Designer’s Note: Initial Thoughts - Part I
When we began developing Kingdoms in late 2020, we knew there would be several obstacles to overcome. The Early Middle Ages are very tumultuous with strong specificities, notably the Crusades. Feudalism is a central notion in Europe, but there is a great variety of governments. This could also be said, though to a lesser extent, about antiquity. However, the further you progress through time, the more abundant and detailed the documentation and sources become, requiring more effort to adhere to historical accuracy if you don't want (1) your game to quickly deviate from what actually happened, and (2) numerous players to say there is only a historical veneer, but that too many things are poorly represented.
Another challenge we had to consider is that Kingdoms follows Empires. A historical game set mainly in Europe, with the core of the game remaining the development of your regions and military campaigns. We had to solve the challenge of creating a game that was similar enough to Empires to appeal to its previous players with renewed and new content featuring the concepts they appreciated, while also being different enough to avoid feeling like just a minor improvement. This is where we sought to define what could be the core of Kingdoms.
Authority
The central concept of Kingdoms is the Authority of your ruler and, by extension, your nation, both being intimately linked. One of the fundamental elements of Empires was the rather successful simulation of the rise, greatness, and fall of the kingdoms and empires of ancient times through a progressive status change mechanism, which had less to do with your military expansionism and much more with a balanced development of your nation. The fundamental principle remains the same in Kingdoms. We wanted to continue to see many nations develop and then collapse in civil war and rebellions because the Middle Ages, like antiquity, are rich in stories of nations with only ephemeral supremacy. Even the powerful Seljuk Turks fractured into several emirates, and the Kingdom of France struggled to expand in a laborious, chaotic process with severe setbacks. The Holy Roman Empire remained a patchwork of antagonistic interests, with only a few powerful emperors managing to imprint a defined direction. And so on, for many nations. There is little stability, and governance is far from rational, often at the mercy of a hasty and poorly informed decision, or a criterion that seems entirely absurd today.
Authority is the most important resource, but reaching 100 is counterproductive, as it creates extra friction with all your neighbors.
Authority in Kingdoms is much more integrated into the game and all its sub-parts than Decadence was in Empires. Decadence was primarily due to your geographical extension and investment in Culture buildings (which in themselves did not have much use except to lower your decadence, thus acting as a brake on your expansion since you had to spend time and effort consolidating).
But in Kingdoms, Authority is present everywhere. It is indeed the super resource of the game. It represents the prestige of your kingdom, its ability to claim lands, your king's willingness to declare wars, and how you keep your population under control. Moreover, when you spend it, you penalize your ability to progress in your kingdom's status, which can, in the short term, lead to a civil war (and if the king’s Authority is low, this seems quite organic), and in the long term, will mean that your fief remains a modest piece of land and not a powerful monarchy. One might criticize that Authority is too central to the game, but one must be pragmatic; a game is necessarily a very significant simplification of reality. Many things must be abstracted and synthesized, or you end up with a very detailed simulation, which is not necessarily intended to be fun and entertaining, but only realistic…
Many features indirectly use Authority. For example, the Emperor will be challenged by HRE members with higher Authority than him.
Authority was thus balanced for months and months, serving to fine-tune precisely the ease of geographical expansion. The road was long and laborious to reach a balance that seems appropriate at Balanced difficulty.
Economic Development
A major content of Kingdoms is also the emphasis on the economic development of your nation. The initial observation is simple: if you want players to find satisfaction in doing something other than warring, you must offer substantial content outside military campaigns. This is what we have done with Kingdoms, with several hundred buildings (CK3 took the character approach). Kingdoms is perhaps the game with the most buildings ever proposed in any strategy game (581 and counting). It will take many hours and different nations to see most of them (which is probably a marketing error, as we did not try to frontload the game with tons of content you would discover from the start, but I still design & code for players first and foremost so...). These are varied, many have small events attached, and almost all have a historical description, as Kingdoms, as a history game, is also a great way to learn more about the history of Europe and the people who lived there.
There is a strong bias in Kingdoms: you will not have the possibility to repeat the exact same construction order in each of your regions. We know this is quite divisive, and some players do not understand that this is how we help maintain the game's interest, as you have to choose from 6 proposals when you want to build a building, and you must prioritize and decide, which is the essence of strategy. The absence of choice, predictability, we have all practiced it for decades with Civilization I, its successors, its clones, and its copies. Here, by combining the extreme number of buildings with the fact that you have to deal with the cards you are given, the game's interest is maintained longer. The concession we made compared to Empires is that it is possible to have a broader range of possibilities through Edicts, which of course, are paid for with Authority.
A very late game, Scotland at turn 433, and yet the player did not 'paint the map.' Various features act as roadblocks, plus you can win without conquering everything.
The other system we are quite happy with, because it works even better than expected, is having managed to combine a rich trading game (with dozens of different resources) with the fact that it is automated, through trading rules that take into account everything one would expect from a rather detailed simulation: the needs and demands of each region, the privileged exchanges between allies and vassals, the commercial competence of each nation (we expect Venice, when selling the same goods as a mountainous region of France, to often win the contract). This was, in fact, the necessary condition, even imperative, to have a commercial system other than abstract. This consequently enriches economic development through the bonus resource system, which is not strictly necessary for the region or buildings but improves productivity. It's a bit of a game within the game, a second layer, which can usually be ignored but delights optimizers or those playing a difficult nation.
Granada, the capital of the restored Al-Andalus, has a trading network extending up to England.
