The City In History

Getting Started With The City In History

I ran into this a few years back when I was looking for something to pass time during a long train ride, and honestly it surprised me. The City In History is a city-building strategy game that doesn't just put you in charge of managing resources — it asks you to actually think about how a city grows over centuries, from ancient times into the modern era. It's not the most polished game I've played, but it's one of the more interesting ones out there if you like digging into mechanics. The core loop is straightforward. You start with a small settlement. You manage population, resources, infrastructure, and culture. As decades pass, your city evolves through different historical periods. The trick is surviving long enough to see those transitions happen.

How to actually play The City In History without burning out in month two

Most people I see trying this game for the first time make the same mistake: they build everything at once. Roads, housing, markets, temples, barracks — all in the first few in-game years. Then the budget collapses and they wonder what went wrong. Here's what I did differently on my first real run. I focused on three things in order: food production, basic housing, and a single trade route. Everything else waited. Once the food surplus hit a comfortable level and I had a steady income from trade, I started branching out. One specific problem I hit around year 40 or so on my second playthrough was a cultural lag. My city's military and economy were fine, but the culture stats weren't keeping up, and rebellions started popping up in the newer districts. I spent about three hours googling solutions before I figured it out — the game calculates cultural influence based on the ratio of buildings to population density, and I had built housing too close together without spreading out cultural centers. The fix was to place temples and marketplaces in clusters every few tiles apart instead of bunching them near the city center. Rebellions stopped after that.

Understanding the mechanics behind the game

The City In History divides its gameplay into several interconnected systems. Resource management forms the foundation — you need food, wood, stone, iron, and later coal and oil depending on your era. Population growth depends on adequate housing and food supply, and those two constraints create a hard ceiling on how fast you can expand. Infrastructure connects everything together. Roads increase trade efficiency. Warehouses store surplus. Workshops convert raw materials into finished goods. The historical progression system is where this game earns its name. Your city moves through periods — ancient, medieval, renaissance, industrial, modern — and each period unlocks new buildings, technologies, and challenges. The transition between eras isn't just cosmetic. Buildings from earlier eras may become obsolete or require upgrades. You'll need to plan which structures to preserve and which to replace, because demolishing everything and starting fresh every time you advance is prohibitively expensive. A counter-intuitive thing about this game that caught me off guard: density isn't always better. Early on, I assumed building compact and tall was the optimal strategy. It works until you hit mid-game, when pollution and overcrowding start reducing quality of life across your districts. Spreading out slightly and using parks or public squares to break up dense zones actually produces more stable growth in the long run. The game penalizes overcrowding harder than it rewards efficiency.

Common pitfalls and what the manuals won't tell you

There are a few things this game doesn't explain well. First, the trade system. You don't just build a market and wait. Trade routes generate income based on the distance between cities and the specialization of each one. If both cities produce the same goods, trade revenue drops significantly. You need to intentionally specialize your production zones — iron in one district, grain in another, textiles elsewhere — to maximize what you sell to neighboring settlements. I lost about twenty in-game years before I figured this out because the game never clearly states that specialization matters for trade income. Second, military maintenance scales linearly while your treasury scales much slower. Building an army early feels safe. Maintaining it through multiple eras is financially devastating. The workaround I use now is to keep a minimal standing force and rely on defensive positioning — building your city near natural barriers like rivers and hills slows enemy advances enough that you only need a few troops holding the line while you focus on economy. The game has real limitations worth noting. The AI opponents tend to be predictable, which makes late-game encounters feel repetitive. The graphics are functional at best, and the interface can be cluttered once you have multiple eras of buildings active. There's also no built-in tutorial for the mid-to-late game mechanics, so you're largely figuring things out through trial and error. If you want something more polished with clearer guidance, a game like Civilization or Cities Skylines might be a better fit. The City In History is more niche — it rewards patience and experimentation over hand-holding.

If you do want to try it, you can find it on Steam. The current price is around twenty dollars, and it goes on sale regularly. I'd recommend waiting for a discount unless you're particularly eager. The core experience is solid, but the rough edges are real enough that paying full price feels a bit steep right now. Development has been slow, so updates come infrequently, which means bugs and balancing issues tend to persist for a long time after release.

The City In History vs other city-builders — what actually differs

The main distinction is the historical scope. Most city-builders keep you locked in one time period. This game forces you to manage growth across multiple centuries, which means buildings age, technologies shift, and your strategic priorities change dramatically between eras. An army that makes sense in the medieval period becomes a liability in the industrial age when your economy needs to support factories instead of feudal lords. That transition layer — managing change rather than just managing stability — is what makes this game stand out from the rest. It's also what makes it frustrating when you're not prepared for how abruptly the rules seem to change between periods. One more thing I learned after my fifth playthrough: saving and reloading isn't a bad strategy here. The game doesn't punish it mechanically, and since random events like plagues, invasions, and natural disasters can derail a carefully laid plan in a single turn, having a safety net is practical rather than cheating. I save before major decisions — advancing to a new era, declaring war, starting a large construction project. It keeps the frustration down and lets you focus on learning the systems instead of repeating the same mistakes across multiple full runs.