I recently took a look at the exciting future promised by the next wave of urban plannersbut i also spent time with current city building games like furthest frontier and Cities: Skylines. And I just found the perfect excuse to go back to another of the best city builders out there, Foundation, which has been in early access on Steam since 2019. Foundation is preparing for a major update, version 1.9, and I got the chance to try it out before it arrives.
If you’ve never played Foundation, one of the most appealing things about it is that it is a completely gridless city builder. Normally I’m all for grids: there’s something immensely satisfying about building roads accurately and carefully snapping buildings into place and ending up with an orderly, well-optimized city.
But in the end I started to prefer the Foundation approach, where no roads are drawn. Instead, as in the also excellent Ostrivcitizens create paths just by walking the same routes over and over, eventually wearing out the grass to create their own desire paths and roads. You zone areas for homes, but the citizens build their own homes as they please within those boundaries. The end result is certainly not as orderly as most urban planners, but it feels pleasantly organic, like a real village might develop over time: managed, but not micro-managed. It’s a pleasant way to watch a city evolve and grow slowly.
Update 1.9 keeps that organic feel, but it also changes a lot in terms of how the progression through the different levels works. Unlocking new buildings is now based on wealth. Your village’s wealth score is determined by several factors: your wealth level (itself determined by calculation factors such as taxes, trade and maintenance), how many map tiles you have bought, the number of trade routes you have, your population and their status (common people, serfs, etc.), the magnificence of your city (which can be increased by certain building features) and beautification (decoration). Certain buildings only become available upon reaching prosperity milestones – for example, you need to reach a prosperity score of 20 before things like fishing, farming, and baking become available, and then it takes a bit of gold to unlock them all.
I struggled a bit with this new progression system at first. Because I spent a lot of gold early on to unlock new map tiles, I ran out of money, and because my city cost as much as it earned, I got stuck at a wealth score of 19. After a second try, I realized that if I didn’t tried to gobble up card tiles quickly, it was easier to get more prosperous in the early game. Expansion went a little slower than I remember the last time I played Foundation, and I had to be very careful about overspending, but my new city is prospering faster in the second level and I’m more than halfway through the next set of unlocks.
Law and order
One of the more interesting parts of the 1.9 update is a system called edicts, a new set of laws that you can apply to your city once it has grown and become prosperous. The interesting thing about edicts is that they have both an advantage and a disadvantage. For example, tools are a consumable needed to build most buildings, and in the early game there is no way to produce them yourself, so you have to rely on buying them from merchants. If you find yourself having trouble buying or producing tools, or just want to be less likely to burn them out, you can issue an edict that gives you 50% of the tools back after a building is built. The downside is that the construction itself takes longer to complete, as if your builders are more careful not to mess up their hammers and saws while they’re at work. It’s an interesting compromise to consider.
If your city is full of food and don’t need the extra money from merchants, you may want to issue an edict that will double your mineral production but halve your food production. Another edict may take over your serf’s need for comforts (luxury goods and the like) in exchange for a nice tax break. If people are unhappy, in other words, you may be able to pay them off.
Feel welcome in the kingdom and a privilege may bring you more visits from royal vendors.
Privileges, another new system, works the same way, but without the drawbacks. If you have a high listening score with the clergy, you can cut the maintenance costs for their monasteries or add a new form of taxation, the tithes, of which you collect a part. Feel welcome in the kingdom and a privilege may bring you more visits from royal vendors. I’ve only just unlocked my first edict and haven’t been given any privileges yet, so I can’t say what long-term effects this will have on the game. But they seem like a fun way to change the rules of your cities, give yourself more options to think about, and make you feel more like a real medieval mayor making political (or even moral) decisions. than just a city manager who decides where the new cheese factory building should go.
Finally, there are victory conditions that you can set for your city in the update, a kind of main mission that you can determine yourself. It can be something as simple as attracting 100 citizens to your village or reaching a prosperity score of 1,000. Or it can be quite difficult, like building a thriving city without ever generating revenue from trade. These victory conditions are completely optional, but they sound like a good way for players who have mastered Foundation city building systems to introduce some additional challenges.
There’s no announced date for Foundation’s 1.9 update yet, though it will be preceded by a preview phase currently slated for mid-September, where players will have a chance to try it before it’s fully released.
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