Fireside this week! I have just finished up a draft of a chapter (to be in one of those multi-multi-author companion volumes) on how video games (particularly more abstract simulation games) depict the ancient world. Writing that chapter led me to reengage with ancient city builders, particularly Caesar IV, Children of the Nile, Pharaoh: A New Era and Nebuchadnezzar. And in the process I had a lot of thoughts that didn’t fit into the chapter, so we’re definitely going to revisit this genre later this year (we’re also going to do a look at Imperator: Rome too, another fruit of this chapter). But what I want to muse on this week is how some differences in design aesthetics radically transform what city builders are about, as a way to explaining, to a degree why I think I bounced so hard off of Pharaoh: ANE and Nebuchadnezzar, despite being a longtime fan of the Caesar series and generally a fan of city builders.
And I think the best way to do this is to contrast what we might see as two ‘schools’ of city builder design, exemplified by something like Farthest Frontier (but Banished or indeed, even Cities: Skylines would work) on the one hand and Pharaoh: ANE and Neb. on the other hand.
We can start with a simple design question: why are you able to track individual citizens in Farthest Frontier (or Cities: Skylines II), but not able to do that in Neb.? Neb. does at least give your citizens names if you click on them (Pharaoh: ANE does not), but these don’t seem to be permanent entities tracked through the game, just names pulled from a file list. If specific workers are tied to specific houses, for instance, the game gives you no way to know. Now part of the answer is clearly that Neb. and P:ANE don’t do this because Pharaoh (1999) didn’t do this, for the same reason Caesar II or III (I never played the original Caesar) don’t do this: for games developed in the 1990s, keeping individual track of the condition of thousands of unique digital people in the city would have melted your computer. Instead, houses generate an abstract set of resources (workers) and workplaces consume those workers and the player’s imagination is left to fill in the rest. Workplaces generate ‘walkers’ (delivery units, mostly), but these cities are devoid of regular traffic – no one is heading to the theater to take in a show, taking a recreational walk, or walking to their place of work and then back home.
But of course now games absolutely can track that many individual digital people and all of their routines. My current City: Skylines II city has 225,000 people in it, all individually tracked with their own homes and families (may Colossal Order have pity on my CPU).1 Admittedly an extreme example, but Children of the Nile came out in 2004 and was already tracking all of your citizens, complete with their own family units, nutrition, health, happiness and so on, for a much smaller number of agents. This can be done and indeed, is a pretty standard feature in most modern city builders.
And I think the answer is that there are actually two kinds of city builders: games about cities as spaces for people and games about cities as systems for production. Most modern city builders are, in fact, the former, interested in the city as a place for people to live and work. Consequently, the simulation is focused on people, so as soon as the technology got good enough to simulate the people themselves, it started doing so, first in really halting ways (like the MySim mode of SimCity4) and now in more robust ways. Even earlier than that, these systems also tried shifting at least some agency – some control – away from the player. SimCity zones develop based on local factors; I recall a very young me being frustrated that I couldn’t simply command residential zones to produce high rises – you had to create the right conditions for that density and then, in the fiction of the simulation, your Sims built that highrise. Even though you place every building in Farthest Frontier directly and you can directly control individual settlers, you generally don’t: the game encourages you to let them do their thing in the urban spaces you’ve created (and they’ve built).
And here, the jump backwards in design for Neb. and P:ANE was quite sharp. I knew back when I played Caesar III in 1999, I was supposed to kind of imagine a real living city underneath the systems I was interacting with. By contrast, in 2021 or 2023, the decision not to have even the fig-leaf of such a simulation is a design choice. Instead, strip off the thin layer of paint and you realize that mechanically these games have more in common with Factorio or Satisfactory than they do with Farthest Frontier or Cities: Skylines. Cities are not living, breathing spaces for people in Neb. or P:ANE but rather mechanistic mega-factories for producing specific goods (mostly armies and monuments) and so what gets simulated are the elements of industrial production; people who aren’t workers don’t matter. Hell, the workers don’t really matter all that much either – neither game bothers to have all of the workers in your brickworks ever walk home.
A really good way to think about this: does the game have any systems to make it actually a negative event for the player if some modest slice, say, 10%, was suddenly raptured out of existence? In Farthest Frontier, that’s a potentially critical loss of labor. In Skylines, for an advanced city, it’s a catastrophe because you’ve probably expended a lot of resources educating those folks. In Pharaoh: A New Era, it is barely an inconvenience, as new settlers will instantly arrive from off-map; indeed, one bug in the game is that the system for getting rid of predators right now doesn’t work (police are supposed to do it, they don’t) and you’d think having crocodiles regularly eating citizens would be a game-breaking bug, but it is actually largely ignorable – a minor disruption in supply chains and nothing more (they added an option to turn off predators in the options to ‘fix’ the bug).
I want to develop that theme more later, digging into the mechanics and how and why they produce this result, but for now I’m going to keep moving. What I find fascinating is how this design sensibility seems attached to antiquity. Now of course I know that these games are intentional ‘throwbacks’ to the older Impressions city builders of the 1990s and borrow a lot of their design DNA from them. But Lethis: Path of Progress not withstanding, this is a style that mostly lives in antiquity and I think there’s a bit of design lineage worth noting here. In particular, Tilted Mill made Children of the Nile in 2004 and the game shows a real effort to break out beyond the old Impressions formula; in some ways Children of the Nile feels almost like a proto-Banished. But then they went and made Caesar IV (2006), which was a return to the Impressions formula before abandoning antiquity to make SimCity Societies and Hinterland, games which proceeded more in the direction of more people-focused simulations (and then collapsing sometime post-2010). And then of course came the ‘throwbacks’ with Nebuchadnezzar (2021) and Pharaoh: A New Era (2023).
Certainly some of that is the old Impressions influence, but I also think it speaks to the way the ancient world is understood by developers and the public. Medieval city builders have increasingly come to imagine cities as being driven by and fundamentally being about the people who live in them (with some exceptions, e.g. Stronghold). But ancient cities are instead instrumental: economic engines for social elites to produce things they want with. Notably nearly all of the ancient city builders explicitly place the player as a ruler, a pharaoh, a Roman governor, a Mesopotamian king (in contrast to the player as a mayor or other sort of elected representative) and generally their scenarios are set by having the political powers that be set objectives for the city.
In Farthest Frontier, the narrative is that the city is built as a refuge for its citizens. The same is true in Banished. A Cities: Skylines city mostly exists for the sake of existing; the game is open-ended in giving the player freedom in the kind of city they build, but the feedback systems prioritize citizen satisfaction. But a city in Nebuchadnezzar or Pharaoh exists to fulfill specific objectives: train some soldiers, build some monuments, earn ‘favor’ with the ruler by shipping bulk goods out. The city – and its citizens – does not exist for its own sake, it exists to serve the ruling class. Indeed, in a real sense, a city in Nebuchadnezzar or Pharaoh: A New Era isn’t really a city: it is a Factorio factory that insists in pretending that its belts are people and that little people live in its factories, even when both things are clearly not true.
And to bring this musing to a close, I don’t think that is an accident, I think it speaks to the public conception of ancient cities, which views them instrumentally, from the perspective of ancient elites far more than viewing them as spaces for people. And that perception is in turn powered by a vision of ancient history where the ‘important’ things are kings, empires, armies and monuments, but not the experience of regular people living in those societies. It is a narrow, overly limited view of the ancient past and I think, quite frankly, we can do better.
And I think that is also part of why I found both Nebuchadnezzar and Pharaoh: A New Era feeling oddly empty, a bit soulless and not all that fun. After all, at this point, Factorio exists and can simulate economic mega-engines at far greater complexity than they can, without the thin veneer of ‘this is a city’ paint, so if I want to build a gigantic factory to churn out widgets (or rockets), I can play Factorio. And if I want to build an actual city that has people in it…well, I can play Farthest Frontier or Cities: Skylines II.
On to Recommendations:
I’ve written some things and been on some podcasts! In writing, I penned an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on cost-free ways departments could be more collegial to their non-tenure-line faculty, including such basic advice as “Equally promote the achievements of your faculty members,” both tenure-track and non; I will leave it to you to guess whose department has studiously ignored that one of their own placed an article in the Chronicle. In either case, having now complained written about higher education in The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Chronicle, I have completed the higher-ed-hat-trick and now await my commemorative jacket.
For podcasts, already out now is my appearance on the History Hack podcast, talking about the Roman army of the Middle Republic and its astounding military capacity. Coming soon (and available already for their patrons) is an appearance talking about the army of the early Roman Republic with the always-excellent Partial Historians. I have a few others coming up as well. But on to things other people have done!
Much like the better city builders seem to target the Middle Ages, we’ve got a couple of good medieval things to share this week. Over at her blog, Going Medieval, Eleanor Janega has an excellent article talking about the global impact of the Black Death and the danger of treating it as a purely European phenomenon, a product of a supposedly uniquely backwards Europe. That fits into a broader problem of binary thinking about Medieval Europe, where it must either be the summit and cradle of all civilization (it wasn’t) or the worst, poorest most backward part of the world (not that either). In practice, Medieval Europe was, for the most part (especially post-1000) a broadly typical part of the long stretch of settled, agrarian states running across Afro-Eurasia. Neither remarkably poor, nor remarkably rich (though it was remarkably fragmented). The corrective is valuable.
Likewise well worth your time is a blog post by Fraser McNair on “Patrimonialisation,” by which he means the process by which appointed offices in the Carolingian period transition into becoming hereditary patrimonies, leading to the form of distributed hereditary rule we see in the high and late Middle Ages (and strongly associate with the whole period). A good reminder both that the fully hereditary model of local rule was not the original or only system in the Middle Ages but also in how such systems come to be; it reminded me in particular of the processes we see in some ancient empires whereby things like satrapies or nomarchies (in Achaemenid Persia or Old Kingdom Egypt, respectively) drifted into becoming hereditary.
Finally, this defense of funding for the liberal arts by Holly J. Humphrey, on the value of a broad liberal education for aspiring medical professionals is exactly the sort of defenses of the liberal arts that we need (and a tip of the hat to Joshua Nudell’s blog for bringing it to my attention).
For this week’s book recommendation, a volume I’ve long been meaning to recommend, T. Hone, Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898-1945 (2018). That the job of the United States Navy in the Second World War was a difficult one – starting the fight losing most of the battle-fleet and then having to engage in war in two oceans at the same time (albeit backed by a tremendous shipbuilding industry) – is not hard to see. But one of the things that remains striking about the USN’s performance in WWII is that in engagement after engagement, the USN learned. Whereas the IJN and the Kriegsmarine remained to a significant degree inflexible in their approach, the USN continually developed over the course of the war, employing new tactics, organizational systems and technologies. The result, of course, was the finely honed naval war machine of 1944 and 1945, seemingly capable of accomplishing anything even when operating half the world away.
Hone’s approach starts earlier, tracing the emergence of a new kind of officer, with broader and more deliberate training in the 1890s and early 1900s. The USN of the 1800s had been a deeply traditional institution, sharply resistant to change (as the students in my US Naval History course are learning right now), but this new approach to officer training and the new crop of officers it produced steadily transformed the way the USN learned. Officers, now motivated to improve both technologies and methods (and with the merger of engineering and general officer training, the skills to understand both) worked collaboratively (through naval boards), exercises (the famous ‘Fleet Problems’) and competition (e.g. gunnery competition to improve accuracy) to improve. The result was the USN able to roll with the punches in WWII and come back not only stronger but smarter, a pace of organizational learning which resounds from almost anything one reads about the war.
Hone has a real skill for finding comprehensible narratives that demonstrate his point, picking out key inflection points where the reader can track the development of, say, gunnery systems or surface warfare doctrine. The result is a book that, while quite valuable for the specialist, is also very approachable for the lay reader. If you are unfamiliar with the operations in question, particularly the USN’s operations in WWII, you may need recourse to Wikipedia for a map or two – the maps the book has are excellent, but relatively few, but the argument is never hard to follow and Hone sign-posts it really well. My sense is this book is already becoming a standard for the instruction of officers (some of the NROTC kids seem to have been assigned it) and it is excellent for that, but also excellent for the civilian reader who wants to understand how agile, learning organizations come to be that way.
In re: dark surfaces, it may also be from the way cats seek out warmth. Dark surfaces absorb more heat from sunlight, so are warmer (all other things being equal)–perfect for chilly kitties 🙂
[Dons Physicist hat]
Note that dark surfaces also radiate heat faster than light ones. Do the Research Cats seek out dark surfaces that aren’t in sunlight or otherwise warmer than other places nearby?
Radiation lose is mostly dependent on the color in the IR, which may not match color in the visible (for paint for instance, you tend to see the binder rather than the pigment in the IR). And in any case, radiation tends to be secondary to atmospheric loses in an atmosphere anyway. Dark will on average be warmer.
But we all know the real reason cats like dark — Associated with witches, Witches wear black and operate at night, therefore cats and darkness go together. Simple, straightforward cat behavior.
Bret . . inquiring minds want to know more!
Of course, the experiments will have to be done with frictionless spherical cats in a vacuum…
There’s a meme out there showing a fox sleeping on a headstone with comments about reincarnation and the like, concluding with the observation that the stone was dark and therefore warm.
Ollie’s training was deficient. Dark cats are taught to shed on light surfaces, and white cats on dark surfaces. My current cat is gray and white, and spends all day running back and forth among various-colored furniture to maximize cat-hair visibility. But it sounds like Bret has a good situation — I won’t spill the beans.
My grey and white cat sleeps on anything but he really likes where coverlets to shed his grey fur on and darker ones to shed the white hairs. Of course Percy and Ollie don’t have those alternatives.
Regarding the differing views of cities in games: How did people of the past view cities? I know in the more recent past (say, the Industrial Revolution) most poor people viewed cities as the key to economic prosperity, while elites were split between viewing them as extensions of their factories (see “company towns”) and viewing them as a blight (Tolkien exemplifies this view). I’ve read that in the Middle Ages cities were viewed more as investments by the elite than as places for people, which makes some intuitive sense given the Chain of Creation and some other aspects of society at the time. I don’t know much about how peasants or merchants viewed cities, outside of them being refuges in times of crisis and markets for goods. And I’m even less familiar with the ancient world….Bronze Age elites tended to be viewed as gods or representatives of gods, so I can’t imagine them being overly concerned about the needs of peasants.
