It's also not a time capsule. Should we write a blog post about how these game villages never actually existed with the people depicted in the game? Or write a blog post about how medieval villages actually existed in 3D space and not pixels on the screen? These are all true things but who was misinformed about them?
  - protocolture 9mo ago
    The article had some ideas on how to improve games without detracting from them? Like using a free form road builder like modern city building games use is neither unfeasible or unfun? Preplanning a settlement is also something that is done in modern city builders, zoning areas for different use? Taxes dont seem to be difficult to implement either. Article seems more reasonable than the reaction. And its probably not going to go unnoticed by people playing in the genre.
michaelteter 9mo ago
Historical inaccuracies aside, when making a game it is essential to frequently stop and ask, “does this make the game more fun?” A lot of realism mechanics make gameplay dreadful, boring, tedious, or frustrating. A simulation is one thing, but a game is another.
- thmoonbus 9mo ago
  The article does address this directly at the end, for what it’s worth.
- rmunn 9mo ago
  Precisely; the reason for omitting many realistic elements is because they would be boring. If I wanted to play through all the steps of plowing a field, planting the grain, irrigating the field, dealing with weeds, harvesting the grain, and hauling it to a market to sell I would play Farming Simulator. If I'm playing a city builder, I'm perfectly okay with those steps being reduced to "plant crops, wait for crops to grow, harvest crops", and to have workers auto-assigned to those tasks while I'm laying out roads and palisades. Also, having my village randomly wiped out from time to time by events beyond my control (plague, wars, etc.) would be realistic, but no fun at all in a game.
  - Aeolun 9mo ago
    Especially with a static game seed, so even reloading won’t save you :)
  - kergonath 9mo ago
    > Also, having my village randomly wiped out from time to time by events beyond my control (plague, wars, etc.) would be realistic, but no fun at all in a game. Besides, there’s Dwarf Fortress if you’re into this sort of thing.
- dwd 9mo ago
  Reminds me of an old joke from The Onion https://theonion.com/ultra-realistic-modern-warfare-game-features-awaiting-o-1819594864/ https://theonion.com/ultra-realistic-modern-warfare-game-fea...
kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago
We need the ability to recreate an authentic anarcho-syndicalist commune.
pteraspidomorph 9mo ago
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.
bee_rider 9mo ago
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.
zahlman 9mo ago
Well, no; this is what's inaccurate about them. 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.)
nephihaha 9mo ago
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.
ChrisArchitect 9mo ago
Some more discussion previously: 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28062677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28062677
btbuildem 9mo ago
These "lords" sounds suspiciously like belligerent parasites. How did they ever bamboozle the people to enforce their nonsense on the innocent?
- netsharc 9mo ago
  I guess they started with something to offer... we now have cloud feudal "lords", who started by offering services, and then make you follow their altering terms and conditions, who they can change and all you can do is pray that they don't alter it any further. Just like real feudals, the cloud feudals can one day decide you did something wrong, and there's no trial, just direct banishment. Even worse if your income depend on these feudals (e.g. all the gig-workers who are working without the benefits that exists with an employer-employee relationship). But to answer your question, I guess it would've started with cooperation between friends/neighbors, the "alpha" person would've led the group of people in some sort of enterprise, his son became the next leader because that's how that was done, this enterprise got bigger and stronger that it encompassed land and resources, and people would want to work for them to earn a living. Heh some even owned navies and colonized places half around the world (the various East India Companies), some are content to work locally (various Mafias).
- imtringued 9mo ago
  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]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracks_emperor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracks_emperor
- onraglanroad 9mo ago
  The same way "wealth creators" do today?
- Tor3 9mo ago
  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.
oxfeed65261 9mo ago
Bret Devereaux, an historian blogger, has a long, detailed look at the economics of premodern peasant farmers and their households, called Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, starting at https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-i-households/ https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an... 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.”
- otabdeveloper4 9mo ago
  > discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families I find the idea that every pre-modern peasant in every society had the same basic contours of life extremely silly. Maybe he means British or French peasants? That's what people usually mean by "peasants". Even within Europe the very basic ideas on when and how you marry and how you treat land ownership were wildly different.
  - nottorp 9mo ago
    > Maybe he means British or French peasants? He's a professional historian who ... unthinkable i know ... cites his sources in every article.
  - gherkinnn 9mo ago
    > What we can do, however is uncover the lives of these peasant households through modeling. > So the models we’re going to set up are going to be most applicable in that space: towards the end of antiquity in the Mediterranean. > I’ll try to be clear as we move what elements of the model are which are more broadly universal and which are very context sensitive The author addresses this in the first paragraphs before getting in to the meat of it.
Svoka 9mo ago
I urge you to try Ostriv. Ukrainian medieval villager community simulator.
- TreeInBuxton 9mo ago
  I agree, I quite liked Ostriv (I tend to play a fair few city builders) - definitely felt a lot more 'in-depth' on certain parts than, say, Foundation (which has more systems, but less detail)
- zvqcMMV6Zcr 9mo ago
  Ostriv is based on 18th century, that's hardly medieval.
Peteragain 9mo ago
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.
morsch 9mo ago
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.
anthk 9mo ago
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.
ginko 9mo ago
The author mentions they studied medieval town planning in the Southern Netherlands, but isn't that an extremely flat landscape? 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.
- yxhuvud 9mo ago
  The author also suggests simulating flood walls. That is also a very .. local suggestion.
lighthouse1212 9mo ago
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.
- ErigmolCt 9mo ago
  The Middle Ages in games and fiction function less as a historical period and more as a visual language
- kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 9mo ago
  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.
  - deaddodo 9mo ago
    Fallout doesn't present a "50s or 60s aesthetic of American life". It's an alternate universe with an alternate history. There's various reasons the racism you're used to seeing and referring to (black Americans) is less so in their universe; but to say there is no racism is naive and ignorant of the universe. There's certainly racism towards Chinese/Chinese-Americans, with Little Yangtze[1] being a prime example, for example; for their own in-universe reasons. You might want to stick to universes grounded in real life/history, if you want to apply real life metrics to them. 1 - https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Little_Yangtze https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Little_Yangtze
    - kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 9mo ago
      I'm talking about the tv show, not the games.
gizajob 9mo ago
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.
ErigmolCt 9mo ago
City builders aren't really simulations of medieval life so much as power fantasies about escaping subsistence
- YoukaiCountry 9mo ago
  Pretty much, in a way they're about having agency in a time when most people had none.
Anonyneko 9mo ago
> Agricultural surpluses were skimmed by the church and the feudal lords It's honestly amazing how this was the norm for so much of our history, given how much it demotivates the villages from growing more produce, which in turn means the lords can't get any more of it either (unless they wage constant wars against their peers, which they naturally did).
pepperball 9mo ago
[dead]
ZiiS 9mo ago
Are they trying to imply other city builders (or any game ever) are accurate? I want my Microwave Power Plant!

