Vikings get harder as the game goes on, but by the point they started arriving with wall-pounding ogres I had even better defences and so many resources stored that I could just rebuild whatever they destroyed as soon as tehy got bored and climbed back aboard their boats. Fires are easily extinguished as long as you remember to build wells (which are cheap and small) around your city. By the time the dragon attacked, I'd built enough ballistae and archery towers that it was easily killed. On the ordinary difficulty level, none of these offer any real threat. And lastly there are viking and dragon attacks, which periodically arrive to smash apart your stuff. Eventually plagues will break out, requiring doctors to stop the infected dying a few months later. Heavy rains can flood your farms and stop crops from growing at all, and lightning strikes can cause fires. Winter comes each year and if your crops aren't stored in time, they'll perish in the cold. That said, there are also disasters, of a sort. Its closest relative is the idyllic productivity of The Settlers. There are advisors, but they give simple advice that can be mostly ignored. You can tax your residents 1, 2 or 3 gold per year, and that gold is used to pay certain workers and unlock certain buildings, but it's that simple. I love all that stuff, but I'm glad K&C doesn't go there. Soon there are graphs, financial reports, and data overlays, or perhaps failure cascades involving depressed workers. Most of the time these games reach this point and then keep layering on complexity, and as the map fills up, the player's time starts to transition from building and expanding to managing and tweaking. One task in Kingdoms & Castles naturally leads to the next and soon your town has grown, its streets are filled with little characters dashing here and there with goods on their backs, and you're planning a new expansion out east. And the stockpile requires staff so you build a larger home to house more residents, only these larger homes require stone, so you build a quarry and.įind the corner pieces, then build out the edges, then start to piece together smaller sections as you work towards the middle. The forester needs someplace to store his wood so you build a stockpile.
Granaries require wood to build, so you build a forester to chop and plant trees. Residents need food to live so you build farms to cater to them and granaries to store the food in. You lay down paths and homes, and homes attract residents. You start on a bucolic island by plopping down a castle, and from there the normal balancing act of competing needs spills forth. Kingdoms and Castles drives home this sensation even further by boiling away so much of the grander complexity of its genre-mates. They are absorbing but low-pressure, and the reward is normally a bustling ant farm of activity. I love losing hours to tweaking my road networks in Cities: Skylines, and building out new neighbourhoods in Sim City 4 or even SimCity. I understand it even better after a weekend playing Kingdoms and Castles, a city building game in which you click buildings together to make a pretty picture appear.Īll city builders, on some level, offer this source of relaxation for me. I can easily imagine the relaxation to be found in sitting at a kitchen table with a family member, the radio on, and clicking together shapes to make a pretty picture appear. I don't build jigsaws, but I understand grownups that do.