If the games presenting cities as factories are representative of how the elite viewed cities in the past, they present a valuable (though as you say, over-represented) viewpoint, in a way that’s quite different from movies or books. And while the view of the elite is overly-narrow and over-represented in other artworks, I think all viewpoints are available to the artist, and putting the player in these roles is a valuable way to make the player understand those roles better. And if the city-sim game provides the peasant’s view of cities, this has all the advantages described above PLUS providing the player with a more visceral understanding of life through the eyes of under-represented groups.
If these games don’t map to historic viewpoints, of course, the value is significantly less, perhaps even negative (from an educational standpoint). Your essay on the dangers of verisimilitude comes to mind in such cases. This is especially true if elites didn’t view cities as a means of production, as it reinforces some of the more dangerous errors perpetuated in other media.
I think the pharaoh cared about the peasants, at least in theory. The gods love you, and so does their earthly representative. And the pharaoh was often depicted holding agricultural implements.
“The gods love you, and so does their earthly representative.”
That’s a modern monotheistic way to view things. I know it didn’t hold in the past, at least not universally–it depended on the deity, the status of the person, the specific religious context, etc. Nor did the idea that the gods love you necessarily prevent them from inflicting tremendous harm upon you, even in monotheistic religions–look at how slavery was justified in the (Christian) Southern USA.
I’d need some evidence that Egyptian (or Sumerian or Babylonian or whatever) religious beliefs included the idea that the gods love everyone before I’d be willing to accept it.
“And the pharaoh was often depicted holding agricultural implements.”
True, but Trump was depicted holding a combat rifle and Soviet iconography included agricultural implements. Further, Egyptian art in particular was highly stylized and regulated (for example, there were very specific ratios for the human form), so it’s not clear that we can extrapolate from an image to an attitude.
Ultimately I agree, the pharaohs needed to have SOME concern for the wellbeing of their peasants. But there’s a difference between being concerned for them as thinking, independent beings with their own desires and goals and dreams, and being concerned for them as part of the livestock.
I’ve been reading a book of translated material from ancient Egypt. Divine benevolence toward ordinary people isn’t as prominent as it is in Christianity, but it’s there and I had no trouble finding it.
“[Amen-Ra] hears the cry of him that is oppressed. He is gracious of heart to him that appeals to him. He delivers the timid man from the man of violence. He regards the poor man and considers his misery.”
The examples of Trump and the USSR support my point better than yours. The hammer and sickle was a message, claiming that the Soviet government served ordinary workers. And Trump posing with a gun is likewise a message that Trump supports gun owners.
Yes, Egyptian art was highly standardized; that does not mean the standards were arbitrary. There must have been a reason the king had himself depicted with a flail and shepherd’s crook, and I believe that the reason was that he presented himself as concerned with agriculture.
“The hammer and sickle was a message, claiming that the Soviet government served ordinary workers. And Trump posing with a gun is likewise a message that Trump supports gun owners.”
Some might wonder if either of those claims was true.
That said, if the pharaoh was depicted to some audience as caring about X, that suggests the audience was expected to care about whether he cared about X.
Does the flail and crook perhaps mean that the Pharoah, is lord of the soil, because Amen-Ra placed him (or her in the case of one of the female pharaohs) there? Is it as if the Pharaoh were say I am the person who organizes the planting and the harvest, around the floods, and who keeps you fed?
Some might wonder if either of those claims was true.
I think the Soviet claim was largely true as regards industrial workers (especially after de-stalinization), it was …. much less true as regards agricultural ones, which means the symbol was at least partly deceptive. (not that the transition to capitalism was great for agricultural workers either). the purpose of the symbol was deliberately to conflate the interests of industrial workers and peasants, which was always much less than true.
Of course the hammer and sickle was later borrowed by lots of other regimes, and some of them treated farmworkers a lot better than the Soviets did.
Sumerian and Akkadian kings often boast of how they studied at school and carried earth to re-build temples. They also invoke the favour of the gods in saying that they protected the poor from the rich, looked after the widow and the orphan, dispensed justice equally and so on. So at least there was an awareness that the peasantry were not there just to be fleeced.
All rulers have to balance their dependence on aristocrats (or plutocrats) with keeping same in check as their nearest rivals. Enlisting the commons is a basic ploy. Of course, they often get it wrong – usually by favouring the top too much.
In medieval Europe, kings and commons often allied together in an attempt to check the power of the nobility. The idea that all societies have cohesive classes of “the rich” and “the poor” who naturally oppose each other is a modern one which became popular thanks to the French Revolution and the spread of Marxism.
In medieval Europe, kings and commons often allied together in an attempt to check the power of the nobility. The idea that all societies have cohesive classes of “the rich” and “the poor” who naturally oppose each other is a modern one which became popular thanks to the French Revolution and the spread of Marxism.
Another example — most ancient Greek tyrants were wealthy men whose power rested on the support of the masses, not oligarchs who allied with other oligarchs to keep the poor in line.
It is also common in the modern world for a dictator and the public to share a goal of suppressing the elites, and for the dictator to explicitly point this out and present himself as the champion of masses.
Bullseye, the modern dictatorships that come first to my mind are Russia, China and North Korea. I wouldn’t say that any of them make a big point of being seen to attack the nomenklatura. (Or actually do so.) Which examples are you thinking of?
“How did people of the past view cities? I know in the more recent past (say, the Industrial Revolution) most poor people viewed cities as the key to economic prosperity, while elites were split between viewing them as extensions of their factories (see “company towns”) and viewing them as a blight (Tolkien exemplifies this view). I’ve read that in the Middle Ages cities were viewed more as investments by the elite than as places for people, which makes some intuitive sense given the Chain of Creation and some other aspects of society at the time.”
That´s the English people.
A simple contrast from the end of 19th century:
About 1880, the census of 1881 found 24,6 million people in England. Of whom 32% (about 8 million) lived outside cities. Greater London had about 4,7 million people so it makes roughly 4,7 million people in Greater London, 12 million in other cities, 8 million in countryside.
In 1873, “Return of the Owners of Land” identified the landowners of Britain, excluding London (as in Domesday Book) but including the other cities. One Bateman investigated major landowners and published results in 1880s… including the homes they reported.
Out of the around 1400 wealthier landowners of England (including those who held much real estate in cities, or London), just 6 said they lived in cities. A small number (under 20) did not give residence, so at least 98, but probably 99,5% of elite lived in countryside along with mere 40% of population.
Spain of 1900 had about 32% of population living in cities of all kind. And just 2,5% in Madrid.
In 1931, about 240 Grandees were identified. From what I recall, their birthplaces, as proxies for their parents´ residences around 1900… 68% Madrid. 13% abroad, of which 5% Paris. Only 19% in Spain outside Madrid – and most of them in major cities. Only 4% or so “outside major cities” – small towns? countryside?
So, we have English elites who bought mansions in countryside – and not in villages either, they built them separated by wide parks from any clustered villages they owned – even if they were funded by urban enterprises. And you have the Spanish elites who lived in cities, abroad or in Madrid, far from the land that funded their urban lifestyle. Which of them was the exception?
“I don’t know much about how peasants or merchants viewed cities, outside of them being refuges in times of crisis and markets for goods.”
How many merchants ever lived permanently far from cities?
“And I’m even less familiar with the ancient world….Bronze Age elites tended to be viewed as gods or representatives of gods, so I can’t imagine them being overly concerned about the needs of peasants. ”
They needed to keep their estates profitable.
But if you are building a city from the position of a god-king, like several of them did – Echnaton with Akhetaten, Sargon II with Dur-Sharrukin…
two considerations
First, if you are in position to build a city, the people are your assets *whether in city or in countryside*. You cannot found a city unless you already control the people in the countryside or in other cities where they are before, therefore you must consider where they are more useful to them, and whether moving them to the city might backfire.
Second, consider the city as your own living environment. Where do you plan on living?
Unfortified palace in unfortified city (Knossos, Akhetaten)?
Unfortified townhouse in a walled city (Medici-Riccardi palace)?
Fortified castle in a walled circuit of a city (London Tower)?
Unfortified palace in unfortified suburb of a walled city (the West End palaces – Westminster, Whitehall, St. James., Buckingham…)?
Altogether away from any walled city, which are pure assets? Then where? In a fortress unassociated by settlement (Windsor Castle)? Etc.
All major landowners maintained houses in London, and spent the Season (spring to mid-summer) there. Those involved in affairs of state spent a lot of time there. But they were closely identified with their country estates, which were the centres of patronage networks across the county.
My guess is that Spanish elites were more dependent on court patronage.
Luckily, there’s already a series on this blog on the topic of ancient religion, including “Bronze Age elites as gods”.
I think that to a significant degree, peoples’ view of cities can be extrapolated from the actual economic situation, which was that before the Industrial Revolution, most people didn’t live in cities due to the labor demands of agriculture, thus most production happened in villages/hamlets. Notably including clothing production, be that for subsistence or for sale, the latter mode gradually standardizing into the putting-out system.
I would also point out that in general, even the oldest games (my experience being with the 1999 Pharaoh) make the player care about the wellbeing of the population, and this is actually a central feature of the game. Certainly, this is done in a somewhat odd fashion — people don’t go shopping from their home to the bazaar, instead the
doordashbazaar delivery walker goes to their home. They don’t go to the entertainment venue to see the show, the venue spawns a walker that entertains them when it passes their home. They don’t go to religious services, the temple spawns a walker (a priest)… They don’t go to the physician, the physician building spawns a walker… And they don’t commute to their place of employment, theywork from homeOK this one actually doesn’t quite work right. Buildings that need labor spawn a walker — so far so good, it’s yet another inversion of the same type — but upon successfully finding any occupied residence within a short commuting distance, they proceed to actually draw employees from the citywide total labor pool, which is just a number. Thus there isn’t an actual correspondence of the form “Bob lives in the northeast corner of the map and works in the brickworks at the southwest corner”, but the player can definitely notice that the industrial area in the southwest, employing hundreds of people, is only supplied by two crude huts, housing a total of thirty people (which includes the children and elderly). Also, people don’t have skills or specializations, all working-age adults are interchangeable (except scribes, the lazy sods). That’s 1999 with at least one scenario specifying a minimum population of 30,000 IIRC.Moreover, the gameplay is largely centered around satisfying the quality-of-life needs of the residents. Firstly, one of the most common type of win condition is a minimum average quality-of-life (called “prosperity rating”). Secondly, for just about every goal the player has, for just about everything they want to do, it’s better if the population lives at a higher standard of living. (One of the primary constraints of the game is exactly the limits on the player’s ability to deliver this in a way that works — that doesn’t bankrupt the city financially, that doesn’t employ more workers to produce and deliver goods and services to houses than the number of workers who live in those houses, and that geometrically fits both internally and into the bits of buildable land.) Thirdly, if the player shirks this duty of care or bungles it particularly badly, the people aren’t passive subjects, they simply pack up and leave.
To this end, any residential structure always tells the player what the people living there aspire to next; this is not even limited to goods and services, but includes the general desirability of the area. (Yes, there is yet another bit of weirdness here. The people are not real-life NIMBYs who complain that a modest apartment would ruin the neighborhood character; they instead judge that a modest apartment would be too good for the neighborhood, because it lacks sufficient character.)
On the one hand, the game goes beyond the mere necessity of seeing the population’s wants in bulk, and embodies an extremely normativist(?) view of people’s wants, where literally everybody wants the same things, in the exact same sequence — there is literally no household that wants access to a courthouse before they can buy beer. On the other hand, I very much welcome its view that in a sense, the purpose cities exist for is production, even if the sole purpose for that production is consumption. (Despite this being a post-Industrial Revolution situation projected into antiquity.) The urban form enables efficient production; in turn production enables consumption. That which has not been produced cannot be consumed, and it is, ahem, a view of the extractive aristocrat that they need not care about their productiveness because it doesn’t limit their consumption. I consider it a most regrettable state of affairs that in several of the most productive urban areas of the whole world, these facts are apparently underappreciated, thus the construction of more housing — to allow more people to both personally partake in the benefits of higher productivity, and to produce more so that more is available even for others — is vociferously opposed.
Even in the game (again, the 1999 Pharaoh) by far the largest share of production, or at least labor, is used internally, sustaining an elevated level of consumption that would be impossible without the city. And the second largest share is usually used for trade with peer cities, to reap the benefits of specialization and division of labor on a large scale (yes, yes, in-game this sometimes comes off as ham-fisted, when industries are blocked off for reasons other than their raw materials not being present on the map). The share of labor that is extracted into aristocratic ends — armies and monuments — generally comes third. One can very well regard that as almost an epiphenomenon, and for that matter as something that democratic societies may also well wish to do. Say, to have an armed force with which to protect the trade routes critical to its prosperity, a topic which both receives several missions in the game, and which is in the news these days.
As a consequence of the last point, a sudden population decline (plague! malaria! the curse of a disrespected Bast! incompetent play (or the curse of an offended Osiris) leading to famine or a district-demolishing fire!) can very much be disastrous to the player. Since most of the labor is more or less directly harnessed to maintaining the city itself, a sudden labor shortage can swiftly knock out any of the many, many interwoven services and infrastructures defining the quality of life available to residents, leading to them emigrating from the city, exacerbating the labor shortage (or for that matter leading to them dying in a sudden-population-decline event). In fact, unless the player previously had a massive unemployment rate buffering the labor pool, the most convenient place to put the cut is exactly on the “aristocratic” extractive labor uses, since there the result is merely delay, not a propagating collapse. No bricks for the mastaba? Oh well. No apothecaries or physicians or priests or entertainers or firemen or bazaar delivery workers? Oh shit. A gold mine collapsed? Annoying. A granary collapsed? Disastrous.
>To this end, any residential structure always
>tells the player what the people living there
>aspire to next; this is not even limited to
>goods and services, but includes the general
>desirability of the area. (Yes, there is yet another
>bit of weirdness here. The people are not real-life
>NIMBYs who complain that a modest apartment
>would ruin the neighborhood character; they
>instead judge that a modest apartment would
>be too good for the neighborhood, because
>it lacks sufficient character.)
