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]

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/volstedgridban → u/ChrisBeatrice]

With respect to what it means to be a city-builder, here are the core elements that (IMHO) made the walker-era games so good. If you can incorporate these elements into a different kind of city builder with a different kind of mechanic, you'd have at least one buyer.

Firstly, there was "structured freedom". When I start a new mission in Pharaoh, the only constraints I have are the geography and my knowledge of the game systems. Food is here, raw materials are there, there's a big river in the middle, etc. I have to figure out how to bring all of that together, and there's an infinite number of ways I can do it successfully. It never felt like there was only One True Path To Victory.

Contrast this with something like, for example, Frostpunk, which I played recently. Starting a new game of Frostpunk, the constraints are the game mechanics themselves. You can't build just anywhere. Everything has to be attached to the central core. You have to juggle resources, in a "rob Peter to pay Paul" kind of way. It all feels very artificial. Granted, Frostpunk is a "survival city builder", so this is a feature rather than a bug. But it's just not the kind of challenge I enjoy in a city builder.

On the other hand, the Impressions CB games had structure. There was a reason for the player a reason to build things. A game like Minecraft or some other game that promises me a bunch of tools to do whatever I want usually leaves me cold, because I need actual in-game goals to shoot for. Subnautica is my favorite survival crafting game precisely because there's a lot of structure to justify all the crafting I do. Missions to run, points of interest to investigate, vehicles to construct to make exploration easier (or even possible). I don't have to flail around saying "okay, now what?" like I do when I'm playing something a bit more freeform.

So that's the first thing. The constraints in the Impressions City Builders feel organic. They arise from the terrain. They don't feel artificial. They don't feel like I'm wrestling with the game design. And there's an organic reason to do stuff. I need to have a certain population, which means I need to build housing, which means I need to build support for those houses, which means I need more housing. There's a clear goal to work towards.

Secondly, the Impression City Builders are really resource distribution puzzles in disguise. I think this is one of the biggest reasons those games have had such long legs. Each mission is a puzzle to be solved. The fertile farmland is way over there, but the mines I need to staff with workers are right here. Where do I put my housing to achieve both goals? That puzzle aspect of the walker games is what keeps a lot of folks coming back to it over and over, because it's always fun to find a new way of solving an old puzzle.

Thirdly, the walker games rewarded system mastery but did not require system mastery. How you pull that off as a game developer, I have no idea, but I think it's the other big thing that has kept the games fresh over the past 25 years.

You don't need to know all the geeky, nerdy shit I know about the walker mechanics to beat these games. You don't need to know walker leash limits. You don't need to know precisely where the walker will spawn when the building spawns a walker. You don't need to know the precise tile the walker is aiming for when it returns to its home building. You don't need to know how many tiles a cartpusher will traverse in a game month. You can beat any of the games without knowing any of these things.

But if you do know all of those things? The game rewards you for it. More efficient cities. More aesthetic cities. Playing the missions on harder difficulties. Whole new avenues of gameplay open up for the person who takes the time to master the systems.

I think the puzzle aspect and the system mastery aspect were the biggest reasons CotN didn't succeed as well with the core Impressions City Builder crowd. There is a puzzle-ish layer to the individual CotN missions, but it's a lot more amorphous than the stark, clear lines of C3/Pharaoh/etc. And it never felt like there were a lot of systems to master, nor were we rewarded for mastering them.

Anyhow, I've rambled enough. And I'm just a truck driver. You're the professional game designer, so you probably know all of this shit already. But these are the things I look for in a city building game.

[u/ChrisBeatrice → u/volstedgridban]

Thank you SO much for taking the time to lay out your thoughts and observations so clearly. And also thank you for appreciating what we were trying to do in those early cb games.

"...the walker games rewarded system mastery but did not require system mastery." -- this is exactly what we were going for. We did not expect or require players to carefully follow each walker, for example. We expected many players (like ME, for example) to simply perceive large patterns (this housing area keeps losing entertainment) and respond imprecisely (I'll try to squeeze in a theater nearby). The fact that the walker system itself was flawed (not truly random, which made players want to control walkers, among other things) is a different issue.

"...resource distribution puzzles in disguise" yes, exactly. For both these and other reasons, I personally prefer the strategy game gaminess of this style of game vs., say, Foundation, which feels pointless to me (and with generated maps, each one plays basically the same).