248 points by benbreen 9mo ago

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?

bluGill 9mo ago
Earthly colored clothing was not normal. Sometimes it might be forced on slaves, but humans like colors and dying clothing is a tiny part of what is needed to make a garment so anyone allowed to would do it. of course we have a lot more colors available today, but there is every reason to think they would use all the color they could. Some of the colors decay fast (lasting longer than the garment if in use but not surviving to today if the garment was stored). Mostly this is something not written about in history so we have to guess but we have plenty of reason to think color was common.
- zozbot234 9mo ago
  There's a whole lot of pictorial evidence from medieval times and it typically shows quite a bit of fancy colored clothing. Even traditional "folk" attire, that would've been restricted to cheaper choices, is not really all that brownish. Modern chemical dyes were only around starting in the mid-19th c. or so, hence prior to that you got a somewhat poorer color selection, but some variety was absolutely available.
  - bluGill 9mo ago
    Good point, I mostly look at written history but art is a valid source that I forgot about.
  - Aeolun 9mo ago
    Absolutely, all natural colors would be overwhelmingly available. But even brown is not the natural state of most clothes, so I’m not sure why that is surprising.
- Ekaros 9mo ago
  In general I have understood that more colour the better in those times. That going also for interior decoration. The natural wood colour was later thing and mostly coming off when the paint had flaked away and the tapestries rotted. Partly also done with puritanism. In the end taste changes with time. 60s and 70s which are only 50 or 60 years ago look vastly different in decor than now.

sieabahlpark 9mo ago

[dead]

legitster 9mo ago

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.

relaxing 9mo ago
Reminds me of the Walking Dead tv show where they had communities being fed by a few raised beds with tomato cages and half a dozen corn stalks.
- nitwit005 9mo ago
  People talk about some areas of the real world as boring because you just see endless wheat or corn fields. Things widely viewed as boring are not going to feature heavily in entertainment products.
  - bee_rider 9mo ago
    In a zombie setting the fact that agriculture takes up a lot of space could be really useful from a story-telling point of view. It provides a reason to expand past the walls of the settlement. It’s weird because in these settings a successful settlement is usually portrayed as basically impossible for the zombies to break into. Then, somebody has to do something stupid to let them in. Movies where things fall apart despite nobody making an obviously stupid mistake are a lot more satisfying IMO.
    - bluGill 9mo ago
      You don't expand beyond the settlement - your fields are already there. You leave the settlement to tend the fields. You can't wall all the fields but you can wall the village. expanding is done when the fields get too far to walk there and back in a day. Then you make a new village. more likely you practice what birth control you can to limit population. Your other choice is go to war and kill some other village so your kids can move there. There was essentially no unclaimed land you could expand into.