I am sometimes told that populations should be strictly linked to each structure, and that it is unrealistic to see all your peasants suddenly become cathedral builders. In fact, it is a concession to realism above all; it is necessary to give the player a tool to adjust their production immediately, to give a bit of grease to the wheels when they want to reorient their economy. However, social classes in Kingdoms are quite inflexible, so there are still some significant constraints on how your populations change jobs (a noble will not go to work in the fields).
Another challenge we had to consider is that Kingdoms follows Empires. A historical game set mainly in Europe, with the core of the game remaining the development of your regions and military campaigns. We had to solve the challenge of creating a game that was similar enough to Empires to appeal to its previous players with renewed and new content featuring the concepts they appreciated, while also being different enough to avoid feeling like just a minor improvement. This is where we sought to define what could be the core of Kingdoms.
Authority
The central concept of Kingdoms is the Authority of your ruler and, by extension, your nation, both being intimately linked. One of the fundamental elements of Empires was the rather successful simulation of the rise, greatness, and fall of the kingdoms and empires of ancient times through a progressive status change mechanism, which had less to do with your military expansionism and much more with a balanced development of your nation. The fundamental principle remains the same in Kingdoms. We wanted to continue to see many nations develop and then collapse in civil war and rebellions because the Middle Ages, like antiquity, are rich in stories of nations with only ephemeral supremacy. Even the powerful Seljuk Turks fractured into several emirates, and the Kingdom of France struggled to expand in a laborious, chaotic process with severe setbacks. The Holy Roman Empire remained a patchwork of antagonistic interests, with only a few powerful emperors managing to imprint a defined direction. And so on, for many nations. There is little stability, and governance is far from rational, often at the mercy of a hasty and poorly informed decision, or a criterion that seems entirely absurd today.
Authority is the most important resource, but reaching 100 is counterproductive, as it creates extra friction with all your neighbors.Authority in Kingdoms is much more integrated into the game and all its sub-parts than Decadence was in Empires. Decadence was primarily due to your geographical extension and investment in Culture buildings (which in themselves did not have much use except to lower your decadence, thus acting as a brake on your expansion since you had to spend time and effort consolidating).
But in Kingdoms, Authority is present everywhere. It is indeed the super resource of the game. It represents the prestige of your kingdom, its ability to claim lands, your king's willingness to declare wars, and how you keep your population under control. Moreover, when you spend it, you penalize your ability to progress in your kingdom's status, which can, in the short term, lead to a civil war (and if the king’s Authority is low, this seems quite organic), and in the long term, will mean that your fief remains a modest piece of land and not a powerful monarchy. One might criticize that Authority is too central to the game, but one must be pragmatic; a game is necessarily a very significant simplification of reality. Many things must be abstracted and synthesized, or you end up with a very detailed simulation, which is not necessarily intended to be fun and entertaining, but only realistic…
Many features indirectly use Authority. For example, the Emperor will be challenged by HRE members with higher Authority than him.Authority was thus balanced for months and months, serving to fine-tune precisely the ease of geographical expansion. The road was long and laborious to reach a balance that seems appropriate at Balanced difficulty.
Economic Development
A major content of Kingdoms is also the emphasis on the economic development of your nation. The initial observation is simple: if you want players to find satisfaction in doing something other than warring, you must offer substantial content outside military campaigns. This is what we have done with Kingdoms, with several hundred buildings (CK3 took the character approach). Kingdoms is perhaps the game with the most buildings ever proposed in any strategy game (581 and counting). It will take many hours and different nations to see most of them (which is probably a marketing error, as we did not try to frontload the game with tons of content you would discover from the start, but I still design & code for players first and foremost so...). These are varied, many have small events attached, and almost all have a historical description, as Kingdoms, as a history game, is also a great way to learn more about the history of Europe and the people who lived there.
There is a strong bias in Kingdoms: you will not have the possibility to repeat the exact same construction order in each of your regions. We know this is quite divisive, and some players do not understand that this is how we help maintain the game's interest, as you have to choose from 6 proposals when you want to build a building, and you must prioritize and decide, which is the essence of strategy. The absence of choice, predictability, we have all practiced it for decades with Civilization I, its successors, its clones, and its copies. Here, by combining the extreme number of buildings with the fact that you have to deal with the cards you are given, the game's interest is maintained longer. The concession we made compared to Empires is that it is possible to have a broader range of possibilities through Edicts, which of course, are paid for with Authority.
A very late game, Scotland at turn 433, and yet the player did not 'paint the map.' Various features act as roadblocks, plus you can win without conquering everything.The other system we are quite happy with, because it works even better than expected, is having managed to combine a rich trading game (with dozens of different resources) with the fact that it is automated, through trading rules that take into account everything one would expect from a rather detailed simulation: the needs and demands of each region, the privileged exchanges between allies and vassals, the commercial competence of each nation (we expect Venice, when selling the same goods as a mountainous region of France, to often win the contract). This was, in fact, the necessary condition, even imperative, to have a commercial system other than abstract. This consequently enriches economic development through the bonus resource system, which is not strictly necessary for the region or buildings but improves productivity. It's a bit of a game within the game, a second layer, which can usually be ignored but delights optimizers or those playing a difficult nation.
Granada, the capital of the restored Al-Andalus, has a trading network extending up to England.I am sometimes told that populations should be strictly linked to each structure, and that it is unrealistic to see all your peasants suddenly become cathedral builders. In fact, it is a concession to realism above all; it is necessary to give the player a tool to adjust their production immediately, to give a bit of grease to the wheels when they want to reorient their economy. However, social classes in Kingdoms are quite inflexible, so there are still some significant constraints on how your populations change jobs (a noble will not go to work in the fields).
