Ancient Cities A Stone Age tribe to guide

Your citizens are not puppets waiting for orders. They work, eat, sleep and play on their own, within the guidelines you set: how many hours a day to work, how strictly to ration the food. You organise work groups and set priorities, and the people in them decide where hunting, fishing or gathering makes the most sense. Walk a route often enough and a path wears into the landscape, so your settlement grows its own roads over time. It is less direct control than most builders, and that is the point: you lead, they live.

You can start at any time and place in prehistoric Europe, from the warm Mediterranean to cold Scandinavia, from the end of the Ice Age to the end of the Neolithic. Each start comes with the forests, animals, tools, buildings and knowledge its culture actually had, and the climate and seasons shift with the location. Starting year also sets your difficulty, so an early Ice Age camp plays very differently from a farming settlement. Every combination gives you a different run.

This is a city builder for people who like their cities small and honest. You lay out huts, workbenches and storage, and the town takes shape around the routes your people actually walk, so it grows organically instead of on a grid. Resources run from flint, wood and reed to honeycomb, berries and mushrooms, and every building and tool matches what the culture of your time and place really used. There is no timer and no rush: you build at your own pace and let the village become a village.

Your people have ages, skills and their own minds, and the stories come from what goes wrong. Strip every berry from the forest and there will be no seeds next season; overhunt the deer and the herds die out or move on. Knowledge itself is fragile: it lives in people, and if the ones who carry it die, it can be lost. Migrants may arrive with techniques you have never seen, and whether you can feed and house them is your call. Generations pass, and the tribe you end with is the one you kept alive.

The world around your camp is simulated, not painted on. Plants and animals react to the seasons, the climate and to your hunting and gathering, so food is a moving target. You craft tools from flint and bone, tan skins into leather for tents and huts, and in the Neolithic learn to farm, raise goats and aurochs, and mill grain into bread. Take too much and the land empties; manage carefully and your settlement lasts. When local resources run dry, you can trade, raid or pack up and migrate elsewhere.