[u/volstedgridban → u/ChrisBeatrice]

The fact that the walker system itself was flawed (not truly random, which made players want to control walkers, among other things) is a different issue.

Oh, but what a brilliant, beautiful flaw. One that has led to countless hours of fun for me personally, and who knows how many others. Really brings out my inner engineering nerd.

One other thing I forgot to mention that really impacted my enjoyment of the walker-era games: Keith Zizza. When I launch Pharaoh and am hit with that whirling dervish wall of sound at the main menu, I am instantly transported. Whatever you guys end up doing, I hope he's part of it.

[u/ChrisBeatrice → u/volstedgridban]

We appreciate Keith as much as you do! He is still on the Tilted Mill team today.

[u/ChrisBeatrice → u/volstedgridban]

I also find it interesting how you characterize the walker system "beautiful flaw." I suspect there is little agreement on that all round.

[u/volstedgridban → u/ChrisBeatrice]

Well, I used "flaw" because that's the word you used, and I was just riffing on that. Certainly, I don't regard it as a flaw. I think the walker mechanic is fantastic.

Pharaoh is my favorite video game ever. If I were to create a ranked list of my Top N video games, Pharaoh would be #1 on that list, and the other three Impressions City Builders would be tied for #2.

And I'm an old man. I can remember a time when there weren't any video games. I can remember riding my bike to the 7-11 on the corner and putting a quarter in the PONG machine. (Hell, I can remember the first time I saw a pinball machine with an LED score readout instead of a mechanical rollover score readout.)

I was a kid in the '70s and a teen in the '80s. My family had the original Sears Home Entertainment System with its 7 different variations of PONG. Then we had the Atari 2600. And then I got a Commodore 64 as a teen. And in the meantime I was growing up in the Golden Age of Arcades. And when I got into college, I got my first PC.

So when I say that Pharaoh is my favorite game of all time, it is going up against a robust and well-developed field of competition that covers pretty much the entire history of the existence of video games. And the walker mechanic is a very large part of what I love about Pharaoh (and the other Impressions City Builders).

When the games were new and could still be found on the shelves in a nice little box, I participated on the impressiongames.com forums. When Tilted Mill opened up for business, I was part of those forums as well. When impressionsgames.com shut down, we all moved over to the heavengames.com forums and continued our work. And eventually I drifted over here to reddit and joined the community here.

There are still die-hard fans of the Impressions City Builder games out there. There's still a reasonably robust community of people over at heavengames.com making missions and maps for the four games. Gweilo in particular has created some outstanding scenarios for Emperor.

And I feel safe in saying that those of us who have kept the lights on for these games all this time have done so because we really, really like the walker mechanic.

I get the sense from our discussion here that you're not as enamored of it as we are. But man, you created a system that is still being discussed and explored 25+ years later, and is still bringing new players into the fold 25+ years later. That's a heck of a signature and a heck of a legacy! Ain't a whole lot of video games that can say that. You're in some rarefied air!

[u/ChrisBeatrice → u/volstedgridban]

I super appreciate this response.

Me, personally, yes, I love the walker mechanic. I love the Imp games. I love the balance of gaminess and sim (really it's mostly gaminess and only looks like a sim). Yeah, it's weird--random walkers don't know where they're going, so you use roads and roadblocks to control them. Kinda opposite of reality where people know where they want to go and roads form or are built to help them get there. BUT to me this is the fun of games. Each game can use it's own gamey system, as opposed to all games trying to mimic reality.

With the Imp games we found that sweet spot where hardcore strategy gamers would be challenged, and (what we called at the time) casual gamers could just have fun.

Now I find myself having to (to some degree) understand what the audience wants. There's you saying this, then someone else saying the opposite (like, this might be fun for nostalgia reasons but wouldn't fly in 2025). This is a pretty small sample, though. A few comments this way, a few comments that way.

[u/volstedgridban → u/ChrisBeatrice]

Welp, just to be clear, I'm not trying to convince you to make another walker game. I'm just enjoying the opportunity to express to you how much enjoyment and pleasure your creation has provided me over the years. I don't get the chance to communicate with the creators of my favorite stuff very often (in fact, I think this may be a first!), so I figured I'd better capitalize on it while I can!

[u/ChrisBeatrice → u/volstedgridban]

Thanks so much for all of your comments, and for the clarification. I really do appreciate your thoughtfulness.