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-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.”
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.
that ratio completly ignores 'women's work' which was half the labor. you don't have much a village if the naked people freeze to death, and most people like nice clothing even when the weather (and culture) allows nudism
Women may have done half the labour but they didn't spend all their time weaving cloth and making clothing. You're forgetting about all the food preparation and preservation that women did. Women cooked meals, baked bread, preserved fruits and vegetables, and brewed beer, in addition to all the farm work they did (feeding chickens, collecting eggs, milking cows, working vegetable gardens, harvesting). Of course, women didn't do all of that work alone, they taught their children how to do it and supervised their labour. Large families were preferred because children are inexpensive (cheap to feed and clothe) relative to the labour they produce under proper supervision. Expensive entertainment and education for children was still centuries away.
Cooking was always divided in all cultures. Men too often left the village for long enough that they had to cook their own meals. Weaving and tailoring was often men's work.
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!)
History is long - I'd call 14th century slightly before. The end of the medieval period does reach the 14th century, but most of the time period we are talking about didn't have it, and the culture effects of it would (as always) take longer to settle out.
I think you are completely right about demand pull being a deciding factor in adoption of new inventions. Many question why Rome never entered the industrial revolution, especially considering that they invented a steam engine[0].
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.
A more primitive spindle wheel was invented in the Warring States period in China:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/early-china/article/...
Women and children very much participate in farming back then, harvest was a “all hands on deck” situation.
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.
Bret Deveraux linked to estimates that 70% of producing clothes is spinning, 20% is weaving, and 10% is sewing.
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.
At times it was all hands on deck for harvest - but most of the time it wasn't and that rest is an important part of village life missing. As you say, drop spindles suck.
Many crops are not hands off. wheat chokes out weeds, but you need to weed the garden. You need to water crops in a drough - if you could get water (from a well or river). rice needs a lot of labor to manage water levels
Yes, but also the other side of the ratio includes everything like guilded craftsmen, monks, merchants, etc. Not exactly people who weren't doing work themselves.
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.
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.
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.
I agree. The main point here is that the inability to put the farm inside the walls provides necessary motivation to have people go out and get bit, which is what we need for the story to happen.
> You can't wall all the fields but you can wall the village.
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.
Cutting off some forest might help.
Just like in I guess a large portion of human history after farming started. You abandoned the fields and retreated to the walled hilltop when the enemy came. Maybe that's what we have been genetically conditioned to expect and that's why we have these zombie films and series.
People always talk about how reality is too boring, and that's why shows need to have spaceships bouncing around and explosion sounds and superhumans etc.
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.
I've seen clips of medieval reenactments, iirc in Poland they don't really hold back. But they try to use swords on people in full plate armor, which... does nothing, really.
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).
I agree with you, but we must admit that The Expanse has all of spaceships bouncing around, explosion sounds, and superhumans.
The funny thing about this is that pre modern cities featured in modern media are always surrounded by unformed grassland because it makes the shot more dramatic and it’s easier to do than showing lots of little farms growing in density up to the city walls.
Well, a little diversity in crops wouldn’t hurt. And most of the corn isn’t for humans
I wish the Banished developer hadn't abandoned it
Have you tried the Colonial Charter mod? Adds an insane level of content.
Also, there are now dozens of games that took the concept and ran with it. From Space Base to Manor Lords to Timberborn.
No I haven't, sadly I can't find the real one on Steam as it suffers the same problem every other Steam game does; hundreds of suspicious copy pastes of original mods.
Abandoned? What was unfinished? I was satisfied when I played it. My only complaint was something about population growth or the ageing of people being too quick IIRC.
A game with a similar feel is Frostpunk. It's set in the Victorian era during a fictional new ice age. Although it really goes in strongly for the model of a village evolving outwards from a central point, it does a lot of other things that are closer to what the article talks about. Like, it's very bleak and very hard. Your town will die a lot until you figure the game out. There are three classes of people: workers, engineers and children, and most people are just workers. You can pass a child labor law if you want children to work. Sickness and managing disease is a big part of the game. Roads can be curved and buildings are built in radiating circles, so most roads actually are curved.