kattagarian 9mo ago

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.

lovich 9mo ago
To connect with another comment under this post, it even captures woman’s work of the era, with homes having small gardens or producing clothing that ends up being a significant portion of your economy, at least when I last played it.

dfajgljsldkjag 9mo ago

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.

nine_k 9mo ago
Players also find it fun and satisfying when an FPS player can carry five large weapons, with 100 pounds of ammo for it, run while carrying all that 20 mph in any direction without getting tired, pick anything from the floor without slowing down or ceasing fire, etc. A realistic shooter would be much harder, and having to limp slowly after taking a stray bullet in the leg would suck. And people play for fun, not for feeling the misery of war. Or, in that case, of the slow and restricted early medieval life.
- dfajgljsldkjag 9mo ago
  People certainly also play milsim like arma, but that's definitely a minority. Meanwhile in Minecraft I'm carrying around 2000 cubic metres of gold in my pockets.
  - lloeki 9mo ago
    You don't have to go to milsim to not be able to carry an entire armoury of RPG-actually-full-blown-missile-launcher, grenade launcher, assault rifle, sniper rifle, DMR, submachine gun, multiple sidearms, plus various other alien weaponry, each complete with enough ammunition to fill an 18-wheeler trailer if desired to be stored with any sort of safety. It was fine when I was playing Doom ][ but that's something that started bothering the hell out of me back when Half-Life came out with its believable sci-fi setting, as it kept breaking my suspension of disbelief. "Can carry only two, maybe three tops with sidearm" seems to be the rule these days.

m4rtink 9mo ago

There were no electronic computers in the middle ages - so of all the computer games course are inaccurate! ;-)

forthwall 9mo ago

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…

musicale 9mo ago

Next they'll be telling us that dragons, wizards and elves are not accurately portrayed in medieval RPGs. It's surprising really, since Mario Kart is a completely realistic driving simulator.

pteraspidomorph 9mo ago
Of course not, everyone knows there were only five Istari in total, Saruman the White, Gandalf the Grey, Radagast the Brown and the two Blue ones that were kidnapped by aliens.
chihuahua 9mo ago
After playing it repeatedly since 2002, if I find out that Splinter Cell is not a 100% accurate simulation of an NSA employee's work day, I'm going to be very upset.
nonethewiser 9mo ago
Yeah this was my take. "Duh. Now so what?" One thing this article points out is that the growth of settlements is unrealistic. they follow a linear path of constant expansion whereas real medieval villages were very stable in a sort of subsistence mode for centuries. I mean... yeah. But it's not a simulator, right? It's also not a time capsule. Should we write a blog post about how these game villages never actually existed with the people depicted in the game? Or write a blog post about how medieval villages actually existed in 3D space and not pixels on the screen? These are all true things but who was misinformed about them?
- protocolture 9mo ago
  The article had some ideas on how to improve games without detracting from them? Like using a free form road builder like modern city building games use is neither unfeasible or unfun? Preplanning a settlement is also something that is done in modern city builders, zoning areas for different use? Taxes dont seem to be difficult to implement either. Article seems more reasonable than the reaction. And its probably not going to go unnoticed by people playing in the genre.

michaelteter 9mo ago

Historical inaccuracies aside, when making a game it is essential to frequently stop and ask, “does this make the game more fun?” A lot of realism mechanics make gameplay dreadful, boring, tedious, or frustrating. A simulation is one thing, but a game is another.

thmoonbus 9mo ago
The article does address this directly at the end, for what it’s worth.
rmunn 9mo ago
Precisely; the reason for omitting many realistic elements is because they would be boring. If I wanted to play through all the steps of plowing a field, planting the grain, irrigating the field, dealing with weeds, harvesting the grain, and hauling it to a market to sell I would play Farming Simulator. If I'm playing a city builder, I'm perfectly okay with those steps being reduced to "plant crops, wait for crops to grow, harvest crops", and to have workers auto-assigned to those tasks while I'm laying out roads and palisades. Also, having my village randomly wiped out from time to time by events beyond my control (plague, wars, etc.) would be realistic, but no fun at all in a game.
- Aeolun 9mo ago
  Especially with a static game seed, so even reloading won’t save you :)
- kergonath 9mo ago
  > Also, having my village randomly wiped out from time to time by events beyond my control (plague, wars, etc.) would be realistic, but no fun at all in a game. Besides, there’s Dwarf Fortress if you’re into this sort of thing.
dwd 9mo ago
Reminds me of an old joke from The Onion https://theonion.com/ultra-realistic-modern-warfare-game-features-awaiting-o-1819594864/ https://theonion.com/ultra-realistic-modern-warfare-game-fea...

kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago

We need the ability to recreate an authentic anarcho-syndicalist commune.

pteraspidomorph 9mo ago

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.

bee_rider 9mo ago

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.

zahlman 9mo ago

Well, no; this is what's inaccurate about them. 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.)

nephihaha 9mo ago

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.

