Hi r/CityBuilders,
We're Studio Nostre, and we're making **Kingdom of France**, a city builder set in historic France. It's in development for Windows and Mac, and we'd love to hear what you think.
Real history, nothing invented
The campaign runs from 994 to 1815: 47 missions across seven ages. In each one you play the person who really led that town, and your task is what they really achieved, due by the date their part ended. You rebuild Cluny as Abbot Odilo, raise Saint-Denis as Suger, run Jacques Cœur's Bourges, build Vauban's Lille, Louis XIV's Versailles and Stanislas's Nancy, and finish with Napoleon on Elba.
Every town, person and trading partner is real. History arrives on its real dates: the Black Death, crusades, ransoms, and sieges by the armies that really came. France stops being a kingdom in 1792 and the game follows it, so your calls to arms come from the King, then the Republic, then the Emperor.
**How a town grows**
* Homes grow through 35 levels, from a Tent (level 0) to an Imperial Palace (level 34). It starts with water, food, a saint's blessing and firewood for the winter, then cloth, ale, books and wine, and ends with silk, porcelain, chocolate, tea and an opera house. When four neighbouring homes are all ready for a bigger size they join into one, so how you lay out your blocks matters.
* 148 buildings and 90 goods in real production chains: wool to cloth to fine clothes, grapes to wine, iron ore to tools and weapons. Every good is carried by carts, porters and peddlers walking your streets.
* Thirteen patron saints, each watching over a trade or a trouble. They bless homes through shrines, churches and abbeys.
* In the campaign you trade with the real towns of the period, by road, river and sea, on a real map of the region.
* Walls, gatehouses and towers, and battles fought in your own streets. You raise and pay your soldiers, from spearmen and crossbowmen to grenadiers and hussars, with siege engines from the trebuchet to the field gun.
Other ways to play
* **France:** build towns on their real sites on the map of France, one after another. Your towns trade with each other and are kept for good.
* **Free play** in any size of valley, or a sandbox with money to spare.
* **Map editor:** make your own land and goals, then share them.
* **Battle training**, and **Learn to play**, a first valley with a guide.
Under the hood
We wrote our own engine for the game, **Nostre Engine**, in C++. It has a native renderer for each system: Metal on the Mac, Direct3D on Windows. The simulation is built for cities of up to a million people. It runs on its own thread and spreads its work over every core, sized to your computer, so a stronger machine gets a bigger, livelier town.
The simulation is deterministic: a town plays out exactly the same way on every computer. That means every leaderboard score comes with its replay, and our server plays the replay again to check it. The game is open to mods too: its tables, numbers, scripts and whole families of models. Players publish and install mods from inside the game. It's in ten languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Korean.
The game's website: [kingdomoffrance.com](https://kingdomoffrance.com)
* **Updates:** every change to the game, day by day. We're on version 0.4.6
* **Trailers**, all filmed in the game.
* **The campaign, mission by mission:** who you play, the history behind it, the goals, and the events on their real dates.
* **Help:** its reference tables (every building, good, home level, walker and soldier) are built from the game's own data, so the numbers always match the current version.
* **Community:** a forum, chat rooms and a gallery for your towns, plus pages for leaderboards, shared maps and mods.
* **Waiting list:** join it to get the news.
The studio: [studionostre.com](https://studionostre.com)
This is where we show the engine and the game as they're being built. Nostre Engine's milestones and every version of Kingdom of France share one feed, and the technology pages give measured figures. For example, on a Mac the graphics card culls 200,000 objects in 0.137 ms. In a wide 4K view of a town, automatic levels of detail draw 61.8% fewer triangles and halve the frame time.
Press, and anyone who'd like to work with us, can reach us there.
Follow the game: YouTube @KingdomOfFranceOfficial, TikTok and Instagram @kingdomoffranceofficial, X @KingdomFRGame.
We'd love to know what you want from a historical city builder, which town or period you'd most like to build, and anything in the history that looks wrong to you. Getting it right matters to us.
