Medieval City Builders

Mechanics

The basics of this genre (started by Banished) are:

The "positive" system:

• You have villagers who can each perform a single task, in a worker placement mechanic.
• You have resources that are extracted or farmed via workers being placed in buildings.
• You have buildings that serve as work sites, where resources can be gathered or converted via worker placement.
• Building a building costs resources and worker placement.

The "negative" or "driver" system:

• Villagers have needs: warmth, food, shelter, health. Failing to meet those needs results in villager deaths, which reduces the labor pool, and creates a negatively-enforcing loop accelerating the player towards game loss state ("all villagers are dead").
• More educated / specialized villagers have higher needs, so creating iteratively higher "rungs" of society has correspondingly higher needs that are harder and require more infrastructure to meet.

The "meta" or "goal":

• Build as high as you can before it all falls over.

Note that because the villagers in all of these games are so much more abstracted vs e.g. Dwarf Fortress, the player motivation here is more one of challenge rather than dramatic investment. Players don't really care about their villagers on much more than an abstract level; it's really about building a town as big as you can while still being functioning.

Note: I didn't really play any of these long enough to see a late-game fail state.

Individual Games

• Banished -- initial one, kind of blank slate. Idea is that you were banished and have to survive.
• Patron -- you play as a noble landholder, and this specifically buys into the medieval legitimation myth of building things to "care for" your poor helpless peasants (using their labor and the resources they gather, of course).
• Farthest Frontier -- a funny case because the setup is explicitly about people evading state capture; and of course they just have a little mini-state anyway with inexplicable state structures like a marketplace that just magically generates gold for no reason. A bit annoying because it's almost a cargo cult representation of state "goods". No thought went into what an alternative social structure (and attendant physical structures) might look like.

Politics

• Peasants as inherently weak-minded people who need you to make decisions for them constantly (Patron)
• The magic emergence of economy ex nihilo (almost every game except Workers and Resources)
• The default / assumptions of state structures