Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate (2020)
leidenmedievalistsblog.nl
leidenmedievalistsblog.nl
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.”
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.
He's a professional historian who ... unthinkable i know ... cites his sources in every article.
> 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.
> 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. They’ll also be pretty applicable to the European/Mediterranean Middle Ages and some parts – particularly mortality patterns – are going to apply universally to all pre-modern agrarian societies. 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 (meaning they differ place-to-place or period-to-period) and to the degree I can say, how they vary. But our ‘anchor point’ is going to be the Romans, operating in the (broadly defined) iron age, at the tail end of antiquity.
https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...
[1]:https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-pa... [2]:https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii-real-c...
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.
The "Dynasty" part comes from being able to have children and pass the village along to them if you play long enough. But everyone in game is a peasant of some sort. Nobility is mentioned but never directly visible.
I wouldn't call the game accurate exactly. But it is fun. I especially enjoyed having a ground-level view instead of the birds-eye view of most city builders.
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.
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.
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.
North America had vast empty forests - but remember just before Europeans arrived disease (small pox) killed large portions of the population. We have very little recorded about what life was like before Columbus, but archeological evidence suggests that the land was already used to the max capacity of their technology. (Europe did bring technology to better use the land - for some definition of better. I'm not qualified to comment on why they didn't develop the technology, but there seems to be some interesting culture factors - perhaps you can find an expert)
An interesting take on this is depicted in Attack on Titan, where they do in fact wall all the fields - the city (I don't remember if it's like the last vestige of humanity or whatever) is surrounded in concentric ring walls, the outer one which contains villages and farmland having a circumference of about 3000 kilometers for an internal area of 723,822 km², making its area just a bit smaller than Zambia and Chile.
Of course, a 3000 kilometer, 50 meter tall wall is ridiculous. But then again the great wall of China is 21.000 kilometers long. I believe there's more info about the walls and their construction in the source.
Cities can only pull off a large population if there are a lot of villages growing surplus food (which is not what the village wants - in the medieval world cities were not making luxury goods farmers wanted so farmers would want to work less), and cities needed good bulk transport for all that food. Rome was a massive city in the day with just over a million people - today that is considered a tiny city and there are many much bigger.
And then something like The Expanse comes out and it turns out that realism is actually really interesting. Sure, the space is unfamiliar realism, but so is serf life to most viewers. And direction is also very important.
Anyway, you mention Space Marines, there's animations and lots of media about them. Some depicting them as basically invulnerable (like the 40K episode of Amazon's Secret Level), but plenty of them where they die en masse - because while they're super suits, they're up against the worst the universe can throw at them (like the British).
This comes from it fundamentally being small scale skirmish game. So realistic army sizes are not possible. And on other hand you need some level of game balance. You can't expect one side to have dozen models and other to field thousands or tens of thousands.
And even there. Considering stated population of any reasonably build world to be in billions and more populated to go to hundreds of billions. Number of normal humans you could stick a weapon in hands and told to shoot at that direction would still be in at least millions if not billions. A few thousand whatever can do very little against that.
Maybe it was Interstellar.
Also, there are now dozens of games that took the concept and ran with it. From Space Base to Manor Lords to Timberborn.
Similarly by adding ‘and clothe bodies’ that captures well over half of a typical woman’s labor back then. Drop spindles sucked up an enormous amount of labor before you even had cloth.
People don’t understand that there are ebbs and flows to a farming life. There is always work to do but no one is out in the fields much unless it’s harvest or seeding times.
We tend to think of weaving as the time consuming thing but that’s because the spinning wheel had been around for a while by the time the Industrial Revolution happened.
of course harvest would be all hands on deck to farm, and preserving the harvest was part of that. However mostly that was not done.
women's work is mostly using a drop spindle - it took every woman in the village 10-12 hours a day, every day, working a drop spinele to get enough thread for their clothing. This was however an activity compatible with stopping to nurse a baby or otherwise care for kids.
you are thinking 1800s when the spinning jenny made thread in a factory. Or slightly before then when the spinning wheel (which should have been invented 1000 years before it did if inventors thought about it at all) which greatly freed up women's lives.
not to say that women couldn't do other the things. Different cultures had different splits. but most were making thread - we know because we know how much work that takes and how much clothing someone had (not much!)
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/An_amoro...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/early-china/article/...
Nope. You can invent it, but if there is no economics to drive its adoption it won't spread.
Medieval thread production and thread consumption was roughly balanced so there was no great economic incentive to engineer it.
A spinning wheel is significant labor from a craftsman which means you need to have excess cash to buy and maintain it--farmers surely didn't have that. In addition, if you suddenly generate 10x the amount of thread, that doesn't mean that it can be consumed--weaving doesn't magically get faster. There isn't a lot of trade beyond a single village, so there is nowhere for excess thread to go in order to become money. All this is even before you have engineering limitations--spinning wheels didn't create great thread for weaving from most fibres.
(Side note: In fact, the excess thread from spinning wheels basically didn't get consumed initially. It just created a surplus of rags. Which then led to printing because there was suddenly a cheap supply of something looking for a usage to consume it all ...)
Contrast this to later: The invention of the flying shuttle suddenly kicked up demand for thread which then needed the spinning jenny which then needed the cotton gin. That was all "demand pull"--there was pent up demand that would result in profit if you could fill it. And, even still, a LOT of "inventors" went bankrupt inventing all those things!
Although I would question if multiple hours of daily labor isn't itself a significant demand pull? I assume everyone wants to free up time spent on monotonous tasks, but maybe this is wrong.
The Aeolipile was not a functional steam engine - it was essentially an unpressurised two-spouted kettle that span on an axle. It had no way of maintaining enough pressure (no valves) to do useful work and the metal working techniques of the day weren't good enough to contain useful pressure without exploding. Real steam engines only came about after people had spent centuries building cannons that didn't explode.