Caesar II, a game of broadly similar vintage, has a similar dynamic as I recall, with housing advancing until it hits a ‘cap’ imposed by desirability and services. I recall Caesar III expanding on that but not the details because I was never as familiar with it and never played Pharaoh at all.
But it was pretty clear to me that the dynamic here isn’t “insulae are too good for the neighborhood” so much as “this area is a literal shantytown of hovels because there aren’t enough people who want to live here badly enough to justify building an insula.”
Land that aristocrats will build villas and palaces on, of course, is so desirable that there’s no chance of an insula being built on the same site; presumably the owners of the villa or palace can handily outbid anyone else.
Yes, that sentence was a bit odd, since desirability follows the simple rules of higher quality housing adds land value, lower quality drops it.
Caesar 2 went on gog n 2020 (maybe 2019) and I did a playthrough, the system and C3 through emperor are the same or close to it, a certain land value and sequence of services are needed, plus enough space. 2 might have a population requirement, 3 does not, a house will develop as good as it can get even if mostly empty, then people will move in if space is available.
Otherwise the comment you are responding to is accurate (Another reason I found the twitter thread strange, the games do require taking care of citizens as a goal.)
I think the point is that a present-day American NIMBY would find it extremely peculiar to regard “higher-quality housing” as synonymous with “higher-density housing.” Obviously urban density in these games is limited by available ancient-world construction methods so we’re not exactly talking about “Billionaires’ Row” here, but the best available commoner housing would easily be classified as low- to mid-rise apartment buildings in a modern U.S. residential context, and would be anathema in a typical white-collar suburban McMansion Hell.
At least to me, the oddest part of that sentence (although this may have been slightly tongue-in-cheek) is that in the contrast between in-game ancient-world attraction to moderate urban density versus present-day suburbanized NIMBY aversion, the tag of “weirdness” is attached to the former and not to the latter, since the modern NIMBY view of single-family urban housing — i.e. low-density sprawl with few if any amenities in walking distance is not only acceptable but actually desirable — would be deeply anachronistic in an era prior to mass automobile ownership, barring whatever tiny sliver of wealthy elites could afford to have any urban amenities they might want on a daily basis provided for them on the spot by live-in servants and/or slaves. (I guess this does fit with Bret’s frequent observation that modern-day laypeople looking at premodern history tend to imagine themselves in the positions of aristocratic elites, and tend to downplay or ignore the experiences of the vast majority of the non-elite population.)
IIRC, while the earlier impressions City Builder games basically went on a “higher quality housing=more people” thing, the latter ones actually tended to have a two-tier system fo “commoner housing” (where that was still the case) and “Mansions” (I think they were called different things?) for the elites, who had much higher requirements, didn’t hold many population but did provide other benefits (taxes, soldiers, etc.)
Response to skinner: the NIMBY part wasn’t the odd point — I’ve done some work and research with property values, infrastructure planning, and such. Am very familiar with the “This parking lot is a valuable historical treasure, building some houses on it will ruin the neighborhood” crowd. The odd bit was just the “in game, people think an apartment building is too good for the neighborhood.”
Well it doesn’t seem so odd if you think of non-elite residential property ownership the way people at most times and most places in human history would’ve done — the modern American way of doing home construction and residential real estate, where a wealthy developer builds vast tracts of single-family homes as uniform and regimented as a monocropped farm field, and where “upgrading” one’s home outside of a fairly narrow range of small-scale renovations is generally taken to refer to selling the house altogether and buying a new one in a different tract monocropped with a different species of house, is profoundly weird by just about any standard outside of the North American continent and/or prior to the past century or less. For the vast majority of the urbanized human experience, building multi-unit housing on what had once been a single-family plot would seem like a perfectly logical response to an area getting nicer and more expensive!
Aside from the effects of car-centric transportation planning, I think Americans also tend not to want to perceive (due to our ideological self-image as a land of freedom and private property rights and so on) the extreme restrictiveness of modern U.S. residential zoning codes that tend to rule out many otherwise logical housing types, like the old-style New England “triple-decker” three-unit apartment buildings that had been a way for poor immigrant families to make ends meet in an area that might otherwise be “too nice” by splitting costs between multiple households in the same extended family. Just imagine in Caesar or Pharaoh or Zeus, if every time you connected a neighborhood to a supply of olive oil or built a new amphitheater, the walker passing through the neighborhood had to be accompanied by a herald announcing to the residents that the city was magnanimously loosening its zoning restrictions to allow them to upgrade their homes by narrowing the required setback distances or removing the ban on kitchens above the ground floor or whatever.
“is profoundly weird by just about any standard outside of the North American continent”
Yeah. Americans like to brag about freedom while wrapping themselves in chains.
* draconian drug laws, including legalized police theft (civil forfeiture) and difficulty getting enough painkillers when medically needed
* draconian sex work laws (prostitution is way closer to being legal in every other developed country)
* massively restricted property rights, as you say
* casual acceptance of the fact that cops might just kill you if they feel like it and can handwave seeing you as a threat. also of police corruption.
* practically limited freedom of mobility for anyone who can’t drive
* practically limited freedom to start businesses, because of health insurance costs — the US is near the bottom of the OECD in self-employment and small business
But hey, it’s easy to get handguns, and the rich don’t much in taxes, so rah-rah, land of the free!
*don’t pay much in taxes
When most people lived in the countryside, the city acquired an aura of wonder. Just like Arcadian visions of the countryside arise when most people live in cities.
Good point
The elite eye view of ancient cities probably has a lot to do with the elite bias of ancient sources.
One still quoted phrase in German is “Stadtluft macht frei” = the air in a city makes free. It usually refers to how people out in the countryside were bound to the landowner (leibeigenschaft, part of the feudal system) but someobdy who managed to run away and become a citizen of a city was thereby free (though as layperson I don’t know how difficult it was to become a citizen in the medieval time – in modern times, you needed enough money and the right religion to apply and be granted citizenship, a lot of people who lived in a city weren’t full citizens with all rights).
But once you lived in a city – even without full citizenship – you were not only free from serfdom, you were also free to learn anything (in theory) and instead of becoming a peasant because your father etc. had been one, you could become an apprentice to a smith or a baker or… (at least in theory, in practice different Zünfte (trade associations) had entrance rules, so if you were not the son of a smith, it would be harder to be accepted as apprentice.
And back then, the apprentice had to pay for apprenticeship, since the Master was loosing time instructing them, and also telling trade secrets. So that was also a barrier, compared with today.
Today, we still think of cities as freedom compared to rural countryside because of the anonymity (no matter how small my million village may seem in daily life). Nobody cares if two men are living together in one apartment, or who isn’t a member of the shooting club, who doesn’t go to catholic church on sundays…
That in turn leads to a certain segment to denounce cities as dens of sin etc., which in turn may also make them more attractive to the rest of population?
The rule in England was that a serf who was not reclaimed after a year and a day became free. Usually by moving to a town. Since towns and cities were population sinks (more deaths than births), they only grew by immigration, and opportunities opened up a lot.
The old Sierra City-Builders (of which Pharaoh: A New Era is a direct copy, quite unashamedly) do not map to old view-points at all. Not only in the macro (city-as-goal-fulfiller as Brett points out, which comes somewhat also from the 90’s philosophy of video games needing campaigns and thus winnable missions), but also in the micro of specific design philosophies. Outside of the Roman Expire, planned cities being put down in the middle of nowhere were extremely rare (real life Ancient Egypt amounted to like 5 of them over the entirety of its existence), and I’ll bet my hat that ancient cities did not control their expansion of residential districts via Zoning.
What also is a massive departure from antiquity is the very modern economics view of money and people. They had to pretend that Egypt had a unified, freely exchangeable currency, and that this currency was not only the major, but the only factor determining the ruler’s wealth. And then there’s the matter of unemployment: If you build a perfect paradise of a city where every laborer is living in the best possible housing, all goods are being produced to absolute excess, and no taxes are being collected, then if 30% of your populace do not have a job, somehow the citizens will still consider it a hellhole. If those same 30% are made to work in a Papyrus Workshop which will never, ever, over the entire game produce a single unit of papyrus (because you’re already overproducing and the storehouses are full), somehow the city happiness shoots up. This “unemployment means unhappiness” assumption is one that only holds under modern, salary-based capitalist systems. It would not actually appear in a subsistence-focused agrarian society (and quite rightly, in the people-focused simulation of Children of the Nile, it’s not a factor – people with all their needs met will just idle with no negative effect).
Is Stronghold really a city builder? I mean it did have that free build mode which could serve as one, but at least when I played it ages ago, I was mostly drawn towards the competitive ‘build your castle and besiege that of your opponents’ multiplayer mode. Of course, it wasn’t a great simulator at that either; I vaguely recall your collections on siege warfare and noting how Stronghold sieges, despite being ostensibly medieval, seem to function far more like early modern sieges, with a big focus on firepower and designing your fortifications geometry to maximize fire output while minimizing fire intake. But I do tend to think of it as a RTS game more akin to StarCraft or the Age of Empires series, not a city builder.
I don’t know if you’ve ever played it, but I would really like to see your take on Avalon Hill’s board game and then later computerized Advanced Civilization. Not a city builder at all, but focused on the ancient Mediterranean, and a kind of highly abstracted empire builder mostly focused on trade, wealth acquisition from said trade, and recovering from the inevitable disasters that crop up periodically.
Just want to chime in as another AH Advanced Civilization fan.
(Need to look into the computer versions one of these days.)
(Note for those playing at home, this game came before the series of Civilization computer games by Sid Meier, and are not related to them except for the basic concept.)
At least the computer version I played can be found on some abandonware sites. I need to run it on dosbox, which is easy on the hardware but you do have to know how to set up and use dosbox. Also, while it does come AI supported, the AI is as dumb as a bag of rocks, so if you play with any seriousness, it’s not going to be much of a challenge.
I’d call Stronghold a city builder/RTS hybrid. It’s definitely not a pure city builder but the economic management is way more complex than what you’d see in a typical RTS.
The job of the USN in WW2 may have not been easy, but it was a plum job compared to others: take the Regia Marina, forced to fight an opponent whose Mediterranean fleet was double its size and without literally enough fuel to move its battle squadrons. Or the Marine Nationale, since its main action in WW2 was to be bombed by their erstwhile allies…
It wasn’t easy for *any* navy in WW2, but the Trent Hone book is about how navies as organisations of people reacted to the problems they were facing. Emphasis on people, not technical innovation, before someone brings up the Type XXI submarine.
As you point out it wasn’t easy for the Marine Nationale, but they weren’t playing a major role in the war for long enough to make a comparison.
Vincent O’Hara, another US naval historian who has collaborated with Trent Hone on books, did a YouTube talk with Drachinifel (“The Regia Marina in WW2”). He said that the Italian navy was also an impressive “learning organisation” in WW2.
I haven’t yet watched Drachinifel’s video (it’s so long), but at the moment O’Hara books are quite high in my to-read list (which may not mean much, since it includes close to a thousand titles); the main works I’ve read on the Regia Marina in WW2 are Sadkovich’s and Bragadin’s, plus some publications from the Ufficio Storico dello Stato Maggiore della Marina Militare (or simply USSMM).
I wouldn’t know about our navy as a learning organisation, my impression is that they were too fuel-starved to put in action any lesson learned, but when I began to take an interest about it I was impressed by how powerful were some of our most modern battleships and cruisers, something I wouldn’t have never imagined before.
There’s an interesting point that the Italian navy’s fuel concerns might not have been as big of a deal in a “normal” war, that wasn’t a World War, when fuel could reasonably have been imported and it wasn’t a case of “Whoops, suddenly literally ALL THE FUEL IN THE WORLD is being used for war stuff”
Doesn’t matter how much of the worlds fuel was being used: any of it that was heading for Italy would have had to steam past the RN bases at Gibraltar and Alexandria. I don’t see them letting that happen very often.
A Finnish senior naval officer recently published a book of the Regia Marine‘s motor torpedo boat operations on Lake Ladoga. (Naturally, the book was written to get historical lessons about organising in a multi-national operation on Finnish waters.) They shipped four boats there through over the Alps, through Germany, across the Baltic and over a couple of isthmuses in Finland. The operations they pursued were not decisive for the war, and cut short by the winter, but on tactical level, the Italians fought well and bravely, showing innovative spirit to logistical and organisational problems. The contrast was especially marked to the general incompetence the German flotilla fighting on Ladoga demonstrated.
This story increased my respect towards our Italian NATO allies considerably. They have a naval tradition to be proud of.
I’ve never heard of it, is the book available in English ? Anyway, this doesn’t surprise me, the Italian Navy has a long tradition of using motor torpedo boats, frogmen and other non-conventional means, dating back to WWI when half its strategy consisted in sinking Austro-Hungarian battleships with motor torpedo boats so small they couldn’t even cross the Adriatic on their own…
The flip side of this is that the USN’s problems may have been both slight compared to those of other armed services in World War II, and large by the standards of people NOT fighting a world war.
(That said, I think there is a lot to be said for comparative history. It would be interesting to make comparisons with similar navies facing similar problems.)
> It makes sense, but is still striking how much both cats are drawn to dark surfaces, where they presumably feel better hidden.
My boyfriend’s family cat is well-known for checking all laps in a room and settling in on whoever had the darkest trousers/skirt. Interesting since she’s light-coloured – she’d blend in much better on tan trousers!
An aesthetic choice of striking contrast, then.
I’ve heard of a woman whose black cat loved the white cushion and white, the black one.
The point about the US Navy’s openness to learning gets me thinking about the broader pattern of US adaptability during the Second World War. The US military had a lot of effectiveness problems during the first year or so of the war (Rommel once referred to our army as “Britain’s Italians”), largely because we hadn’t yet gone through the same battle-hardening as the British, Indians, Australians, King’s African Rifles, Free French, &c. This is often presented as a weakness of the US, but I’m wondering if it wasn’t ultimately a strength in that it made us more willing to adapt and refine as we went along. What are your thoughts?
There’s nothing exceptional about the US military’s learning during the Second World War. Every victorious military learns during a war, it needs to if it wants to win if only because the generals always prepare for the last war. If you think the British and the Soviets didn’t perform better in the latter years of WW2 than at the beginning, you’re mistaken.