ChrisArchitect 9mo ago

Some more discussion previously: 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28062677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28062677

btbuildem 9mo ago

These "lords" sounds suspiciously like belligerent parasites. How did they ever bamboozle the people to enforce their nonsense on the innocent?

netsharc 9mo ago
I guess they started with something to offer... we now have cloud feudal "lords", who started by offering services, and then make you follow their altering terms and conditions, who they can change and all you can do is pray that they don't alter it any further. Just like real feudals, the cloud feudals can one day decide you did something wrong, and there's no trial, just direct banishment. Even worse if your income depend on these feudals (e.g. all the gig-workers who are working without the benefits that exists with an employer-employee relationship). But to answer your question, I guess it would've started with cooperation between friends/neighbors, the "alpha" person would've led the group of people in some sort of enterprise, his son became the next leader because that's how that was done, this enterprise got bigger and stronger that it encompassed land and resources, and people would want to work for them to earn a living. Heh some even owned navies and colonized places half around the world (the various East India Companies), some are content to work locally (various Mafias).
imtringued 9mo ago
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]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracks_emperor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracks_emperor
onraglanroad 9mo ago
The same way "wealth creators" do today?
Tor3 9mo ago
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.

oxfeed65261 9mo ago

Bret Devereaux, an historian blogger, has a long, detailed look at the economics of premodern peasant farmers and their households, called Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, starting at https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-i-households/ https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an... 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.”

otabdeveloper4 9mo ago
> discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families I find the idea that every pre-modern peasant in every society had the same basic contours of life extremely silly. Maybe he means British or French peasants? That's what people usually mean by "peasants". Even within Europe the very basic ideas on when and how you marry and how you treat land ownership were wildly different.
- nottorp 9mo ago
  > Maybe he means British or French peasants? He's a professional historian who ... unthinkable i know ... cites his sources in every article.
- gherkinnn 9mo ago
  > What we can do, however is uncover the lives of these peasant households through modeling. > So the models we’re going to set up are going to be most applicable in that space: towards the end of antiquity in the Mediterranean. > I’ll try to be clear as we move what elements of the model are which are more broadly universal and which are very context sensitive The author addresses this in the first paragraphs before getting in to the meat of it.

Svoka 9mo ago

I urge you to try Ostriv. Ukrainian medieval villager community simulator.

TreeInBuxton 9mo ago
I agree, I quite liked Ostriv (I tend to play a fair few city builders) - definitely felt a lot more 'in-depth' on certain parts than, say, Foundation (which has more systems, but less detail)
zvqcMMV6Zcr 9mo ago
Ostriv is based on 18th century, that's hardly medieval.

Peteragain 9mo ago

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.

morsch 9mo ago

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.

anthk 9mo ago

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.

ginko 9mo ago

The author mentions they studied medieval town planning in the Southern Netherlands, but isn't that an extremely flat landscape? 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.

yxhuvud 9mo ago
The author also suggests simulating flood walls. That is also a very .. local suggestion.

lighthouse1212 9mo ago

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.

ErigmolCt 9mo ago
The Middle Ages in games and fiction function less as a historical period and more as a visual language
kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 9mo ago
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.
- deaddodo 9mo ago
  Fallout doesn't present a "50s or 60s aesthetic of American life". It's an alternate universe with an alternate history. There's various reasons the racism you're used to seeing and referring to (black Americans) is less so in their universe; but to say there is no racism is naive and ignorant of the universe. There's certainly racism towards Chinese/Chinese-Americans, with Little Yangtze[1] being a prime example, for example; for their own in-universe reasons. You might want to stick to universes grounded in real life/history, if you want to apply real life metrics to them. 1 - https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Little_Yangtze https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Little_Yangtze
  - kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 9mo ago
    I'm talking about the tv show, not the games.

gizajob 9mo ago

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.

ErigmolCt 9mo ago

City builders aren't really simulations of medieval life so much as power fantasies about escaping subsistence

YoukaiCountry 9mo ago
Pretty much, in a way they're about having agency in a time when most people had none.

Anonyneko 9mo ago

> Agricultural surpluses were skimmed by the church and the feudal lords It's honestly amazing how this was the norm for so much of our history, given how much it demotivates the villages from growing more produce, which in turn means the lords can't get any more of it either (unless they wage constant wars against their peers, which they naturally did).

pepperball 9mo ago

[dead]

ZiiS 9mo ago

Are they trying to imply other city builders (or any game ever) are accurate? I want my Microwave Power Plant!