MEMORIAPOLIS

It's nice but I can't recomend it due to performance issues: it is literally impossible to play after the medieval age with half a map occupied. Everything is painfully slow, it makes no sense. something is eating up all cpu and ram. my pc is decent btw. 32gb ram old nvidia 2060 but reliable. I've played simulations way more complex than this game with this pc and was no where near all the lag I had in medieval time. When I passed to rennacense it made no sense, I can't play this anymore.

After finishing a full playthrough, I think I have a good idea of the game and what it offers. In short, Memoriapolis is a good, interesting city builder... and a bit of a strange one. In it, you create and grow a city with the sole aim of building a wonder, moving through eras while managing the people's needs. Aaand babysitting political leaders. To address the elephant in the room: no, that's no Caesar 3, nor does it has to be. The negative reviews, I feel, come from players that expected a "regular city builder", and didn't find it. Well, yes. Memoriapolis takes a somewhat opposed approach to the genre. The upset is understandable though: in here, production chains are reduced to the strict minimum, there's no logistics, no road layout, no house placement, no worforce micromanagement. Thus, the game is "empty", "lacking" and "boring" to some. Yet, playing this game made me realise that other city builders - the big ones first of all - didn't expect me to be a mayor, a city leader. They expected me to be an entrepreneur, a company director. One quick example: money has little use in construction. Researches and buildings don't require it, except a few unique buildings. It's used mostly in political actions, bribery, and event management. And it comes only as a cut from the factions taxing their own people - you don't tax people yourself -, or from resources selling. You don't need to swim in money, thus, the game doesn't give you a way to mint money from gold. Instead, gold is used to make gold leaves. Basilica and ambassies' ornament, y'know. Memoriapolis doesn't ask you to make, distribute and export furnitures, olive oil and jewelry, because that's not your job. It asks you to lead a city, not to build your own international megastore. That's a bit of an unfair claim, of course. Cities too must take care of their commercial balance, that doesn't make them entreprises. Still, the focus is clearly not on the commercial or production side of things. All you collect and produce is aimed at construction: wood turned into beams, stone into blocks, clay into bricks, sand into glass... That's all fair and good, but then what the heck do you do in Memoriapolis? The answer, in short, is: you manage the political turf war. This is a game of influence. Six factions will spread across the districts, and you're here as an arbiter. You can let them do whatever they want, of course, and they'll like it. You can play favourites, and the favourites will like it. Or you can undermine them, and they won't like it. Why should you care if you're popular among the factions leaders, or interfere in their turf war? Because *they* are on the council voting on laws and decrees. If the two elected factions don't like what you did to them in the past... it'll cost you to do anything politicaly. But it's a city *builder*, so what do you build exactly? Why, public buildings, of course. Were you expecting to build stores? :) It doesn't seem revolutionary, yet it changes how to manage and grow your city. The buildings you erect are landmarks that attract settlers to create new housing districts and roads, provides a flat number of people's needs, and spread the influence of one or another faction. Depending on how you put them down, these buildings can create a dense megalopole, a tiny town with many faraway suburbs, a clear cut of faction holdings, or a complete chaos of districts switching from one faction to another as everyone tries to up eachother. The bigger the faction, the more the taxes, and the more chances they'll end up on the city council, hopefully liking you enough to let you do what you want. In short: put a building here to grow your religious district. Careful not to let it spread too close to the nearby military stronghold. There is a whole building upgrade mechanic, that sometimes switches the affiliated faction: a military castrum can evolve into a political castle. Ruins appear at some point too, and repairing them can lead to a faction building right next to your carefully grown other faction neighborhood. And thus, more frictions occur. The turf war. The turf war never ends. So why subject yourself to all of this? The lack of political control, playing arbiter for faction leaders, the absence of logistic or workers management, the poor production chains? Well. To build a wonder. The Eiffel Tower, the Crystal Palace - you see the kind. All of your city, its struggles, its spread, its (in)stability, the researches, the resources management, the political riffraff, everything has for final goal to build that damn thing. You'll need ample stocks of various resources, both for the construction itself and to unlock the wonder's researches, some free space despite your rampant city growth and the absurd amount of farms you'll need to feed everyone, and the approval of the faction leaders to actually start the construction. And you'll have to repeat all that for each of the wonder's steps. Good luck o7 Memoriapolis is a good city builder, that actually puts you in the shoes of a mayor having no control over businesses and needing to tend to the endless political scuffles. It becomes a boring waiting game if you expect another Caesar clone. The city evolves, spread, its political map changes, its leaders and their agendas changes. It's honestly a nice take on the genre, far from perfect but quite enjoyable.