The US military certainly showed far greater adaptability than the Wehrmacht or the IJN.
Are there any books studying this comparison? Being a layman, I’ve always felt there is a lack of comparative history aimed at an audience as ignorant as myself.
There’s a 3 volume set by Millett and Murray (eds): Military Effectiveness. Covers 1914-45, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Great Britain, the US, Italy.
Peter, that’s a bit out of my price range, but I will keep an eye out for a deal. Thank you.
I did specify ‘victorious military’. To be fair, while the war’s in progress, the eventually-to-be defeated military learns too… until it doesn’t when it becomes more concerned with surviving than with learning.
“the generals always prepare for the last war.”
There is a lot to be said for preparing for the last war. It’s probably the war most similar to the next war. If the UK/US had spent the late 1930s preparing to fight the last war, they would presumably have been preparing to fight an extended ground campaign in western Europe. It’s hard to believe such preparation would not have been helpful.
In fact, many officers in both allied and enemy militaries remarked on the extent and pace of the US military’s learning during the war. You’re right, it’s not exceptional that they did learn at least one thing: every military learned something. But the Americans did learn more and faster than was the general rule. (They also, at least on land, had more to learn: I can’t remember who it was, but I think the quote went something like “The American soldier knows less and learns faster than any other.”)
Part of the problem for the US military, particularly the Army, was that we came late to the party. Forex, in Kasserine Pass we were throwing units with less than six months of in-theater experience up against units that had been in combat for years. It really shouldn’t have shocked anyone that we didn’t do very well.
The Black Death is a fascinating one, because the archaeological record suggests it originated on the Eurasian steppe somewhere, and variously mutated to the point it became lethal in progressive waves through human history.
I remember reading an article suggesting the reason the steppe was practically deserted (even moreso than the steppe usually is) when the Russians expanded across it was due to one of the waves of Yersinia Pestis that hit Europe in a big way a couple of generations before was still bouncing around steppe populations, and/or had been severely depopulated a generation or two later than Europe and it’s population hadn’t bounced back yet.
Dr. Janega doesn’t specifically talk about this in her blog, but given how destructive she says the Black Death seems to have been for cities on the Steppe this would be an interesting thing to see researched (if it hasn’t been already)
I wonder why those cities ended up so deserted. It is not obvious that the infection or mortality rates should have been so much higher there than in Europe, so did the epidemic trigger some kind of social collapse?
Decline of steppe cities might be from improved naval technology decreasing Silk Road traffic in favor of shipping around Cape Horn.
It took a while to develop the ships. Still, people were afraid the cities would breed another pestilence , and that did add another motive.
> shipping around Cape Horn
To replace the Silk Road, shouldn’t that be sailing around the Cape of Good Hope instead?
Argh! You’re right, my bad.
Dtes don’t match. Also, a lot of steppe towns existed not as caravan stops but as service centres for the nomad populations, providing metalwork, grain, cloth etc.
Prof. William McNeill (whose book, Plagues and Peoples, kind of founded the historical study of epidemic disease), notes the emptiness of the steppes in the early modern period as a striking contrast to earlier periods, and attributes it to endemic plague.
As far as I know, the great medieval Black Death epidemic is believed to have started at the edge of the steppe in eastern Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan, near where the steppe runs into the Tian Shan mountains.
That’s a really interesting idea about the steppe being (relatively) deserted because of after-effects from the plague- do you have a link to the article?
It’s on pp. 171 et seq. of my edition of “Plagues and Peoples.” If you find an edition with different pagination, it’s near the end of Chapter IV, “Mongol Empire’s Impact . . .”
I bounced off Neb when I realized it was two clay pits to a pottery studio type of game. I think that comes down to the same sort of factorio thinking of belts and machines.
The reduction is particularly unfortunate for Rome because we know how much power was defined by personal relationships. It’d be fun to see mobs of client networks in a game.
1/24—Bret’s CHE article is published.
1/29—Department admin emails lecturers asking them preferred name for the new nameplates that are going to go up outside shared lecturer office (have never had these before, been here five years as trailing spouse).
Coincidence?
If it was a factor, I’d be thrilled to know it made a difference.
I do not have a nameplate on my office door and have never had one.
Even though it wouldn’t change the content of the post a whole lot, the constant ellision of Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom from any and all citybuilding discussions makes me a sad panda. Many, many prominent citybuilding only streamers also have no idea the game existed. But it was easily the best Impressions/Breakaway citybuilding published by Sierra, in 2002. The royal menagerie, the best great projects, the best farming, etc. Farthest Frontier actually is the first game that really tries to advance farming gameplay, with the crop rotations, beyond Emperor. Emperor could sort of do fancy stuff with crops, because they were seasonal and you could have multiple crops connected to one farm building, but it isn’t quite as good as Farthest Frontier.
I played every Impressions game from the original Caesar on, and I agree with you completely about Emperor being the culmination and best.
I’d personally put Emperor and Pharaoh about the same, or Pharaoh better, but no question it did add some good changes and refinements to gameplay. (Pharaoh had floodplains, demographics to adapt to, and without some of the Zeus implications added some more challenges to work around.) Agreed that all four games in that style should be looked at if you are into those kinds ofcity builders.
-The Caesar 3 series as I think of it was quite fun, until a few years ago when it felt like I’d “figured them out” as it were, and and if making an updated version would make a lot of changes to the standard mechanics, plus add some other styles of game. But that’s pretty typical for stuff I played as a kid, or others from that time period.
If I were to make said updated version (Which obviously has a nanoscale chance of happening for all sorts of reasons, but is fun to think about.), a mix of Caesar 2 (different ways for buildings to provide services, it had a mix of citywide, area effect, and walkers. Plus maybe the province/city split), Caesar 3 series (production chains add fun), and generalized newer mechanics (more complex farming/food gathering, adding politics, military, or other major mechanics as a core part of the game, among others). But that could be a lot to write on its own.
I feel like Emperor was the best in technical terms, but Pharaoh was more atmospheric and had better storytelling. The mission introductions in Emperor felt like they were written in the modern era looking back (e.g., the first one calls China “the world’s oldest continuous civilisation”, most of the dynasty end screens say something like “Welp, they’re done, time to wait till the next dynasty comes along”), which drains the tension in the same way as a novel telling you, “Don’t worry, this character survives until the end.” With Pharaoh, OTOH, the mission introductions felt like genuine dispatches written by the Pharaoh to one of his governors, and when the First Intermediate Period hit, it felt like there was a real chance that Egypt would fall apart for ever.
That does help as well. Graphics/sounds/atmosphere I’d say something similar, Emperor is noticeably technically improved, but Pharaoh just managed to do something really good with what it was using.
Definitely agree about the earlier Impressions games having way more atmosphere than Emperor, or the Impressions-style games like Lethis and Neb that came after it. Just all the little touches the designers put in to make the world feel alive. Like, sure, the walkers in Caesar are fundamentally the same thing as a block of iron going down a conveyor belt. But when the block of iron is a gladiator saying ‘Hail, Citizen’ in his best received pronunciation latin over the background music of Miklos Rozsa trumpets in between a video clip of a chariot rushing up to your palace because the emperor wants 6 pieces of furniture again, it really goes a long way to selling it.
Meanwhile, even in games like Farthest Frontier that track individuals, everyone is interchangeable and nobody has any personality. Yeah, you can see their names and where they live, but after a while, who cares? The cart pusher in Pharaoh might disappear forever once he reaches his destination, but IMO it’s still way more entertaining to click on him and hear him complaining about how far he has to go than FF’s style of mute peons.
“I have to go clear across the CITY with these goods! *sigh* It’ll take all day.”
Then, personal details may just hide that its legibility (in the *Seeing Like A State* sense) means it’s unrealistic. An actual person trying to manage a city doesn’t get that level of detail.
I have never played Emperor. Is it available somewhere and can it be made to run on a modern system?
Available on GOG. It looks like their version supports windows 10/11 🙂
https://www.gog.com/en/game/emperor_rise_of_the_middle_kingdom
Zeus (The one between Emperor and Pharaoh) is also available from that site.
For anyone looking into these games, it is the simplest to play of the series. Also much less serious, more having fun atmosphere.
Zeus and Pharaoh (but not Emperor) are also available on Steam.
Well I only run Win 7. But the GoG link someone posted below does work for 10/11 apparently. Also on sale for $2.99. Actually bought it myself when I saw that.
If it’s crop rotation you want, don’t sleep on Ostriv. (More generally, if you like Farthest Frontier, you’d probably enjoy Ostriv as well.)
Have you read ACX’s book review of Cyropaedia? Scott Alexander argues against what you write in The Fremen Mirages and similar articles.
The tl;dr is something like “Steppe people may only have beaten huge empires with a thousand times their wealth 20% of the time, but 20% is actually pretty good given the power disparity, so maybe there’s something about living in super-harsh conditions that makes you a badass”.
Any thoughts?
I’d take some persuading that China had a thousand times as many horses as Genghis Khan and his friends. And that’s the kind of wealth that matters in war when cavalry is the big thing. Infantry armies are for people who lack horses.
That’s a very inaccurate view of warfare. Infantry-based armies could and did defeat cavalry-based ones.
What do you mean by “cavalry-based army”? Last week our host described the armies of Alexander and his successors as “cavalry based”. But those armies had far more infantrymen than cavalrymen. They had several men per horse. They were mostly-infantry armies, like those of all agrarian peoples.
The Mongol armies, OTOH, had several horses per man. A horse requires several times the calorie intake of a man, and in a subsistence economy is going to be correspondingly expensive to maintain. Man-for-man the capital value and maintenance cost of the Mongol army must have been a lot more than Alexanders. That is a great thing if you can afford it – but who could produce a large army like that?
The Emperors ruled farming peoples who lacked many horses, the nomads had many horses per man, but few rulers who ruled many men.
But if you are the Great Khan, and posses such an army, you have a great army that can nearly outrun the rumour of its coming. No one will have time even to mobilise an army to fight back.
What do you mean by “cavalry-based army”?
One in which the majority of soldiers are cavalry, as should have been obvious from the context of a discussion of steppe nomads vs. sedentary China.
But if you are the Great Khan, and posses such an army, you have a great army that can nearly outrun the rumour of its coming. No one will have time even to mobilise an army to fight back.
That’s not true, though. Sedentary peoples had various methods both to delay nomad armies (long walls or similar barriers, for example) and to spread word of their movements (fire/smoke signals can travel even faster than a galloping horse).
GJ, what examples can you give of a mostly-infantry army attacking and defeating a mostly-cavalry army of equal numbers?
To admit you can only survive an attack by staying behind a wall is to admit you have a less effective army. Any army that cannot attack the enemy has a crippling disadvantage.
And it is hard to attack an opponent with greatly superior mobility. That is why everyone always wanted cavalry in the past, and wants mechanization and air support now.
GJ, what examples can you give of a mostly-infantry army attacking and defeating a mostly-cavalry army of equal numbers?
There are plenty of examples of mostly-infantry armies defeating mostly-cavalry armies here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han%E2%80%93Xiongnu_War
To admit you can only survive an attack by staying behind a wall is to admit you have a less effective army. Any army that cannot attack the enemy has a crippling disadvantage.
I never said that infantry-based armies could only survive an attack by nomads by staying behind a wall, I said that the use of walls and similar barriers was one way in which sedentary states could negate the nomads’ mobility advantage.
And it is hard to attack an opponent with greatly superior mobility. That is why everyone always wanted cavalry in the past, and wants mechanization and air support now.
Of course cavalry was useful, but it doesn’t follow that horses were the only kind of wealth that mattered in war.
GJ, thank you for that link. I confess I have not had long to look at the article and have not found the Chinese victories in which they were demonstrably inferior in cavalry to their opponent. I will have a better look when I have an opportunity in a couple of days.
Alternatively, could you point me straight at them?
“Of course cavalry was useful, but it doesn’t follow that horses were the only kind of wealth that mattered in war.”
GJ, my apologies if I initially explained myself poorly. I didn’t mean to state that horses were the only expensive militarily valuable thing to the exclusion of, for example, swords. I meant that horses were very expensive and militarily very valuable and it is absurd to say that Army A was richer than Army B, when Army B had far more horses per soldier. Army A might have been larger than Army B but man for man, it cannot have been much richer.
People seem to think that because a nomad lived in a tent, he must have been poor. This is foolish. A man who could take a bunch of horses to war with him wasn’t poor.
GJ, my apologies if I initially explained myself poorly. I didn’t mean to state that horses were the only expensive militarily valuable thing to the exclusion of, for example, swords. I meant that horses were very expensive and militarily very valuable and it is absurd to say that Army A was richer than Army B, when Army B had far more horses per soldier. Army A might have been larger than Army B but man for man, it cannot have been much richer.
People seem to think that because a nomad lived in a tent, he must have been poor. This is foolish. A man who could take a bunch of horses to war with him wasn’t poor.
“Horses were very expensive” is true of sedentary societies, but is it true of nomadic ones? Given that most people seem to have had several horses, I’d suggest not. And even if we want to say that, for some definition of “rich”, the median steppe nomad was richer than the median Chinese peasant, China as a whole was undoubtedly richer than the steppes as a whole. There’s a reason so many steppe peoples wanted to conquer China, after all.
The original quote was: “Steppe people may only have beaten huge empires with a thousand times their wealth 20% of the time, but 20% is actually pretty good given the power disparity, so maybe there’s something about living in super-harsh conditions that makes you a badass”
But if the steppe people could raise more cavalry than the empire, the power disparity was not obviously in favour of the empire. Nor is it wise to assume that the median steppe nomad lived in far harsher conditions than the median Chinese peasant just because he lived in a tent.
But if the steppe people could raise more cavalry than the empire, the power disparity was not obviously in favour of the empire.
People remember empires like the Mongol or Hunnic ones because they were so dramatic, but most of the time sedentary peoples managed to keep the nomads out of their territory, suggesting that the power disparity was indeed in their favour.
Nor is it wise to assume that the median steppe nomad lived in far harsher conditions than the median Chinese peasant just because he lived in a tent.
Now that is certainly true, and I think it’s one of the stronger counter-arguments against the Fremen Mirage, at least in the form usually encountered and as applied to pre-modern societies.
The review to which you refer is for paid subscribers to that Substack only, so probably comparatively few have read it.
