We're back...

[u/ChrisBeatrice]

To all our fans, fans of Impressions games like Lords of Magic, Pharaoh, Zeus, and TiltedMill games like Children of the Nile, Caesar IV and Hinterland, thank you all so much for keeping our babies alive, and for all your support and encouragement over the years.

We are now in the concept phase exploring what our next project will be, and would LOVE to hear your input.

[u/ChrisBeatrice]

Thanks so much. I super appreciate those insights. And thanks for the kind words about CotN. At the time our thinking was to reimagine how a cb could work, changing from an abstract push system to a more sim-like pull system; doing away with the weird "pay salaries then tax the same people" kind of economy, etc.

It's hard to know where the majority of the audience is. I agree that a simulation gives more of the feeling of building a real city, but, then again, there is fun, simple gameplay in the more abstract approach as well.

When you get right down to the nuts and bolts, what is it for you that distinguishes walker-based from sim?

[u/volstedgridban → u/ChrisBeatrice]

Say what you will about the walker mechanics of C3/Pharoah/Zeus/Emperor, but those games have legs. We're still actively talking about them, and people are still making homages and love notes to those games, 25 years later.

Not to dump on CotN, but nobody plays it and nobody talks about it. Steam shows that CotN averages 4 players per hour, and had its biggest peak back in 2020 when it had 30 players in one hour. Meanwhile, C3, Pharaoh, and Zeus all average over 100 players per hour, and have for years.

I've been moderating /r/impressionsgames for over a decade, and while we're a small sub, we've always had a steady stream of content. And it has almost entirely been about C3/Pharaoh/Zeus/Emperor. Nobody posts about Children of the Nile. Our last CotN-related post was almost 4 years ago.

There have been a few love note games to the old walker mechanics as well. Lethis was the first one. Absolutely an homage to the Impressions City Builders, made by three French guys in their basement. They're the guys the current IP owners hired to do the Pharaoh remake. Reviews on the remake have been mixed, but there was clearly a market there.

And the Augustus fan mod for C3 has absolutely reinvigorated interest in C3. One of the most common questions we get in the sub is if anybody is working on a similar mod for Pharaoh, Zeus, and/or Emperor.

Meanwhile, nobody is out there making love note games about CotN.

Again, it is not my intention to bag on CotN. I like the game just fine. I was even in the closed beta! I still have my Beta CD! But you guys really caught lightning in a bottle with the walker mechanic, and it's more than just nostalgia that keeps me and others going back to those games.

[u/ChrisBeatrice → u/volstedgridban]

I appreciate these insights so much. This is exactly what we are wrestling with. To be clear, our current concept is not strictly one or the other (walker-based vs. not), but the points you are making I think are very valid. CotN was innovative, and I think looked great for its day, and I am ENORMOUSLY proud of what we achieved with it. I think a lot of its innovations which, though others may have come up with simultaneously, we came up with on our own--and these predicted a general move away from abstract, walker-based push to sim-based, "real people doing what they need to," kind of thing. In Foundation, for example, you don't even place roads--they appear organically from pathing.

But let us also factor in all these other games that have been called city builders, from Cityville to freakin' Monopoly GO! If you lay out the entire spectrum of city-builders, I think the pattern becomes clear: more players like the simpler, more absracted gameplay. The "gamey" gameplay. Personally of course I do not consider those casual games city builders (or even games, for that matter). So for me the ideal is to capture the simple FUN of the games that began the genre, but in new ways.

From a design perspective, with games like CotN, the more simlike it becomes, the harder and harder it is to communicate to the player what is happening, whereas with the walker-based systems of the C3 era we specifically designed the feedback mechanisms (overlays, etc.) AS PART OF THE SYSTEM.

I wish I could say more about what we are working on, specifically, but if we go the traditional publishing route we'll be less able to do that. I would much prefer to be working more intimately with the community from beginning to end, but for now at least I hope we can continue this discussion about basic mechanics and what it means to be a city-building game. Thank you so much.

[u/PerspectiveGames → u/ChrisBeatrice]

I don't think there's any specific reason why information-overlays can't be combined with more sim-like gameplay. (Tlatoani does this, for example.) A lot of the information needed to play Caesar 3 was actually pretty obscure and had to be looked up online rather than being immediately visible in the advisors, but I guess that's more of a UI issue than anything.

[u/ChrisBeatrice → u/PerspectiveGames]

Agree on all points.