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.
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.
Those kind of shooters do exist though, Arma being the prime example. Players often joke that it is a walking simulator despite being somewhat constrained in favor of a fun game over 100% realism. But you can easily spend 30 minutes hiking to the next objective just for a chance to take a shot at somebody or get shot in an ambush. It isn't conducive towards a quick 15 minute game, but it is very much a different style of game with people sneaking and hiding and being bastards peaking out through leaves in the bushes 1000m away to shoot you, versus a traditional FPS where you can shoot and battle people like a coked up machinegun toting gorilla multiple times within just a few minutes.
Yes. I still love the difficulty level menu from the original Deus Ex: Easy, Medium, Hard, and Realistic.
(Weight and bulk were actual considerations there, and you could limp, or even have to crawl, if your legs were wounded.)
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I'm all for more realism in an FPS game, but then the realism also has to apply to the NPCs, who have unlimited ammo, can see through walls or worse, shoot through them, who have no fear and thus not hide or not long enough, don't sneak around, don't have imperfect control over their actions.
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).
Not disagreeing with your point but: I have never seen any call of duty player who actually thinks you can actually carry twenty magazines worth of bullets or recover from a dozen gunshots by cowering behind a car. I have however seen many overconfident strategy and simulation game players talk as if playing civilization gives them a license to be confidently wrong about real world history and geopolitics.
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.
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.
From a fun perspective, this is unfortunate, because there is usually one or two weapons that are general purpose enough they should always be carried. The rest have some sort of gimmick that makes them useful only in certain circumstances (tank approaching, sniper area) or are just wacky (shrink ray, freeze ray, net gun). With the tiny weapon limit, the esoteric guns never get any playtime. Larger arsenal also encourages some kind of rock-paper-scissors resistance mechanism where critters take double damage against foos, but resistance to baz.
I think change was more so move from keyboard to also supporting controllers. Keyboards easily have 9 weapons on number keys and in some cases like quake nail gun even more on same key. Controllers just do not support this as easily. Thus move to things like wheels and other input methods.
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some of the Rainbow 6 games, and Arma, tend to enforce carry limits much more harshly. OG Operation Flashpoint I remember being unable to stand from prone if my leg was shot. Which made it fun if I had just succeeded at something and needed to complete a mission otherwise having to replay it 100 times to get that far without the leg injury, so I would just slowly crawl 3 kilometers in the dark.
Americas Army attempted to be a realistic FPS as a recruiting tool.
Boring as hell and didn't have that click-click-get-dopamine vibe of Call of Duty, etc.
Skyrim has a "realistic mode" where carrying too much makes you slower.
That "truth feels like a glitch" line really nails it. It's striking how quickly historical accuracy becomes uncanny when it clashes with our internalized image of the past
Yeah, I think when making a game, in general, fun is the first thing to consider. All these games are lumped into the article as "city builders", but Age of Empires and Sim City are completely different genres, just as one example.
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...
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.
I had a discussion with my son son about recent (2015-2019) Need For Speed games I worked on. He asked why we didn't include keeping track of fuel and actually stopping to use the gas station like in real life (in game you just drive through and it repairs your car). And why don't repairs require you to leave the car for a few days and cost tons of money?
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?!"
One of the first games I remember seeing (I was maybe 7 years old) was Test Drive, I still remember it features gas stations as checkpoints: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/b03NIAoH2g4/hq720.jpg?
my first thought! fond memories, I remember it as being really hard
Hey! Just wanted to say it's really cool to run across someone that worked on those games. NFS is one of my favorite franchises, and Payback was my favorite in the series. Good work!
It really depends on the audience though. I personally way prefer more realistic simulation like games, for example BeamNG. NFS has a broad appeal and is fun to play but it doesn’t feel anything like driving a real car. No offence though, I grew up with NFS underground 2 and it largely inspired my love of modified cars!
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.
Right, which is why I wrote "It wouldn't work well in our specific games."
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.
Interesting, thanks for sharing
Reminds me of an old joke from The Onion
https://theonion.com/ultra-realistic-modern-warfare-game-fea...