That 20% figure sounds exaggerated. What’s the methodology behind it?
Also, frankly, a review of topics adjacent to the Fremen Mirage is one of the places I’d trust Scott Alexander’s analysis least. On a lot of issues he’s sensible, but this is one of the ones where he gets shaky. The man has a known and longstanding history of just not being able or willing to say “goodbye” to ‘scientific’ racism. It keeps crawling back into the corners as a brainworm.
And the Fremen Mirage is intimately related to the ideology of racial identity. Because it’s very much grounded in the belief that human groups are biologically distinct in objectively significant ways that can be easily identified by their longstanding, near-permanent ties to specific bits of land, and that these groups remain largely “pure” and “unmixed” and stationary by nature. Conflation of biological and cultural identity is a big part of the game.
So if you give Scott Alexander a chance to review something that questions the Fremen Mirage, he is particularly likely to twist himself into knots trying to find a pretext to disagree. It’s one of the issues where I don’t think he’s well equipped to be entirely rational.
And the Fremen Mirage is intimately related to the ideology of racial identity. Because it’s very much grounded in the belief that human groups are biologically distinct in objectively significant ways that can be easily identified by their longstanding, near-permanent ties to specific bits of land, and that these groups remain largely “pure” and “unmixed” and stationary by nature. Conflation of biological and cultural identity is a big part of the game.
No, it’d grounded in the belief that living a frugal, physically demanding life makes you a strong, tough person. If anything it tends more towards the nurture end of the spectrum, which is why “Fremen group goes on a conquering spree, gets rich, loses their Fremen-ness” is such a common trope.
You need to reread Dr Devereux’s series on the Mirage. Populations remaining pure and unmixed was a fixture going back to at least Tacticus and the Germanic peoples. And the whole thing became deeply (maybe inextricably) linked with scientific racism in the 19th Century.
Tacitus said that the Germans were pure and unmixed, but he never attributed their toughness or virtue to this. Nor do Sallust, Caesar, or Herodotus ever equate Fremen-ness with biological superiority. (And the Fremen Mirage series’ treatment of Herodotus, in particular, is embarrassingly bad, for reasons I can go into if anybody’s interested.)
“The man has a known and longstanding history of just not being able or willing to say “goodbye” to ‘scientific’ racism. It keeps crawling back into the corners as a brainworm.”
Can you provide any examples (or other evidence) to support this assertion?
I’d point you to r/sneerclub, alas that seems to be dead, used to have a pretty big archive of him flirting with racism.
Then there shouldn’t be much of a problem citing an example.
Everything Scott has written seems to be still online on his Substack and website, so if he is constantly flirting with racism, surely it should be possible to provide examples from a sample that includes everything he has ever written online.
“I swear I once saw something on r/sneerclub” just doesn’t sound convincing.
(And really, who would trust a source with that name, unless they could confirm it from the original?)
Here’s some of his leaked emails:
https://twitter.com/ArsonAtDennys/status/1362153191102677001
Here’s the rationalwiki page (which has links): https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander#Neoreaction_and_racialism
That’s before we get into the more indirect bits, like he’s not sayig slurs, but he’s hanging out with people who do. (metaphorically, since this is the internet)
That’s before we get into the more indirect bits, like he’s not sayig slurs, but he’s hanging out with people who do. (metaphorically, since this is the internet)
And to think some people say liberals don’t have a sense of purity…
The original comment was:
“The man has a known and longstanding history of just not being able or willing to say “goodbye” to ‘scientific’ racism. It keeps crawling back into the corners as a brainworm….
So if you give Scott Alexander a chance to review something that questions the Fremen Mirage, he is particularly likely to twist himself into knots trying to find a pretext to disagree. It’s one of the issues where I don’t think he’s well equipped to be entirely rational.”
The rationalwiki article claimed to support this position states, under the heading “Neoreaction and racism” that: “Alexander is critical of neoreactionaries, having written what is generally regarded as the definitive takedown of neoreaction”
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/
It also complains: “He has also expressed support for Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s hypothesis that the frequency of congenital diseases among Ashkenazi Jews (of which Alexander is one) is caused by selection for intelligence”
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/
I don’t see how this one article shows an obsession with “scientific racism”, why “scientific racism” is so objectionable if it consists solely of noting that one subset of European Jews has a higher than average IQ, or why an interest in Ashkenazi Jews should require a belief in the Fremen Mirage, given that they have nothing in common with the Mirages idea of Fremen.
If that’s the best you’ve got, then I think the people who are skeptical about your claims regarding Scott Alexander have every right to be.
i don’t know what to tell you, if people think “My ethnic group is genetically smarter than other ethnic groups” isn’t racism, I honestly don’t know what is?
Somehow, “X group, which I belong to, has a higher than average IQ but also has a lot more congenital diseases” doesn’t exactly scream “I’m a racist eugenicist.”
Arilou, it is an empirically determined fact that (on average) Ashkenazi Jews have a higher-than-average IQ: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/29250
Why would you expect that fact to become untrue just because the person writing is himself Jewish?
Personally I find it hilarious how this hypothesis turns the Fremen Mirage so perfectly on its head: https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf
My recollection of the Fremen Mirage series is that steppe peoples were explicitly called out as the one major exception, specifically because horse archery was such a devastatingly effective combat tactic in the ancient world and to be good at it you pretty much have to be hunting from horseback from an early age.
IOW, it’s not that living in super-hard conditions makes you a badass, it’s that practicing a uniquely effective and difficult combat technique continuously starting in childhood makes you a badass. The steppe factors in because if you don’t live on the steppe, there are much easier ways to eat than shooting small game with a bow and arrow from horseback, so people do the easier things instead and the entire male population doesn’t learn horse archery.
The high skill level of steppe horse archers is definitely a factor, but the strategic mobility of steppe nomads was probably even more important. An army on the march typically eats up whatever agricultural surplus is stored in the areas it passes through and needs to spend a lot of time “foraging” for that surplus, which limits the ability of settled cultures to project power. In contrast, steppe nomads subsist without agriculture even in normal times, while steppe warriors on campaign can subsist even by milking and sometimes bleeding their own horses. Compared to a king, who can only raise an army for limited periods of time and faces extreme limits moving that army from place to place, a khan can maintain and move large concentrated forces much more easily, at least across the steppe.
– if they’re so good, why are they out on the steppe living in those harsh conditions? Perhaps it’s because they were chased out of the better land?
– good at raiding is not necessarily good at conquering. The two have different ends. The Mongols were good at raiding for most of their existence. When they went conquering it was because they used combined arms, with most of the armies not actually being horse archers.
– horse archery is good for use in plains. In hills, or swamps, or mountains, or forests, or in besieging a walled town, it’s not good.
Gosh that blog *Going Medieval* makes me appreciate your style. So patronising – it just has overtones of “you’re all idiots”. I have never believed anything any of the people she’s criticising believe and yet somehow her tone makes me think kindly of them.
Agreed that our host’s style is better, but that’s less because the other author is patronizing and more because she seems to think that “informal tone” means “write like you’re a stereotypical Tumblr user.”
I also think it’s hilarious that her primary worry about “the Black Death hit Europe especially hard because medieval Europeans were stupid” is that it encourages racism against non-Europeans. I…really don’t see how things that encourage you to see your ancestors, rather than someone else’s, as backwards encourages racism except against them, but then again I don’t spend all my time among leftist academics.
Speaking of things that make people angry, I must say I do not appreciate being accused of ignorance of non-European sources by the very same people who simply can’t be bothered to give us modern translations of said sources. Nowhere, maybe I missed it, did she link to any online source or place where interested persons might be able to read chronicles from medieval Russian, for example. The only links I saw were to quotes in books of other scholars not readily, or at all, interlibrary loan being a bit of a crap shoot at this time, available to non scholars. As for the quality of undergraduates, maybe she needs to take that up with the admissions office in her university.
Now do the Civ series.
I know it’s not our esteemed host, but if you have not already read them, you may be interested in the posts by “The Digital Antiquarian”, a blogger who is chronicling the history of computer gaming, on this topic, which begin here:
https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/the-game-of-everything-part-1-making-civilization/
Looking at that. I’m so old I played the Walter Bright Empire in the form of a DOS port of the original, in the mid-1980s. I remember figuring out how to use ANSI.SYS to make the terminal control code work. Later I played the Interstel version also.
The Civ games pretend that the enumerated population visible/available to the player is the entirety of the farming population, because the game starts in the neolithic, and cities accumulate “food” to grow. That any squares/hexes outside the borders of some visible polity are either literally uninhabited, or inhabited only by hunter-gatherers (hence the “goodie huts” and barbarian encampments) even thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution.
This makes very little sense. The games would be much improved if the tech tree started in the Bronze Age (with the rise of tributary empires), with a few renamings. Those are not citizens who work the land, and workers who build roads in person; those are governors taxing the locals, and officials organizing the road-building. Rename food points to literacy points (and rename the granary “library”). Cities may, optionally, be correspondingly renamed as palace/court/”administrative center”.
They could move further, and regularize the goodie huts and randomly-spawning barbarians into a regular game mechanic. Draw faint lines on the map, denoting language/culture group boundaries, partly to make it look less empty; have an approximation of faction relations to such groups (in the sense Alpha Centauri has a faction relation to the local wildlife). Having good relations with the locals increases tax compliance, and works (road-building, irrigation) take fewer turns to complete. Bad relations the opposite; minor uprisings destroy tile improvements (“road” includes horse-changing points), kill unescorted officials, wound military units. Really pissed off locals produce major rebellions, with proper military units (i.e. armies) and, occasionally, a literate official who can found a capital. Likewise, land unclaimed by empires for any reason (awkward location, simply not being able to expand Assyria fast enough to subjugate Italy before Rome is founded, or being in the Americas) can accumulate its “unclaimed”
foodliteracy-point production toward spontaneous faction creation. Let land not be completely inert.Optionally, a deeper overhaul: make the question of how to govern such a large empire with so few literate elites central to the game. Let defeated factions continue to exist, paying a tribute in perpetuity (or rather, until they rebel)? Incorporate them under a system of vassalage (indefinite-term, possibly hereditary), governorship (fixed limited term of legitimacy, but can still rebel), or ministerial bureaucracy (tax collection and military disbursements are divided at the top level, and siloed separately).
It took me a while to look it up, but I present the following post from the CivFanatics forum. https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/funny-journal-entries.253287/page-3#post-6460907
It’s a joke ‘conversation’ between the player who adopts a more or less normal sense of reality and his in-game advisory council, who view the rules of the game as laws of physics and don’t seem to mind that it takes 60 years to get an army from the border cities to the enemy city. I found it hilarious enough to remember a post from 2008, so I hope it entertains.
There’s another kind of game which has city-builder elements but is explicitly an industry simulator: ones like Industry Giant and its sequel, where you’re building an industrial supply chain within an area inhabited by people (unlike Factorio etc.) but you don’t have much if any direct control over the city. Your mines, factories and shops will affect population patterns and these will affect your gameplay (better to do business in a boomtown than a rustbelt) but this is a decidedly second-order effect.
What are the latest and greatest titles in this genre? Ideally ones that are not pure logistics; I want to make factories too.
I don’t know what is the latests title in that genre, but the greatest is and stays Transport Tycoon. Still available as open source version OpenTTD. No factory building though.
I have (had, thanks to Google) no idea who or what Colossal Order is… But the combination of that, a computer, and the near omniscient control of such games made me think of Colossus.
Hah, this one is a pleasant surprise. I love all these games, and I loved reading your take.
I agree with the Factorio analogy, it is something I use myself to explain these – as I call them – “logistics-based city builders”.
Personally though, neither Factorio on one end of the spectrum, nor Cities Skylines on the other catches my fancy, while I really like Nebuchadnezzar, Caesar, Lethis etc…
I really crave the puzzle-solving side of things, but I just struggle to feel immersed with something like Factorio. So I need the combination. Especially the later levels in these games where you have to plan and build quite large and complex cities I really enjoy.
I may be a bit like the old 90s gamer and I’m still imagining all these other things happening in the city behind the gameplay abstractions, and I do fully grant you that with today’s technology that shouldn’t be necessary.
I liked Nebuchadnezzar so much I even made a crazy advanced spreadsheet to plan and calculate everything, for people to use.
Ah well, happy days.
(PS: Agree with someone else in these replies that Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom is the pinnacle of the Caesar/Pharaoh series and is criminally overlooked)
If you’re classify city builders into those categories of people v production chain oriented, what do you think of Against the Storm? It’s production chain and task oriented – your people move around and take rests, but don’t ever return to their houses on one side of the coin. And on the other, meeting citizen resolve/happiness goals is a win condition that can outstrip the tasks the game assigns. If people die in one of the events the game throws at you, yeah, they get replaced by off board people pretty soon – but their deaths (or desertion) also move up the “you lose” track so it still sucks.
I find the gameplay a bit too on the random side. I hate having to make blind choices like selecting a flour producer without knowing whether a small farm and flour user are coming down the pipe.
Admittedly, I just now unlocked the field kitchen, so I have guaranteed complex food production now.
I feel like Against the Storm wants to be about people, but b/c of design and team constraints (only being 6 people including 1 programmer) it ends up coming off more as a production chain game than the theming seems to indicate. I’ve heard that it used to be that the houses actually used to be returned to by the villagers but that got removed because it got too complicated. And then the other big part of the game, the randomized roguelite aspect of having random building choices, also feels like a push towards a production emphasis.
This makes me want a CityBuilder where the citizens are constantly going around doing annoying things like ‘organically building their homes and workshops’ while I am playing as the “God King’s Appointed Servant” trying to accomplish things for him. I can lay out roads and try to set up factory districts to produce the goods or services the God King desires or has decreed, but the citizens have a tendency to act based on their own economic model. However, you have to keep them at least partly happy because (A) the God-King will sack me if the citizens riot and (B) he pays attention and will offer better rewards if they are happy.
So you could lay out a perfect housing district with huge parks and excellent roads – but if you just forcibly cleared a large camp without giving people better homes, they will be a teensy bit upset. It may be workable if you’re doing it to bring in noble families who will put a good word into the God-King’s ear, but otherwise you might drop the idea, reach into your pockets and buy out enough homes to just put in some basic sanitation and a bigger road to go a central market.
