Historical Strategy Sim

Games like Anno 1800, Civilization, and Banished make their citizens and economies legible by flattening them: uniform needs, no aging or illness, the player as an all-seeing placement-god personally siting every building, self-sufficient production chains that don’t reflect how real 18th–19th century economies actually relied on trade. This is a deliberately narrower attempt at the same genre (one map, a handful of England-flavored regions) built to take citizen agency and economic realism more seriously than its inspirations do.

It’s the first of two related concepts, built first on purpose: a top-down game is a better place to work out data models, production chains, and economic mechanics than a first-person game would be, before tackling the harder embodied version. V1 scopes down to a single region and the core loop (population grows, needs food, works the land, pays tax) with individual citizens who have real needs rather than uniform tiers, kept small enough to ship a playable browser demo and get real feedback fast.

Primarily a learning vehicle for systems and economic design, before attempting its more ambitious sibling concept below.