I can't find it now, but someone made an ultra-realistic D-Day simulator where you basically portray one of the guys who never made it to the beach in Saving Private Ryan.
Battlefield 1 opens with a series of short battles that you can't win. Every time you die the camera moves to another nearby soldier who is also being overrun, and you fight for a while then die again. You see the graves of each person you played who died. It's one of the most powerful openings of a war game I ever played and really drives home the reality that whilst what follows is fun, the real WW1 is one you probably would not have survived.
Thanks for sharing I skipped this title and missed that scene.
The "Johnny and the Dead" series by Terry Pratchett included a school mate of Johnny who liked to make computer games.. and he created a realistic game about flying your spaceship to some nearby star or somewhere. Everything was realistic.. you would stare at the black night of space for thousands of years (literally) while going there. For some reason people didn't flock to that game.
I guess they preferred more casual games like “Desert Bus” (1995), a really existing title, built to show how a realistic long-distance bus driving simulator would look like. It is still played today as a joke, mainly for charity events.
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.
> 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.
Especially with a static game seed, so even reloading won’t save you :)
Never let realism get in the way of game play :)
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.
The article does address this directly at the end, for what it’s worth.
Same for why sim city didn’t have parking
In particular, the complaint that 'most villages didn't grow into towns' is a pretty terrible one from a game design point of view, because you could say "Most X don't Y" about almost every game, because players want to do the _exceptional_, not the _every day_.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
City builders aren't really simulations of medieval life so much as power fantasies about escaping subsistence
Pretty much, in a way they're about having agency in a time when most people had none.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Good point, I mostly look at written history but art is a valid source that I forgot about.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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).
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.
These "lords" sounds suspiciously like belligerent parasites. How did they ever bamboozle the people to enforce their nonsense on the innocent?
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).
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.
The same way "wealth creators" do today?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything muses about that
Well when they have swords, horses, and armor, and you don't, your options are limited.
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].
We need the ability to recreate an authentic anarcho-syndicalist commune.
There were no electronic computers in the middle ages - so of all the computer games course are inaccurate! ;-)
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.
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.)
Are they trying to imply other city builders (or any game ever) are accurate? I want my Microwave Power Plant!
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…
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.
The author also suggests simulating flood walls. That is also a very .. local suggestion.
I urge you to try Ostriv. Ukrainian medieval villager community simulator.
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)
Ostriv is based on 18th century, that's hardly medieval.
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.
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.
Some more discussion previously:
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.
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.
Ultimately the goal of a game is "have fun", so anything that goes against that, including historical accuracy, has to make room for the fundamental property every game has to have. Even the 4x games like Victoria and Europa Universalies, no matter how accurate they try to be, is actually just about "being fun".
The Middle Ages in games and fiction function less as a historical period and more as a visual language
Not exactly. People just assume & expect the modern assumptions. They are baked into the games and gamer then assume they're correct.
And yet historians love to nitpick this stuff as if indexicality is the only goal of creative media...
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.
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.
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I'm talking about the tv show, not the games.
Nothing in the TV show takes place in the 20th century, either. The aesthetic in Fallout is what people in the 50s might have thought the year 2073 would be like, but it is not the 50s.
The TV show is in the same continuity as the games, same world different medium.
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All of Mr. Devereaux's work is wonderful including the series you linked, but I think that one its overly focused on the household. I think his two part series on "Lonely Cities"[1][2] is a lot better at giving you a feeling for a city. It is both less in depth and in that one he spends half his time complaining about how Hollywood gets it wrong, so of course YMMV.
[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...
"Peasant Simulator" could be a fun type of game.
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.
Medieval Dynasty attempts to do that. Despite having the word "dynasty" in its title, it's peasant centered. Early game is about building a house and trying to survive. Later game is building a village, recruiting people, assigning jobs to them, and essentially being the mayor. In many respects, it's a first-person village builder.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> Maybe he means British or French peasants?
He's a professional historian who ... unthinkable i know ... cites his sources in every article.
He mentions in the post that his focus is on Roman history, and that his discussion on peasants will be most applicable to the late Mediterranean antiquity
Sometimes you just need to read the sources that were linked to you:
> 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...