Also, in keeping with actual ancient practice, you don’t have an entire budget from auto-collected taxes. You’d have to establish taxes, setup tax collectors, and ensure order is sufficient. But it goes into your personal pocket, as do the fees/bribes that are considered normal. And you could also setup businesses in exchange for a cut (like Roman Senators did), and might need to do so depending on the scenario.
Those twitter posts were weirdly negative/angry/went hard at these games, compared to other critiques of disliked ones. Especially when things like EU4 focus less on ordinary people as well, and that’s just taken as a feature or tradeoff rather than a big negative. Some thoughts
City building games come in a number of styles, with a number of focuses. some do production chains, or managing specific resources. Modern day city builders focus on generalized concepts like land values, transportation networks, crime levels, and such. Some include political elements, usually around different factions of a population. War and survival get thrown in occasionally. Some are pure, abstracted puzzles. The Caesar 3 line and a few modern ones go heaviest on the production lines route, and effectively go the puzzle route as well as you get a handle on walkers. Which is as legitimate a game decision as any other.
Simulating individual people is one of these gameplay choices: modeling individual people is possible, but a successful city that does well by its population can be represented well by overall measures like health, happiness, money, etc. Individuals add some variation to particular people, add some personal stories, but they do take time to properly simulate and play, and as a city gets larger both the game and the player will have a hard time keeping track of everyone anyway. I like the abstracted systems a bit better, though they both can be fun, other people obviously like simulating individuals.
As I said in another comment, I had tons of fun with the impressions games until largely figuring them out a few years ago, and have lost interest since. This is also true of a lot of computer games from when I was a kid. I’ve also done Children of the Nile and Caesar 2. My comments would be:
-A lot of these games have only one fixed way of doing things, which really limits gameplay and city diversity. Caesar 3 style and Caesar 2 have fixed housing progression, Children of the Nile has interlocking requirements to where you have to have most of the types of workers for the city to function at all. A lot of sci-fi city builders do the same sort of thing, where there are few resources, you need all of them in fixed ways. A hypothetical improved version probably could use more flexibility here, with lots of ways of accomplishing certain goals. You should also be able to build lots of different types of cities, maybe one is really healthy but otherwise poor, another is very well educated, another lots of craftsmen but little education, and these would require different playstyles but be able to do whatever the goals are, if any.
-The Walker system ended up messy. It was supposed to simulate a roughly circular area effected, but add more character to the city. In practice, as anyone who played these knows, the randomness required some very odd road networks to make it work properly. Than pharaoh added the roadblock, adding some control but housing blocks are rather weird. People walking to buildings to use them makes a decent system, simulating a patrol route/walking path and making it a constant effect rather than a random path would do a better job doing what walkers were meant to do also. These presumably get recalculated when the road network is changed.
-Like a lot of childhood/1990s and 2000’s games, the impressions ones are simpler than what is possible. So adding some politics and/or diplomacy (Zeus, Emperor, and later have very simple interactions), more complex military, trickier farming/food (Pharaoh had variable floods and fertility, but more is always possible), more complex economy that gets into finance or money vs. good payments or such: these sorts of things should be doable.
-Monument construction is a good inclusion for gameplay, it gives something challenging with a tangible, visible payoff rather than a generically successful city. But having other tangible, obvious goals like this doesn’t hurt. Zeus and Emperor probably went this direction for this reason. Goals like having your educated citizens write and perform a successful play or piece of philosophy, or defeating a disease (through sanitation and keeping a population generally healthy), could provide similar end goals for several types of city management. History wise, monuments are obviously something people did, so including them as a focus or a part of city production makes as much sense as anything.
-Any setting with lots of city states – Classical Mediterranean with Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Classic Maya, Mesopotamia before maybe 1000 BC – should make a good setting. Since cities are the major political unit, you plausibly have a lot of power, and a lot of freedom of interaction with other cities for politics, diplomacy, war, and such.
RE the walker system, this is where Nebuchadnezzar really improved on things.
Instead of random walkers, you can manually configure the exact routes the walkers take, meaning you’re not stuck having to lay out your cities in those unrealistic looking closed road loops, and you have a lot more freedom to design things as you want.
The downside, I have to admit, is that it takes some extra time to set up the workers. (Although some emergency service walkers work on a different system which is automatic and interesting in its own right)
It has some other nice ideas like customizable monuments, variable trade prices depending on city relationship, a fairly interesting dynamic religion system where you can adopt new gods from trade partners, 3 distinct classes of workers, and a unique take on the military aspect.
On the other hand, being as it started out as an indie game by (I think) just 2 developers, in its first version it was extremely barebones at first with just goods/logistics management to upgrade houses and not even taxes, religion or fires.
While the game has been really fleshed out in the years since then, in terms of population requirements there is still a very big focus on goods, even more so than the Impressions games.
Sometimes I think a few less different good types and some more varied house upgrade requirements that have different mechanics (i.e. something culture/entertainment based that isn’t just a random walker and makes the city feel more alive) would have done the game good.
But, I don’t know, maybe if you’ve figured out the Impressions Games it has a few new things to figure out that could entertain you. Just thought I’d drop it a mention. 🙂
(Reply turned out longer than expected, sorry)
-Any setting with lots of city states – Classical Mediterranean with Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Classic Maya, Mesopotamia before maybe 1000 BC – should make a good setting. Since cities are the major political unit, you plausibly have a lot of power, and a lot of freedom of interaction with other cities for politics, diplomacy, war, and such.
I thought that was one of the problems with Emperor — the cities interacted like independent city-states, even when China was supposed to be securely unified. So if you sent off all your soldiers to conquer a barbarian kingdom, a rival Chinese city might try taking advantage by sending an army to attack you, whilst the Emperor just sat in his capital, apparently blithely unconcerned at the civil war breaking out.
Would you ever consider doing a rapid fire review of of military branches recommended reading?
I doubt I’ve read them all. There is a limit to how much one fellow can read!
An interesting spot on this landscape of city builders/factory games is Captain of Industry, which is very Factorio-like, but you also need to build an maintain a city for the workers of your factory.
At first glance it feels superficial much in the way your describe, the only purpose of the habitable buildings is to keep your worker number high enough to avoid penalties from having insufficient labor.
But as you play, the quantity and complexity of resources required by the invisible citizens keeps increasing, and the consequences of interruptions in supply keep getting more severe, so both the design of your factory and your attention as the player keep inevitably shifting more and more towards satisfying those demands.
The mechanics of it all are very much like Factorio, with the belts and pipes and processing machines, but in the end, you end up with a factory-city that spends nearly all its output sustaining itself and feeding back into its own cycles, with only a small fraction available as surplus.
I can’t recommend it enough if you like Factorio but feel that there’s something pointless about expanding for the sake of expanding. A Factorio factory that’s not expanding is idle, a CoI factory that’s not expanding is busy being alive.
“the system for getting rid of predators right now doesn’t work (police are supposed to do it, they don’t)” That sounds like a good summary of parts of the real world, too. At least we don’t have crocodiles over here.
“and you’d think having crocodiles regularly eating citizens would be a game-breaking bug, but it is actually largely ignorable – a minor disruption in supply chains and nothing more” also sounds like a good summary of parts of the real world 😛
I think ultimately the two games mentioned are a bit of an outlier simply because they are specifically meant as throwbacks to the impressions games – Pharaoh: ANE is specifically a remake!
Those games are going to have similar mechanics to the impressions games for the same reason you might say a game like Axiom Verge has a similar gameplay style to Metroid – the games are specifically targeted to people who wanted the old games with some visual modernization and quality of life improvements.
I think your criticisms are absolutely on point, but there may be some over-explanation going on there. Those games were intentionally meant to not just be evocative of impressions games but to be games that would, aside from some modernizations in graphics and interface and a few new headline features in Nebuchadnezzar, be extremely similar in gameplay.
If you’re going into them expecting a huge amount of advancement in gameplay or simulation over Pharoah or Emperor you are probably going to be somewhat disappointed, but you aren’t really the target audience.
So we can discuss why the original Pharoah had the mechanics it did, but by and large Pharaoh: ANE and Nebuchadnezzar aren’t going to have the mechanics they have because they are reflecting on ancient societies, they are going to have those mechanics because Pharaoh had them and they are specifically making a game for people that want a new game like Pharaoh.
Which is why I also included Children of the Nile and Caesar IV, at which point I have included a non-trivial fraction of all broadly released ancient city-builders post-2000. I suppose we could add Grand Ages: Rome, but that’s also not a huge deviation from the historical vision here.
I think the fact that there really haven’t been many city builders focused on the ancient world as opposed to the modern or medieval era may be an interesting question to ask in and of itself.
Although it may be as simple as that it’s fairly easy to make a ‘generic’ medieval setting, whereas an ancient or classical setting is going to be necessarily tied to a certain culture or state and have historical ‘baggage’ a developer may not want to have to deal with. Medieval settings in people’s minds also are probably more associated with the small-scale settlements you might build in a more survival-oriented city builder, whereas people probably think of more Rome or Athens scale cities in the ancient/classic era, which does tie into what you were talking about, as of course every city wasn’t Athens or Rome.
“Medieval settings in people’s minds also are probably more associated with the small-scale settlements you might build in a more survival-oriented city builder, whereas people probably think of more Rome or Athens scale cities in the ancient/classic era, which does tie into what you were talking about, as of course every city wasn’t Athens or Rome.”
Which is odd… for some reason the transmitted evidence is strongly biased towards Athens. Which did not represent a majority of Greeks, nor was Athens the largest city around Greek history! True, Athens was larger than many small cities combined – but there were so many small cities that they combined held more Greeks than Athens. And yet, out of the 110 preserved court speeches, just 1 was written for a court outside Athens. Nor was Athens the only large city – Syracuse was not much smaller than Athens, but how many artworks are from Syracuse? And later on, there were Alexandria, Antioch, Seleukeia, all of them bigger than Athens… how many transmitted Greek literary works discuss life in Seleukeia on Tigris and relations with natives?
But for city-building – classical Athens´ homes are poorly preserved and downtown built up. Why are people building Athens, and not Priene or Olynthos? Why are people building Rome and not Pompeii?
CivCity: Rome is an odd one in the bunch, as it does track citizen-by-citizen and many of the goals involve the standard of living in some way (e.g. “civilization level”, an amalgam of religion, entertainment, education availability as well as work hours and wages plus the inevitable monuments), and the levels that don’t (e.g. Saguntum) I struggled to get out of the quality-of-life ladder-climbing mindset and ship the damn marble.
Sorry, I promise this will be the final reply pestering you with my enthusiasm for city-builder games. 😉
I’ve been really struck by your insight that specifically ancient city builders play so differently from modern or medieval ones, and I’ve been thinking further on this as someone who is also a programmer and tinkers a lot with video games as a hobby.
I’d like to offer some alternative insights, that are more related to the development/industry side of things.
NOTE: What follows I am not in saying to “defend” the games or to make you like them more. They are what they are, regardless of the reasons why.
I respect all of y’alls opinions and have no desire to change other people’s views.
——-
Depressingly, strategy and city builder games have become commercially uninteresting for big developers. They have a learning curve, and many modern gamers are unwilling to commit that time, so these types of games have relatively niche audiences.
Besides, they are much more complicated to develop than the more straightforward action or RPG games.
We see some studios really specialise in these games (Paradox, Creative Assembly) because they have built for themselves both the expertise as well as a dedicated fanbase over the decades. Overall, however, it is no longer a popular genre to work with.
Ancient settings have also become less popular. Instead, there seems to be a lot of “non-specific medieval low or high fantasy” around nowadays, no doubt owing in part to the popularity of series like Game of Thrones.
These settings are sometimes based on real world medieval scenarios, but can also simply have a more generic medieval feel to them without being firmly rooted in history. The latter has further advantages to a developer, because it divorces them from the obligation to do a lot of rigorous research to recreate history. Simply catering to popular perception becomes enough.
In summary, both the ancient world setting and the city builder genre have become so rare, that we only see the combination appear when some dedicated fans of the old Impressions titles decide to develop homages to their childhood favorites.
Because that is exactly what the developers of Neb and P:ANE are. They are two pairs of Impressions fans, rather than established development studios.
Indeed, both teams happen to consist of just 2 developers (if their websites aren’t outdated).
——–
This leads me to my second point, regarding development team sizes.
Aside from Banished (impressively a one-man project), I do not know of any city builder with a smaller development team than Nebuchadnezzar or Pharaoh: A New Era.
They may have modern technology on their side, but overall they can be said to be at a disadvantage compared to their Impressions predecessors 20 years ago.
(Contrary to what some people might think, modern technology has not made video game development require less labor. The biggest AAA games nowadays can have well over a thousand people working on them.)
Compare Farthest Frontier (7), Foundation (14), Cities: Skylines (10), Cities: Skylines 2 (30).
Even these games can be said to have very small teams for the scope they are working with.
Of course, Banished proves that you CAN make a people-oriented citybuilder game with a very small team, at least if this is a design priority that is present in development from day 1.
However, since Neb and P:ANE begun as explicit homages to the Impressions games, it is not surprising that this was not their focus.
Nonetheless, you could correctly surmise that the Impressions-style city builder has the potential to be much fleshed out with modern technology. The cities can be more alive and vibrant, with people going about their business. Smaller detailed mechanics could be layered into the game, on top of some kind of (well-integrated and modernized) logistics system that could still underpin it all to keep the Impressions spirit.
That would be the game that, 20 years ago as a child, I might have imagined we would have today.
However, with the extremely limited means our Impressions dev reincarnees have at their disposal, it is sadly unsurprising that they have failed to expand upon the formula in the way that we might have dreamed about.
In fact, the Neb and P:ANE devs have struggled to even recreate the core gameplay mechanics of the old Impressions games within their initial release windows.
This is blatantly obvious when we look at their release histories:
—Pharaoh: A New Era had many delays and even then was (and to an extent still is) very buggy and straight up misses features of the original game (specifically the military RTS system on the city map itself proved too difficult to reproduce. My guess is that this is related to the “can’t fight animals” bug and they are somehow struggling to combine their road-restricted walker pathfinding system with free-roaming combatants).
