Towns that live: districts, rebuilt quarters, town halls and the rules of the world

Version française plus bas.

The living world's towns now live a life of their own. They grow, they are struck, they come back another way, and they have a heart: a square, a town hall, a church. And you get a few new levers over the world.

Towns that grow

Every town is now made of districts: its centre, a business district, residential streets, suburbs, workers' quarters by the mines and factories. Each one grows at its own pace and up to its own height. Once a town passes 40,000 people, its best-served district becomes a business district and its blocks rise into towers, away from the old centre too.

Every 8 to 12 years a town looks at its plan again. It fills the gaps along its streets, then grows a ring of new streets on its roomiest side, or grafts itself onto a road nearby: the road becomes one of its streets, side streets branch off it, houses line both.

A capital at dusk: towers in its business districts, suburbs all around. / Une capitale au crépuscule : des tours dans ses quartiers d'affaires, des pavillons tout autour.

Destruction leaves a mark

A district that lies half in ruins is no longer rebuilt as it was. Its ruins are cleared, the streets nobody lives on any more are taken up, and it grows back another way: other streets, another kind of district, and a park around the crater, which becomes a lake shore once the water comes in. A town whose heart is a crater moves its centre to its densest district still standing.

Struck at its heart, a town rebuilt around its crater lake. / Frappée en plein cœur, une ville reconstruite autour de son lac de cratère.

A square, a town hall, a church

Every town now has a square with its fountain, a town hall with its clock turret, a church with a spire or a dome, or a belfry, depending on the nation's culture, and a covered market once it is big enough. They stand round the square, never twice in the same place, and are built again elsewhere when they are lost.

A square with its town hall, its domed church, its fountain and its market. / Une place, sa mairie, son église à bulbe, sa fontaine et sa halle.

The countryside

Every farm draws its own fields: three to seven, of all sizes and angles, with hedges between them, and one of three farmsteads. Villages now show what they work: oil pumps nodding round an oil village, sawmills at the forest's edge, headframes over a mining village, fields round a farming one.

A farm and its patchwork of fields. / Une ferme et sa mosaïque de champs.

Wars of many nations, nations of yesterday

The bill of a war now covers every nation of the conflict, camp by camp, with a total and the dead of all sides together. Fallen nations leave the top of the screen for the chronicle, under "Nations of yesterday": their years, how they ended, their peak. Their colour goes back to the map and they no longer stop new nations from being born.

The bill of a war of three nations. / Le bilan d'une guerre à trois nations.

Famine

A nation that cannot feed its people now loses some of them every year, the dead and those who leave, and their houses stand empty and dark until food comes back. Its towns stop spreading meanwhile. Small farms fit where a whole one has no room left, and in a famine a mine or a sawmill gives way to a farm sooner.

Powers of fate and rules of the world

A new tab of powers, Fate: the war bell (total war, every nation against every other), the peace bell (every war stops, a truce follows), and gifts of arms or of resources, to one nation or to all.

And a new menu, Rules of the world, from the start menu or the calendar: turn on or off everything that happens by itself. Wars of their own, pacts, coalitions, peace congresses, trade, rebellions, nuclear weapons, fallout, epidemics, droughts, town growth and more. Your choices are kept from one game to the next.

The rules of the world. / Les règles du monde.

Also: the calendar's pause now holds the whole world still, wars included.