City States: Medieval Development Update

Though we're still waiting on a beta release for this city building game, City States: Medieval continues to release regular development update posts. Mostly this comes in the form of detailed changelogs, but this week we also received some development notes in blog form.

Planned for both mobile and PC, City States: Medieval (CSM) is currently in development, with beta expected to start soon. The City States: Medieval team is part of the growing movement among the blockchain gaming community that seeks to lower the barrier of entry for new blockchain gamers. So along those lines, CSM will be free to play and require no initial wallet or blockchain setup. It will just be a standard game that players download and enjoy. Then, those who want to move into the blockchain and NFT side of the game can do so.

The team releases regular development logs on their Medium page. Usually these are just development changelogs, but they also release articles and video previews as well. This week brought us one of those more informative updates.

City States: Medieval Latest Development

Development of the game continues onward. Two additional, major components of the core functionality, have their first iterations in-game. This includes the world map and the in-game market. CSM also implemented the first stages of Armory storage. Players cannot just stack up piles of gear forever. They require storage space in their Armory. And that space is limited.

In addition, we have a new visual display of the happiness mechanic Keep your villagers happy and they will work harder and more efficiently!

The CSM team is also continually updating the user interface and trying to improve the quality of life for their players. The most recent example would be the process involved in equipping your troops. Previous iterations required numerous clicks and jumping between several in-game windows. Now the inventory has been compressed into one space with ready to click filters at the top to help players sort through their loot. For more info about the game and it's updates, check out the City States YouTube channel.

What is City States: Medieval?

City States: Medieval is a medieval city building simulation. Players begin with a bit of land and a castle. Harvest basic resources like wood and food to grow the city and build new structures. Players can upgrade buildings and the castle itself, though some are gated behind other upgrades.

Players must balance their growth, as every building needs workers, and every population needs a job. City owners choose where their population works, and can move their villagers around at will. But villagers need the proper tools in order to work their jobs. With all of these moving parts and requirements, it will be difficult for one city to excel at everything. And so, it might be wise to focus on a few resources, using the market to sell your excess and buy whatever goods your city lacks.

At the beginning, villagers only require Food. But as the game progresses, they develop more refined tastes, such as beer or gold! In addition to the standard workers, players also recruit military units. Military units can be equipped with various equipment, allowing the players to specialize their troops.

Initially, players use military units to clear out bandit camps and increase the area of workable land for the castle. Though later stages of the game offer PvP and Clan wars.

Battles aren't automatic in City States. Each battle occurs on a randomly generated map with various terrain. Players position their troops and attempt to defeat their foesin this turn based combat mode. Combat in CSM offers an interesting addition. Whenever a unit defeats another on the battle map, the losing unit has a chance to drop some of its equipment as loot. The victorious unit receives half of the dropped equipment immediately. Another 25% goes to the player who wins the overall battle. It's unclear what happens to the remaining 25%. The game will feature both PvE and PvP.

City States will also feature Clans, in-game diplomacy, AI Raider settlements, vassalage, and heroes!

Heroes will be NFTs, with a sale sometime near release. There doesn't seem to be much plan for other NFT sales, though players can extract resources from the game as NFTs. City States: Medieval does have it's own governance token, CSM, which is already live. The team had a seed sale in 2021, and also reserve the right to sell their share of the token reserve for future fundraising efforts.