In the last few years, city-building games have seen a resurgence, bringing freshness to the outdated formula developed by games like Banished and SimCity. Games like Manor Lords have tried to shake up the genre, developing different styles to stand out in the sea of city-building games. From time to time, new games with creative ideas appear, and among them is MEMORIAPOLIS, which brings a fresh and innovative approach to this genre.
MEMORIAPOLIS is a pleasant mix of city building reminiscent of Cities Skylines, and to some extent 4X games like Civ. Essentially, the game allows you to design a city, not as an engineer who carefully plans every detail, but as a gardener who sows seeds and directs the development of his city over the centuries. MEMORIAPOLIS is developed by 5PM Studio, an enthusiastic French indie developer.
You manage, develop and expand your city through different eras spanning hundreds of years. 5PM Studio offers you all that and more in this nuanced approach to city building. With its organic growth mechanics, where your city and its citizens develop and expand independently, and six different unique ruling styles, MEMORIAPOLIS is sure to give you an unforgettable experience and encourage you to replay the game many times over.
You begin by choosing one of six styles of rule from each cultural dimension for your dynasty, placing your ancient camp on the map and watching as roads weave and connect to your new city center. Yes, in MEMORIAPOLIS roads and paths are automatically created connecting different parts of the city. Not only that, but you don’t build houses or manage resources – they organize themselves.
Your citizens start building around the camp on their own. These residential buildings, or civilian quarters as I like to call them, are divided into districts. As you collect resources, you can watch your people collect and distribute them automatically. When you move your mouse over the resources in the upper part of the screen, the areas on the map where those resources are located will be highlighted.
Resource gathering is proximity based, so you don’t have to place buildings exactly on the resources themselves. There are also specific peculiarities in the collection of resources. For example, farms do not have an exact size; instead, you place a main building around which farms are procedurally built. You can also resize this area. So placing farms in large open spaces maximizes efficiency.
On the other hand, a small quarry can collect a variety of resources, including clay, sand, and stone. However, you must first select one resource to collect in a particular area, and once you select it, you cannot change it until that resource is fully collected. Apart from requiring resources, buildings also need workers; you get these workers naturally as your population grows.
Sometimes the territorial expansion of your city may not be enough to reach certain resources; in these cases you have two options. You can use explorer towers for easy territory expansion or build a Macellum. Macellum is a type of service building that allows you to connect to trade routes with other cities to import or export resources. There are other service buildings, such as the Horreum, which gives you a large storage capacity, or the Senatus, which we will go into more detail later.
It’s important to keep your city happy as it expands. Pleasure is divided into subspecies, and if you don’t take care of them, problems like epidemics or fires can arise. Certain buildings, like manufacturing, irritate your citizens and decrease their satisfaction, while other buildings increase their satisfaction.
The main way you achieve this is by building cultural buildings that represent the six different cultural aspects your city can adopt. These are: production, military, religion, education, trade and politics. These cultural buildings affect the districts around them, increasing satisfaction and fueling faction growth.
The factions in the game have their own desires and ideals, and to make them happy, you need to build culture buildings that appeal to them. Each faction gives you small bonuses if you allow them to take control of certain parts of the city. As factions become more popular, you’ll unlock new and better cultural buildings.
Once you build a Senatus, you can adopt faction-pleasing policies that yield bonuses. However, not everyone supports factions and policies, but you can bribe them to get your policies adopted. Sometimes, if factions become too troublesome, you’ll have to banish them from your city, which can have both positive and negative consequences.
MEMORIAPOLIS offers huge potential, with unique mechanics and dynamics that make the game intriguing. Even though it is still in the early access phase, the game already shows great potential, and future improvement can rank it among the great classics of the genre.
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