Pick up and Play: Kingdoms and Castles
Next up on the Pick up and Play series, we have the simple, Kingdoms and Castles. Available on Windows, macOS, and SteamOS, it’s a village builder selling for about $10 on Steam and GOG.
The goal of the game is to build a kingdom. That’s it. Terrain is randomly generated, but there are a few standardised variables, such as the number of tree tiles and rock quarries. From my experience, I haven’t been able to generate a straight barren field, or an island bursting with natural materials. It all ends up balanced for better or worse. After cycling through various terrains, it’s time to claim your birthright. Because manifest destiny and all that. Drop your castle and start chopping trees!
The game settles into it’s main flow from here on. Here, we path and build, all while micromanaging a few different variables, and outside influences to reach your overall goal. First is resource management. In order to build and expand your kingdom, you’ll need various resources scattered across the land. You’ll need to collect resources. You’ll need to store resources, because let’s face it, all you’re ever going to do is consume those resources, in order to path and expand. Wood, Stone, Charcoal, Food, and Gold are all the main items you’ll be tracking through your play through.
Second is population management. Hey you see a bunch of wood and rock! But, who’s gonna actually pick it up? Population is important because the more people you have available, the more you can produce overall. Constructing appropriate housing with adequate access to public facilities is also important, because not only will you retain the population with high happiness thresholds, but it doubles as a way to attract more people who visit your kingdom, and deciding to make it their home.
Finally, safety is the final micro-measure the player tracks, although this one is more nuanced than it seems. See, instead of it being a numerical element that’s always readily available to the player, the safety of the town is the result of trial and error, in forming a proper militia to deal with foreign threat. Why safety, in a city builder? Because what’s a game without some challenge, and let’s be real, since this game is mostly medieval themed, let’s make it spicy.
Dragons. And Vikings.
Wait, what?
When playing on normal or hard mode, your village will get taunted, pillaged, and decimated. They will scare your subjects, they will take your women, and they will pillage your beautiful red apple orchards you spent hours agonising on how to properly exploit for efficiency. The dragon isn’t that bad. In my play-through, he served as nothing but a minor distraction. A lost pet looking for a home. The vikings were cute, but not impossible to deal with. They show up, ravage, pillage, break a solid number of buildings, and then roll on out with beer and lady in grasp.
You can set up archer towers and ballistas on top of existing walls and structures offers some defense, and peace of mind for your residents. This helps funnel intruders into choke points, leaving them susceptible to their impending doom.
That’s the game, in a nutshell. However, I’m not done here.
This game is great. For about 3 hours.
I don’t have many qualms with the game, given it’s only $10 bucks, but there are two things I really want to talk about, because it affects the amount of time you as a player will probably end up playing this game.
My biggest issue with this game is it’s potential, and it’s lack of depth. City builders are intricate concoctions of analytical thinking, housing the innate ability to plan ahead while also stay fluid when things don’t go to plan. City builders, and other strategy games of this genre such as 4X, allow the player to get really deep, and intricate with the presented mechanics of the game, while having the player really loose their imagination in developing their own narrative, environment, and gameplay experience. This, just lacks that. To a massive degree.
The lack of progression is the biggest offender. Everything that could have some level of depth or progression, doesn’t. It’s shallow, it’s low, it’s one dimensional. Each industry building serves one function, and that’s pretty much it. Some buildings have “progression”, when what it really is are resource roadblocks. For example, there exist multiple types of buildings, and industries for the player to craft with available resources. Housing has 3 levels, Granaries and storage centers have two levels, and that leaves a majority of the content stuck at this singular level. Things are constrained by space and resources, so instead of deconstructing and “upgrading” existing buildings (you don’t even retain the resources because what is recycling), it becomes smarter to just continuously expand, until you run out of land. By then you’re drowning in resources, and can rebuild whatever you want, in order to maintain happiness and safety.
And that’s another thing that lacks depth: Happiness in particular. The happiness value feels like an arbitrary calculated number that you have little control over. The advisers in the game give you suggestions in terms of how to improve happiness, but by the time I was coming up short on land, spamming festivals seemed to keep the threshold of satisfaction stable.
There are steps this game can take to make both short and long term progression interesting to the player. For example: statistics. People love statistics, it’s why 60% of Americans who read about stats from their local newspaper blindly believe them 30% of the time. Statistics tell us the more intricate details of the game. Some are tucked away, such as the particular happiness level of a house, as well as what can be used to maximise that happiness. But the steps taken to maximise happiness, such as access to public facilities, or a charcoal maker, seem like simple “one and done” instances of engagement. This simplifies the flow of game play, but doesn’t allow for more interesting scenarios, or decision making of the player in question. I feel reduced value when building out new facilities because I have no clue how much happier my citizens will be when I give them some neighbours, and a tavern. I can’t judge the effects of spamming festivals in a desperate attempt to raise happiness, because I have no meaty feedback. I just sit, click, and watch the number slowly rise and fall.
This game also confuses me in terms of how it allows the player to manage kingdom expansion. The player paths and plans out various roads and architecture, but the actual queue of work is hidden from view. You’re left at the mercy of the game, and feel frustrated as your advisers complain there aren’t enough hands to go around. I know there aren’t enough hands, can I just tell people where to go so I can produce more beds to attract more citizens to my kingdom? Blocking off the queue of work your citizens engage in leaves a ton of decision making to the game client. This leaves various buildings left barren, as the game dictates what’s the most important task at hand, based on what you the player, queue up as actions the citizens in your town will take on. The ability to shuffle, and dictate priority tasks to the townsfolk, would go a long way to allowing the player to have a sense of control and ownership over the town.
Tiny Tower, an iOS game that has been out for a number of years, accomplishes this concept pretty well. For each resident that joins your tower, they’re given various statistics that impact their ability to work on the various industries you build in your tower. You have control on who to place where, what to sell when, and who to stock with what. You can take advantage of various special residents to boost productivity for each resident on the floor, or speed up stock retrieval, allow you to build out more floors, and raise that tower. That sense of deeper player control, would go a long way in making the decision making, and micromanagement in Kingdoms and Castles vibrant and engaging.
So, is it Kingdoms and Castles worth your time? Well if you can drop the Chipotle for one day, and instead spend $10 bucks on this game, I think most people will find a good time with it. Otherwise, wait for a sale. The issue remains that the game is to shallow for it’s own good. With an increased focus on depth, as well as mechanics that allow for more granular control of the kingdom we create, there can be something fun here.
Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more from The Domus Project. Also be sure to follow me on twitter for info on future videos and articles.
