Progression arc
Three stages the player can see · Eras · Levels · One visible meter ·
Three stages the player can see
The founding village. A dozen settlers, huts of daub and thatch, a granary, the first fields, a market place set out once and kept clear. The crafts are no good yet and the first buildings are heaps. The village finds out whether it can feed itself.
Daughter villages and the feudal region. A crowded village sends a party out to reachable land with room for fields. The daughter village grows up, names itself, takes its own feudal standing and pays the mother town only what the two peoples still think of each other. Lords collect rents, knights owe tribute, the wall goes up, strangers arrive from foreign cities, and the region’s make-up starts to drift.
The metropolis. The wall becomes an obstacle, the gates are torn open, the ditch paved, a grid laid outside the old core. The mountain is worked out and the city feeds on its own fabric. Towers stand on medieval footings. Nothing is finished: there is always a next thing to do to the town.
Eras
Advancement is earned from the city’s own state, not bought.
| Era | Roughly | Looks like | What it changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Founding | 1100–1250 | Timber, thatch, dirt tracks | One storey, daub and thatch, no glazing |
| Medieval | 1250–1450 | Stone, tile, the wall, the church | Two storeys, rough stone, cut stone for civic work |
| Renaissance | 1450–1650 | Brick, glass, straight façades | Three storeys, brick, tile, glazing |
| Industrial | 1650–1850 | Soot, canals, terraces, chimneys | Four storeys, iron frames, slate, coal |
| Modern | 1850–1970 | Steel, concrete, grid, sprawl | Nine storeys, steel and concrete |
| Contemporary | 1970+ | Glass, towers, conservation | Twenty-two storeys, curtain wall |
An era does not hand the city a building. It widens the vocabulary and raises the ceiling; whether anything worth having gets built out of that is the craft’s problem. An age is not a date, but it is not indifferent to dates either: the numbers an age asks for ease off once the calendar has passed the year that age nominally begins in, so a thriving city arrives early and a plodding one late rather than never. The exact gates are in the rules as shipped.
Each transition is a crisis as much as an upgrade: the wall becomes an obstacle, the guilds fight the mills, the slums are cleared and the people in them go somewhere.
Levels
Every building carries a level from 0 to 100, read off its fabric and reported on a scale the calendar sets: eight in 1100, a hundred in 2000, narrowed again by the era. The city spends most of its effort on what is already standing, another storey, brick where the daub was, glass where the shutters were, and when a building has had everything its age can give it, it comes down and is built again on its own footings. That loop is the progression: there is always a next thing to do to the town, and the ceiling on how good it can be rises for nine hundred years.
One visible meter
The city panel shows how close each gate of the next era is: people, treasury, literacy, built voxels, time. That is the meter the player watches, and it is never the thing the player turns.
This chapter is docs/design/03-progression.md in the repository; the site renders the file as it is.