—Nebuchadnezzar was very barebones at first release. The game didn’t feature military, religion, police/fire/plague hazards, or even taxes and wages. It was ENTIRELY based on goods, trade and logistics.
Thankfully, they’ve expanded their set of gameplay mechanics quite a bit with subsequent patches, but the initial focus on pure goods and logistics is still in the game’s DNA.
(You might expect Pharaoh: A New Era would have had a leg-up by being able to use the original Pharaoh as basis. Unfortunately, the entire source code for the original Pharaoh was lost. They had to remake the game from scratch)
—–
TLDR:
Ancient setting city builders nowadays only get made when extremely tiny indie studios decide to try and recreate the old Impressions-style city builder.
They routinely struggle to even match the feature list of those games, let alone expanding on it to make the cities “alive” to the extent modern technology would allow.
Established development companies simply aren’t creating this type of game anymore. 🙁
(Sorry for long post. I am out of potatoes to hand out, but I’m not sure if that meme is still current anyway)
I think going along with the rise in popularity of game of thrones-inspired “low fantasy medeivalish” settings, its possible too that when indie studios like those making banished or farthest frontier are choosing settings, they have a gameplay design set planned out and are choosing a setting based on that rather than the opposite.
Impressions definitely did the opposite, in Caesar 2 there were a ton of mechanics meant to evoke rome – the pleb/patrician system, tactical combat, the provincial map, etc. These were abandoned somewhat in Caesar 3 because the devs found it hard to flesh out so many independent systems, but the original intention was there. A large part of the factorio-ness came about in Pharoah to try to have a system to handle credibly building monuments, then people just loved it so much it became unthinkable not to include in later games.
I don’t think the more modern city builders are thinking that necessarily, they are thinking along the lines of “we have a simulation system and set of mechanics we think are cool, what setting fits with that.”
Agree 100%. The setting seems to be of secondary concern nowadays. Developers who are really interested in innovating gameplay (and not so much paying tribute to any specific city builder of yesteryear) seem to just kind of choose the most generic “low-tech” setting that a modern audience will accept, to give themselves as much freedom as possible, and right now that happens to be “generic low-fantasy medieval”.
IMHO I think this is a more plausible explanation than the relatively high-minded idea that society truly has distinct conceptions of ancient and medieval societies. There may be an essence of truth to this also, but I think by and large game developers aren’t so preoccupied with these “academic” considerations to begin with.
I mildly push back on the idea that modern city builder games are disadvantaged by not having bigger development teams. However I’m viewing from the outside, not the inside.
My impression is that while an AAA game has an awful lot of people working on it, most of those people are generating assets / content rather than mechanics or programming. A modern game needs a gazillion detailed texture maps for all the different types of character and NPC, a gazillion different buildings and vehicles and terrain features, and someone has to paint/sculpt them all. But those don’t affect how the game works.
My guess would be that being commercially uninteresting is a bigger problem.
When we’re talking about the AAA titles with 1000+ people, you are absolutely correct. The vast majority of people are busy handcrafting the huge maps, making graphical assets to very demanding modern standards, etc…
Indeed, for the point we’re discussing here, the pertinent thing is only the amount of programmers.
Of Farthest Frontier, I happen to have read somewhere that 4 out of the 7 people on the team were programmers. That is still twice the amount of the entire Neb and Pharaoh: ANE teams, (and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are both in a 1 artist/1 programmer configuration).
Indeed, as development size goes up, we can expect the proportion of programmers to eventually start decreasing significantly. (It is difficult to coordinate several programmers working at the same time, as their work needs to remain cross-compatible at all times.)
So, yes, there are definitely diminishing returns to a larger team in terms of core game mechanics. But when we’re talking about Neb and P:ANE, we’re dealing with dev teams of just 2 and even one extra programmer could make a substantial difference.
You are correct that they are commercially uninteresting to make, but this kind of leads back to the point that only small indie enthusiasts do it, and we circle back to the small teams issue. It is kind of two sides of the same problematic coin, IMHO.
And to bring this musing to a close, I don’t think that is an accident, I think it speaks to the public conception of ancient cities, which views them instrumentally, from the perspective of ancient elites far more than viewing them as spaces for people. And that perception is in turn powered by a vision of ancient history where the ‘important’ things are kings, empires, armies and monuments, but not the experience of regular people living in those societies. It is a narrow, overly limited view of the ancient past and I think, quite frankly, we can do better.
This is overthinking things. The original 1990s city-building games were made in a time when, as you admit, computers didn’t have the power to simulate thousands of individual citizens, so of course they didn’t try and do this. P:ANE is a straight-up remake of the original Pharaoh, and Nebuchadnezzar is clearly a nostalgic throwback to this era as well, which explains the “jump backwards in design”. This essay is 50% “everything is problematic” academic paranoia, and 50% “you’re a bad person for not liking the sort of games I like” snobbery.
I listened to the podcast on History Hack. Our host has a clear way of explaining complicated topics such that non-specialists can understand. This he does without cant or fashionable buzzwords. I did wonder, under the heading of how Rome managed to raise large armies, why no mention of the colonia? Were they not established, in part, to give discharged legionaries the means, land, to raise the next generation of soldiers?
A topic I would hope to hear about if there is a follow-up podcast: some discussion the 2nd tier powers around the Middle Sea, Rhodes, Massilia, Pergamum, Aetolian Legue.
I also wonder why did the Romans, or was it one Roman, the commander, think it necessary to destroy Corinth?
Brat, thank you for another interesting article.
Since I haven’t played (yet) any of these games, I don’t know where their developing teams come from – in previous articles about other games, you mentioned that one company (Paradox?) comes from Scandinavia and has thus a different view at some points than American companies – so I wondered if this view of cities as factories/ production centers is more typcially American? Especially since US came up with the idea of factory towns (which were rather bad for the workers living there?)
Because in Europe, where cities are several hundred years old, and sometimes trace back to big important centers back in Roman times; or used to be important as trade hub on a river, but now everything is on train and trucks, so Augsburg is a little town near to the important modern center, it seems normal to think of cities as places where people live, not as production centers.
The industrial revolution did cause some factory cities inside existing cities (the Ruhr region), but since those have been changed after the age of coal and steel ended, this, too is gone. And before importing the trend of US shopping malls in the cheaper countryside, reachable only by car, factories were in the past decades deliberately put on the outskirts of the cities, near enough to be reachable, but far enough that the noise and pollution would not impact the people in the city.
With 3rd sector growing, the bacon belt around big cities are filled with Technology parks for IT companies and similar, which provide work but don’t pollute; and the tax money is pooled for integration of the bacon belt and city proper, through shared infrastructure projects.
So modern cities produce service jobs because so many people live in the cities and need services, while food and products are produced elsewhere and imported. (This is also important because how worldwide today cities are growing, and rural places loosing inhabitants, there’s a tipping point where when the population falls below a certain level, a town or village is too small to self-sustain, but above a certain number, there will be enough supermarkets, kindergartens, cafes etc. to provide jobs for service sector and infrastructure.)
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“a vision of ancient history where the ‘important’ things are kings, empires, armies and monuments, but not the experience of regular people living in those societies. It is a narrow, overly limited view of the ancient past and I think, quite frankly, we can do better.”
I used to hear that sort of thing when I sojourned through a history graduate program in a previous millennium. Often from self identified Marxists who wanted to glorify the proletariat, of which they wanted to be the vanguard. They produced some interesting work and a lot of turgid junk.
I have read Braudel and enjoyed it. I enjoy Patrick Wyman’s slice of ordinary life podcasts of ancient history. OTOH, I think the evolution of political, social, and religious institutions is a matter of great importance even to the little people.
Also, for most of human history, 90+% of the population have been peasants, serfs, or slaves who have lived lives of extreme deprivation, ignorance, and chronic disease.
“Backs broke bending digging holes to plant the seeds
The owners ate the cane and the workers ate the weeds
Put the wood in the stove, the water in the cup
You worked so hard that you died standing up”
“The Work Song” by Kate McGarrigle
Once you have said that you have pretty much exhausted the subject.
There are people who have broken out of those fetters. The Classical world can point to slaves like Epictetus and Terence. Even in the modern world we can see Fredrick Douglas and Harriet Tubman. And we look on them with wonder, but they are the wild exception, not the rule.
Tolstoy claimed to love the peasants, but the central characters of War and Peace, such as Pierre and Andre, belong to upper tier of the nobility. He spends more time with Napoleon than he does with Platon Karataev, the peasant who saves and teaches Pierre while they are captive.s of the French.
Not only do you have the numbers wrong (90% of people lived in the countryside is not the same as 90% of people were overworked serfs), but the ordinary people made up the armies, built the monuments, gave their acclaim at assembles and assizes (or not), colonised new lands (and were colonised) and so on. Their attitudes and strategies mattered a great deal, not just to themselves but to the elites they were in constant negotiation with.
They mattered, but generally they mattered as a group. You could make the argument that the peasants en masse were more important than any king, but the average individual peasant was way less influential than his monarch. Since video games generally have you play as an individual person — and historical fiction generally deals with individual people as its main characters — it makes sense for them to focus on those individuals who had the most influence over the world around them, namely, the nobles/governors/kings/other important people.
They had great influence, but we can only understand their decisions in the context of their relationships – and here the commons played a significant role. Just as, for instance, how slaves acted and reacted was formative to the attitudes of the Southern elites in the US.
Sure, no man is an island and all, but kings and other nobles were normally much more personally influential than the average commoner, so if you want to produce a game, book, film, TV show, or whatever, focusing on an individual person or persons, it makes sense to choose a king or nobleman as your subject.
“Medieval Europe was, for the most part (especially post-1000) a broadly typical part of the long stretch of settled, agrarian states running across Afro-Eurasia. Neither remarkably poor, nor remarkably rich (though it was remarkably fragmented).”
I don’t think that Europeans of the 10th Century thought they could match the wealth, cultural sophistication, or governmental institutions of the Byzantine, Fatimid, Abbasid, Delhi, or Song empires, of that era. European travelers are awed by what they see in the East.
I understand that it is a dynamic situation. Byzantium’s best days are in the mirror. Even before the Black Death, the Mongols destroyed the Song and Abbasid empires, and wreaked enormous destruction across Eurasia. It is not until the end of the Middle Ages that Europe becomes competitive with the Eastern Empires. Learning how to sail the North Atlantic and finding two new continents to plunder gives them an enormous leg up. Even so, the Ottomans bring the Balkans and Eastern Europe under their sway. That tide does not begin to recede until the 17th Century.
Comparison that makes sense might be Latin America today, or some eastern European countries some time ago, or other middle income countries. Not as rich as Western Europe, the fast growing East Asian countries, or Canada/US/Australia/NZ, but still connected to the richer countries, exposed to the technology and ideas of the time, and richer than a lot of areas,
I think Middle Ages are deeply underrated. In 900 I’d say Europe is fairly backward part of Eurasia. Still net tech receiver in 1300 although *much* more urbanized and literate. By 1500s a minor European power (Portugal) is projecting power in an unprecedented way and defeating larger Eurasian powers on their home turf. They are clearly ahead in forts, naval tech, and seem better at field combat too. Ottomans are wrong comparison, they were fairly advanced in military tech, definitely more advanced than Persians who were pretty good at bullying India given relative demographics. Also some research suggesting Western Europe was pulling ahead economically of even wealthier parts of India/China by 1500s.
1500s are no longer medieval though
Depending on when you draw the boundary, the early 1500s might be. (Personally I’d say the middle ages lasted until the Peace of Westphalia, but I realise I’m a bit idiosyncratic in that regard.) By all common definitions, though, the 1500s are only a little bit after the middle ages, so if somewhere like Portugal is now able to project power to the other side of the world, most of the set-up for that would have occurred during the medieval period.
Was Delhi and other Indo-Gangetic Plain polities more prosperous than Europe in per capita terms, or did its high GDP just reflect the fact that it had crazy high population density? (Genuine question, not trying to make a point here, since I genuinely don’t know). The opulent royal courts with lots of gold and jewellry, etc., could just reflect that there were more people to extract wealth from, rather than being more advanced in per capita terms, right?
“Finally, this defense of funding for the liberal arts by Holly J. Humphrey, on the value of a broad liberal education for aspiring medical professionals is exactly the sort of defenses of the liberal arts that we need”
If you stumped up the money, do you think you could find any faculty to teach a substantial portion of undergraduates in this country anything resembling the Liberal Arts as they were known when I was an undergraduate in a previous millennium?
My impression from discussions with faculty of my vintage is that those teachers don’t exist. I would like to be wrong, but I don’t think I am.
This sort of response confuses me. What do you think I teach? I do broad surveys of ancient history (Greece, Rome, the Near East, Egypt, etc.) and military history. Folks seem to assume that all the humanities teach now is Social-Justice-Basket-Weaving but the core course offerings have not meaningfully changed. It’s still the same basic World History, US History, English literature (with lots of Shakespeare and Chaucer and so on), math and the pure sciences.
Frankly, part of our problem is there is a cottage industry now dedicated to frankly slandering our curricula and claiming that our course offerings look different from what they do.
Like, right now, let me just read down our current (draft) course list for the Fall.
19th Cent. Art From the French Rev. (25 seats)
Ancient Mediterranean World (Greece, Rome, Egypt, near East), 70 seats (x3 sections)
The Middle Ages, 70 seats (3x sections)
Origins of Modern Europe (70 seats)
Modern Europe, 1815-present, 70 seats, 2 sections.
Latin America to 1826, 2 sections
Modern Latin America, 70 seats.
The World from 1200 to 1750, 110 seats over 3 sections.
World Since 1750, same number of seats as the above.
Early US History, 70 seats (x3 sections)
Modern American History, 350 seats over a BUNCH of sections.
We’ve got US Military History, global military history, Common Law and the Constitution.
No basket weaving, very standard history courses. You’ve been lied to about what is being taught today.
The problem isn’t the course labels, the problem is what is being taught in the courses.
For example, a course could be labeled “19th Century English Literature,” but if it focused entirely on Freudian interpretations of the texts and the professor refused to consider any other lens through which to view said texts, I think we could all agree that students who took that course were not getting a good liberal arts education in said course.
I strongly doubt the claim that the liberal arts teach tolerance of ambiguity, communication skills, sensitivity etc. in today’s university setting, where professors are suspended or fired for reading a James Baldwin essay, or showing a Laurence Olivier movie, or displaying a picture of Mohammad. What do the students in such courses, or at such universities, learn?