The first practical application of steam engines was pumping water out of deep coal mines (which the Romans didn't have or need) where it didn't matter if the engine was both underpowered and massive. Even after these engines became commercially viable, it took another 70 years or so for the engines to become small enough to be mounted on vehicles.
That's an interesting insight. I had not thought about the possibility of a scientific understanding of pressure developing prior to the steam engine. If you have some pointers to read up on this, I'd love to learn more.
Also, there were demands for pumps in antiquity, particularly in hydraulics. Lot's of labor was invested in building aqueducts and underground waterways. I always saw the Aeolipile as a tech demo showing that heat can be used as a power source for mechanical motion, but this is probably because I live after the steam machine, knowing it's true potential. I've long wondered why the idea wasn't expanded upon by the Romans or later the Greeks or Egyptians, but I suppose it wasn't convincing enough on its own.
As you say, with retrospect we can see the Aeolipile as a tech demo, but at the time it was an interesting novelty with zero practical application.
However it isn't clear if the Romans could have developed the metals needed even if they tried. There are a lot of parts to better metal alloys that they didn't know and trial and error is a slow process when you don't have why something didn't work.
The Romans were engineers par excellence.
They worked both steel and glass in this time frame. Look at how they built Pompeii for the local conditions. They built the Colosseum with lead clamps and rebar to prevent it from collapsing with earthquakes (it eventually collapsed because everybody stole the valuable lead as Rome failed). Their art was better than anything produced until the Renaissance happened. I can go on and on ad nauseam.
Romans most certainly did not look down on engineering and technology.
They simply didn't have the metallurgy.
A more interesting question is why China didn't kick off into an Industrial Revolution given that they effectively had all the same technologies and perhaps actually had a few more.
There were some cultural issues like considering philosophy more important than trades and technology. However, the general issue seems to be that demand and supply were balanced enough that there simply wasn't a huge incentive.
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.
And people play for fun, not for feeling the misery of war. Or, in that case, of the slow and restricted early medieval life.
Meanwhile in Minecraft I'm carrying around 2000 cubic metres of gold in my pockets.
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.
(Weight and bulk were actual considerations there, and you could limp, or even have to crawl, if your legs were wounded.)
I don't have a perfect game setup and am constantly hampered by needing to do two different things like locomotion and handling with only my left hand, thus using cheats is standard for me to compensate for the imbalance. Also, sometimes I just want to enjoy a walk through the environment without constant fighting (Far Cry 2, 5).
Boring as hell and didn't have that click-click-get-dopamine vibe of Call of Duty, etc.
I expect an RTS game like Age of Empires to be balanced for competitiveness rather than realism.
Sim City 2000 at least markets itself as a simulation game, which I'd expect to be more realistic in terms of city building. For better or worse, though, the simulation seems rather simplistic, which could lead to unrealistic city designs or confusion around why the Sims don't want to drive over the fancy highway bridge I just spent $5000 on...
A lot of realism mechanics make gameplay dreadful, boring, tedious, or frustrating. A simulation is one thing, but a game is another.
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.
https://theonion.com/ultra-realistic-modern-warfare-game-fea...
I told him it would be annoying rather than fun and negatively impact the pacing. It wouldn't work well in our specific games.
Actually, during development there are always so many interesting ideas which don't pan out because they wouldn't actually be fun. Some even get built then scrapped because it didn't work as well as one would think. That's the kind of thing you'll often see internet forums bring up framed like "why didn't the devs think of this?!"
Edit: as a kid my friends and I dreamed of the day car games would have realistic and dynamic crash physics and well BeamNG gets pretty close.
There's an obvious appeal to sim racing for those who want realism and My Summer Car for those who... Well, it's an interesting project which I respect, at least.
The thing to think about is always how well something fits in the specific game you are making. If it completely warps the focus and disrupts the intended moment to moment gameplay loop, then it probably isn't a good inclusion. But it might still be a great idea for another game. In some cases, and this happens often in early development, it can even mean that other game is what you should be making instead. But that rarely happens when working on a big established franchise.
Every time I hear someone likes a game I contributed to I feel quite happy. After all, giving joy and escapism to people who need it is why I always wanted to make games.
Like becoming dehydrated and malnourished if you don’t eat every half hour, which is pretty easy to manage, not being able to carry as much, turning damage up, and increasing afflictions so when you get hurt you have to go see a medic and can’t just cure them, although you can stabilize them.
While those ones are okay, and I’ve turned them on (like the weight being lower has a skill that you can add to mitigate, and items that make you stronger), there’s environmental afflictions on certain planets, but they didn’t put sufficient mitigations in the game to combat them. So a high air pressure planet or high solar radiation planet, even if you get a protective suit it gives you maybe two minutes of mitigation, not nearly enough time to do anything productive while walking on the planet, so if you crank the difficulty up those planets just become totally off limits, since there’s no way to “plan effectively and feel clever”, instead you just get burns and then come down with pneumonia and it’s not fun.
I think you could make it engaging, maybe by leaning harder into the robots automation and allowing them to do more tasks, or having diving style space suits for higher pressure environments.
Incidentally, when I last played Banished there was a loophole in its simulation and you could just build a few modules consisting of like 3 or 4 basic buildings and that solved all your survival problems with no need for later intervention.
Gamers gonna optimize.
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.
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?
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.
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.
It's surprising really, since Mario Kart is a completely realistic driving simulator.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.)
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.
You might want to stick to universes grounded in real life/history, if you want to apply real life metrics to them.
Fallout is absolutely about the American atomic age—not a historic recount of such period by any stretch, but it is the very foundation of the franchise.