The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games
City builders, such as Sim City or even City Skylines are all inaccurate to various degrees. I find it more &quot;honest&quot; when Tropico 6 makes fun of the concept entirely: with your hackers stealing the White House from the US Government.<p>Strangely enough, I find Tropico to be a more believable setting.<p>* Citizen simulation: Citizens need to travel between different areas. Miners need to enter the mines, but when they get tired, they need to travel home to rest. Every now and then, they must travel to Church to fulfil their personal religious needs (religious citizens need more church than non-religious). Etc. etc. for all the personal needs of citizens (food, housing, religion, entertainment). Citizens also grow up: adults give birth to children, children go to school (or not: if you don&#x27;t have schools they&#x27;ll grow up uneducated), 20 years later they enter the workforce as either &quot;uneducated&quot;, &quot;high school&quot; educated, or &quot;college educated&quot;. Higher education levels can perform more jobs (ex: Petro-chemical engineer), while uneducated are forced into the lowest wage jobs (farming or mining).<p>You do need farmers and miners however. So you kind of need to balance the number of high and low educated fellows in your island.<p>* The economy: Tropico simulates a small island country in a world of &quot;Superpowers&quot;. Tropico 6 has 4 ages and therefore different sets of superpowers. Early ages is &quot;The Crown&quot; (the sole superpower), your hypothetical king who sent you to colonize the island. Then comes &quot;Axis&quot; and &quot;Allies&quot; as the two superpowers. A few decades later you get USSR vs USA. Finally the superpowers split into the modern age (Europe, USA, Russia, China).<p>* You&#x27;re a small fish in the world. Your entire economy consists of satisfying the superpowers with goods. More advanced goods means more money from a superpower. Too much relations with one superpower (ex: USA) will piss off rival superpowers (ex: USSR in Cold War era).<p>----------<p>This leads to some very believable situations:<p>* The city center naturally flows from the harbor: your sole connection to the superpowers of the world. While there&#x27;s some trade &#x2F; economy within Tropico (ex: various food items, meat, entertainment, and maybe tourism), the vast majority of your wealth will be from trade with the superpowers you&#x27;re aligned with.<p>* Rich vs Poor citizens -- Poor citizens work the mines. Educated citizens can be university professors, pharmacists, or engineers (who can turn raw petroleum into plastic and sell for even more money to the superpowers). Rich people want to live in nice houses and drive cars. Poor citizens can&#x27;t even afford to ride the bus and walk everywhere (meaning you need to plan poor communities very differently than rich communities).<p>* &quot;Ghettos&quot; -- If you have a valuable resource in a far-off corner of your island (such as Coal, Gold, Bauxite, Oil, or Uranium), you naturally have to build a mine over there. But your workers also need to live there (otherwise they&#x27;ll spend too much time traveling between the city center and the mine, never actually working). Your compromise is to build a low-quality housing area... a &quot;Ghetto&quot;, with just barely enough needs to survive. That way, your workers are encouraged to stay on that corner of the island without spending too much of their free time walking back and forth to the higher quality town center. Raw materials (mines) don&#x27;t have as much value as higher-grades of products, so its not worth the investment improving that corner of the island.<p>Besides, if you upgraded all of the housing in the &quot;Ghetto&quot; area, those workers couldn&#x27;t afford those houses. I guess you can enact the &quot;free housing&quot; edict, but that pisses of the USA-superpower (though it makes you closer to the USSR...). Free-housing also means free: you no longer get income from homes but instead lose money on every house. So its harder to make money.<p>-----------<p>Ceasar &#x2F; Pharaoh also did the rich&#x2F;poor thing better IMO (the richest citizens leave the workforce!! You may suddenly find yourself in a worker shortage if you &quot;upgrade&quot; your citizens too far). A big issue with Sim City &#x2F; City Skylines is that the entire interaction of rich &#x2F; poor is completely neglected.