I think the liberal arts would benefit greatly from universities that were more openly committed to liberal enlightenment values.
This is true.
The stereotype now not that humanities teach social justice basket weaving, but that every subject has to be approached through a social justice identity anti capitalist lens. So the course “19th Cent. Art From the French Rev.” is expected to be 16 weeks examining – sorry, interrogating – how privileged white male artists were only able to create art because of the exploitation of colonial peoples and resources and how each work demonstrates themes of patriarchy and hierarchy. And so on through to “Early US History” which will be expected to be 16 weeks about how white male genocidal homophobic capitalists oppressed and murdered peaceful egalitarian non-binary natives of the Americas; followed by “Modern American History” in which white male genocidal homophobic capitalists extend their oppression and murder to the rest of the world.
Yes I’m exaggerating, but just saying “we teach history not basket-weaving” is not going to be enough.
Trying to convince the people in question is pointless anyway, since the attacks are actually about how unpleasant knowledge or things that the critics don’t like are being taught. Lots of exaggeration or lies or scary words thrown around. Better to defend the know;edge on its own terms.
I hate to be that guy, but some guy named Connor Wood from Substack (Culture Uncurled; he was formerly Science on Religion on Patheos) has complained about how he took a course of Sufism and spent more time enduring complaints about how Sufis are exoticized by ‘EVOL Orientalist Westerners!’ than learning about Rumi and Hafiz.
https://cultureuncurled.substack.com/p/the-unbearable-lameness-of-college
I would like a counterargument against his allegations and for people to call him out on outright betraying liberal democracy as a philosophy and a political system, actually – The gist of his arguments is that liberalism satisfies physical needs but fails to grant ‘meaning and moral community’ and a sense of belonging.
These arguments are evil in that it allows anti-democratic authoritarians to commit moral horrors (he used to defend democracy no less than five or so years ago, btw), but few people have sought to confront him or the twisted conservative ideology that claims a monopoly on meaning, belonging, happiness as distinct from pleasure, and community.
But point is, he has made complaints about encountering such basket-weaving in his personal life, and those need to be debunked. Can one of you help do so?
Good article. Like the author, my wife is a BU alum who has ceased donating.
With all due respect, it isn’t a good article. It’s an article by a traitor to liberal democracy and liberalism and I want it debunked, not validated.
And by Liberalism, I do not mean welfare states, I use Bret’s definition of ‘all people have inalienable rights and essential dignity and the right to rule themselves’.
Connor Wood has betrayed those and had said as much in his Substack.
I said, good article, no more. I know nothing of the author beyond this one article.
I doubt that is can be debunked, because all the evidence I see indicates that university faculties do not believe in liberal democracy or liberalism. I used to say that my wife and I are the last hippies (when we dropped our daughter off at college, we drove around campus singing “Little Boxes”), but I think we are also the last liberals.
And Mr. Devereaux isn’t a liberal in your book?
Or do you think he flies too close to the ‘woke’?
As for myself, I think he should be less optimistic about changing the minds of his more conservative readers, and that is all I wish to say.
Why are you asking the readers of this blog to be your attack dogs?
No one else has done more than avoid engaging with his views, even the ones who can disprove him easily if they just spent a little bit of effort.
But points taken and conceded.
“The gist of his arguments is that liberalism satisfies physical needs but fails to grant ‘meaning and moral community’ and a sense of belonging.”
whatever you think of liberalism as an ideology, that seems to be pretty clearly true?
(I disagree about how well liberal societies satisfy physical needs either but that’s a different story).
I think the issue with articles like these, at least in my experience, is they can be exercises in ‘nut picking’ (picking out the craziest person and making them represent their entire class/institution) – and nut picking targeted at hyper-elite private universities which are already the nuts to pick.
Notice how these stories don’t usually happen at large public R1s?
(Psst: State schools are better)
I’ve taken more than my share of college courses (BA, MA, PHD, a lot of classes) and I’m not going to say that the nuts don’t exist. Of course they do. But in my experience, they’re a small minority.
Instead, I took Russian history courses (undergrad) from two professors who were *very* clear-eyed about what the Russian Empire and the USSR were (our textbook for ‘Russian Rev’ was Richard Pipes’ book. Richard Pipes was born in 1923…in Poland. You may imagine he was not a fan of the Russian Revolution). My European history courses (undergrad, but also, like, I teach these) were focused on the big topics you’d expect – the emergence of western literature, western political traditions, economic systems.
I have just one course I remember the professor being a bit loopy – it was a literature course on ‘Spiritual Autobiographies’ (which in practice meant ‘autobiographies written by Native Americans or African Americans’). The professor was off in her own world some time, but the assigned books were still valuable and enriching and not all of the class time was useless – we talked plenty and in useful ways about literary themes in the autobiographies, even if the prof. was unwilling to be even slightly critical of their authors.
When I look at the departments I’ve taught in, done grad work in, that balance remains: one or two kind of loopy professors, but most of the instructors and the vast, vast majority of the courses are very solid. You can see what kind of history I do in this blog and I must stress: I am not considered some kind of mutant by my peers. This is what most of us do.
So I would encourage you to resist the nutpicking and also discard anything about elite private institutions (BU, Harvard, whatever). Most students attend large public state schools (about three quarters of college students in the USA attend public universities).
The tendency to hyperfocus on the highest echelons of elite private higher ed as if it can provide an adequate microcosm to speak about higher ed writ large is a huge problem in all sorts of ways — not just in these “culture war” / “cancel culture” debates about weirdo Trustafarian lefty campus activism and so on (funnily enough, the right-wing media figures who pump out nutpicky clickbait commentary on these topics are often themselves alumni of the same elite institutions, which needless to say isn’t true of the vast majority of their target readership) but also when trying to think and speak clearly about the economic landscape of academia as a vocation, since an academic who got their PhD from one of these institutions will most likely have a significant leg up in the Malthusian scramble for whatever tenure-track positions are still out there, even at less elite institutions.
(An earlier post was lost, probably because it contained a link.)
But basically, someone named Connor Wood complained in his Substack (Culture Uncurled) that he spent more time enduring complaints from his professor in a Sufism course about how Sufis were exoticized by ‘EVOL Orientalist Westerners!’ instead of actually learning about Rumi and Hafiz and the origins of Sufism.
He used to be a defender of Liberal Democracy but went off the deep end a year or so ago due to claiming that ‘secular liberalism has lost the public’s imagination’ and that it cannot provide meaning and moral community or a sense of belongng and ‘rootedness’ and that the anti-liberal populist wave was people rebelling against that.
Sadly, no one is taking the time to prove him wrong even though his arguments are turning people away from democracy and pushing them towards the very moral horrors he still claims to denounce. Not that Mr. Devereaux hasn’t skewered anything resembling his arguments that he has encountered…
But basically, someone named Connor Wood complained in his Substack (Culture Uncurled) that he spent more time enduring complaints from his professor in a Sufism course about how Sufis were exoticized by ‘EVOL Orientalist Westerners!’ instead of actually learning about Rumi and Hafiz and the origins of Sufism.
For a similar example, see this blog post: https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2020/06/who-preserved-greek-literature-2.html It’s mostly an interesting article about textual transmission, but then it goes into this bizarre and unsupported segue:
>The modern history of Greco-Roman texts is brutally colonialist, to an almost comical extreme. ‘Classics’ as a field is practically the archetype of a field that is white, male, and parochial. ‘The glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome’ (Edgar Allan Poe) is still a cornerstone of how these cultures are perceived: it’s no coincidence that people like Steve Bannon and Boris Johnson are enthused about Greek antiquity, and that white nationalists are obsessed with ancient Sparta.
Not only does this have nothing to do with the rest of the blogpost, it’s also exactly the sort of thing that undermines support for Classics as a field of study. People who believe Gainsford about the state of the discipline aren’t going to stump up money for a “brutally colonialist” enterprise, and people who don’t believe him aren’t going to stump up money for a department whose own academics keep badmouthing it like this. As for attracting students, why would anybody enrol on a course just to get told they’re a bad person for wanting to learn about ancient Greece and Rome?
Exactly right about how this sort of rhetoric destroys the enthusiasm that all sides might have for studying classics. Which is sad, that future college grads will no longer muse of an absent beloved, “Nun Anaktorias onemnais’ ou paraoisas . . . .” or console themselves for misfortune by remembering “Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.”
I’d sympathize, but the conservative establishment has had its chance, in Florida, to set the record straight, and they wound up saying that ‘Black Slaves in the Southern US were taught useful skills’.
There was no attempt to accomodate the criticisms while proving the value of the classics anyway, as Mr. Devereaux has successfully done. Only a blatant denial of said criticisms and a cover-up of the negative effects of slavery and colonialism that did exist.
That is just as reductionist as saying that America and the West should be known *only* for slavery and colonialism.
Why not advocate for the addition of Egyptian and Sumerian Texts into the Classics?
Why not acknowledge the crimes of Empire, while noting that the West also laid the foundations for its dissolution and acted with more grace to its loss than various illiberal states throughout history?
Instead we get a coverup of colonialism and slavery with a dose of ‘Anti-Muslim Hate is justified even though The West already won against most Muslim countries and kept punching down despite already having won, and this caused our problems with Muslim terrorists today’.
Mr. Devereaux has made the Classics interesting without covering up the dirty laundry of *all* societies that got any great dose of power. Conservative activists have not done the same.
With the latest campus controversies about Hamas and Israel, we have observed the pro-Israel left (a small but powerful segment) teaming up with conservatives (in campus settings, an even smaller and generally powerless segment) to implement standard illiberal, “cancel culture” measures against the pro-Hamas left. At Columbia, for example, where I am now enrolled, the university has instituted disciplinary against students who hang Palestinian flags from their windows, which supposedly violates some obscure rule against putting things on outdoor windowsills.
My hope is that after a long struggle, a Westphalia-style agreement might converge on free expression and commitment to liberal values generally as the only policy that can bring peace. But it will take a long time (perhaps 30 years). Until that day, attempts by conservatives to anticipate the result would be futile.
Surprisingly balanced, Mr. ey81. I appreciate this specific response.
With all due respect, HighestSun, that particular sentence was the only positive thing said about slavery in that particular curriculum, and everything else said about the institution, which was quite a lot, was entirely negative.
So I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t think your characterization of conservative efforts is at all fair.
@60guilders , it’s forgiven.
@ Highestsun:
I’d sympathize, but the conservative establishment has had its chance, in Florida, to set the record straight, and they wound up saying that ‘Black Slaves in the Southern US were taught useful skills’.
Alright, but I don’t see what that’s got to do with the issue of academics slandering their own disciplines.
There was no attempt to accomodate the criticisms while proving the value of the classics anyway, as Mr. Devereaux has successfully done. Only a blatant denial of said criticisms and a cover-up of the negative effects of slavery and colonialism that did exist.
Plenty of academics have actually tried to do this, but it generally hasn’t mollified the critics, because most “Classics is a racist/imperialist/neocolonialist discipline”-style criticisms aren’t being made in good faith.
Why not advocate for the addition of Egyptian and Sumerian Texts into the Classics?
Because Classics as a field of study is about ancient Greece and Rome, not Egypt and Sumeria. You might as well ask why we don’t incorporate Aristotle into Chinese Studies curricula.
Why not acknowledge the crimes of Empire, while noting that the West also laid the foundations for its dissolution and acted with more grace to its loss than various illiberal states throughout history?
See above re: “There was no attempt to accomodate the criticisms while proving the value of the classics anyway.”
Instead we get a coverup of colonialism and slavery with a dose of ‘Anti-Muslim Hate is justified even though The West already won against most Muslim countries and kept punching down despite already having won, and this caused our problems with Muslim terrorists today’.
Firstly, this is a very reductionist and tendentious view of history.
Secondly, what does it even have to do with Classics professors going off about how awful Classicists are?
@Dillon, yeah it’s tough. There’s the saying Terry Pratchett often used, that a lie can be half way around the world before the truth can get its boots on.
Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I never want to give up on rationality and reasoned argument and believing that a majority if not all of people can change their minds to make the world better. However it is important to be rational and reasonably argumentative about the *important* lie, so unless “basketweaving” has a different meaning in US academic circles, I don’t see much return on arguing that that no, the course titles haven’t changed.
There are comments above yours’ that are attacking your position. Mind if you take the time to debunk them?
Not going to take the time.
I’ve complained before on ACOUP about commentators dragging in current day politics / culture war into what are primarily discussions about ancient and medieval history. I believe in reason and rational argument, I also believe that you should so so where you can have the most effect and that bothering people everywhere all the time is actually counterproductive.
Here Prof Devereaux brought up the topic himself, and I’d intended this as a response but clicked on the wrong ‘Reply’ link.
And I don’t think I *could* debunk the examples being brought up. I live in Australia, it’s a decade since I worked full time at a university. Apart from general principles I don’t have anything to offer and, see above, probably wouldn’t even if I did.
https://xkcd.com/386/
I prefer not to be this person.
Commenting before reading the post, although I did a cmd-f to check for the game’s name and it didn’t show up
I’ve been recently playing this really great city building game that’s in early access but very close to 1.0. It’s called Songs of Syx. This comment specifically made me think about recommending it:
> And I think the answer is that there are actually two kinds of city builders: games about cities as spaces for people and games about cities as systems for production.
Songs of Syx straddles this line and does both. They’ve taken a normal city building game, and plopped it into a grand strategy map. So you’re building your city, laying out your buildings, making your citizens happy (they are individually tracked!) and all that, but the point is to create an economic surplus you can use to power the logistics of your army on the world map. The world map functions like a very simplified Total War style game.
It’s really fun, and pretty unique, and I highly recommend it
I wonder if the lofty abstraction in ancient city-builders has its origin in the very beginning of computer games. Some of the first computer games ever written were of this type, and happened to be themed after ancient Sumer: “The Sumerian Game,” which sounds like it was fairly elaborate, but which inspired the much simpler “Hamurabi” (sic) which in turn became a mainstay of early personal computers. Naturally they were pretty abstract–no simulating individual subjects in Hamurabi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sumerian_Game
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamurabi_(video_game)