66
Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate - Leiden Medievalists Blog
(www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl)
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
66 points (94.6% liked)
History
6318 readers
27 users here now
Welcome to History!
A community dedicated to sharing and discussing fascinating historical facts from all periods and regions.
Rules:
-
Post about history. Ask a question about the past, share a link to an article about something historical, or talk about something related to history that interests you. Discussion is encouraged.
-
No memes. No ads. No promos. No politics. No spam.
-
No porn.
-
We like facts and reliable sources here. While sources like Quora/Reddit/Wikipedia can be great tools for quick searches, we do not allow such user-generated content as primary source. What’s wrong with Wikipedia?
NOTE: Personal attacks and insults will not be tolerated. Stick to talking about the historical topic at hand in your comments. Insults and personal attacks will get you an immediate ban.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Medieval towns were planned almost in their entirety before anyone moved there, they followed some set standards on what to build, and once established they remained mostly unchanged in size or population. As opposed to games, where you place a city center and organically grow out from there in a linear fashion in both terms of buildings and population.
Where, Balkan, US?
Here in central europe, it worked like you'd imagine: Lot's of "grouped farms", hamlets, 100-people castle villages, bigger villages, local-center-villages, small towns. All maybe one or two miles apart.
And some tidbits from history; how the local district was sold to the Habsburgs, because the next bigger city had debts (the Habsburgs didn't keep it either). Or how the local small city got city rights back in 1700, despite only being a small town, because it was strategically important.
And while the bigger cities were around since the romans, it all grew organically.
This doesn't match at all with what you're saying.