Community Spotlight : A city of 100 000 residents by DarkFrost
One of the pillars of Memoriapolis is its amazing community. In this first episode of Community Spotlight, we’re thrilled to introduce you to DarkFrost, who we had the pleasure of chatting with!
Learn how he managed to build a city of over 100,000 residents, plus a few tips for those of you just starting your Memoriapolis journey!
Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
Well to start off this interview, I'd like to share a huge project I've been working on... The 150k population city. This was much harder than my 100k city, and I'll get into the details later on.
I'm a huge history fan, it's one of the topics which interests me the most. Whether it be humanity's earliest history up to recent times. I enjoy stumbling upon a period of time or a nation's history which I find captivating, and then delving into what I can learn about it; my most recent example of this being the final 100 or so years of the Ottoman Empire. Like most, my favorite period is probably the Middle Ages, with a close second being classical history. I'm so influenced by sword combat in general that I've long considered trying to get into a HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) group, basically real but safe sword fighting as a hobby. Because of this, most games featuring medieval or ancient history (especially combat) have my interest.
As for city planners, I have a good amount of experience in the genre, but I'm not fantastic at some of its core mechanics. In games like Cities: Skylines, I struggle to make realistic and sprawling city road maps. I've spent hours researching road hierarchy and different real-life city planning concepts, but struggle to use that knowledge in a realistic way. As such my favorite games in the genre tend to not have traffic be something the player has to manage. These games like Kingdoms & Castles and Memoriapolis allow you to more freely build without being punished for a sub-par road network, with Memoriapolis building all the roads for you. The important thing however is that these games have other interesting mechanics to focus on instead. With Kingdoms & Castles you have warfare, other nations, and Viking attacks. While Memoriapolis has a more internal approach with factions you have to keep happy, and satisfactions you have to manage. That way traffic management is replaced with different interesting mechanics to focus on instead, making the game unique. There are many out there who do enjoy road & traffic management for the challenge it provides and for the realism and detail it allows you to get. Those people are all probably much better at it than I am . But that's just the thing, it's a high barrier of entry to get good at road & traffic management, whereas other mechanics can be much easier to learn, while still allowing players to get really good at them. That right there is a huge reason I enjoy Memoriapolis. So in general, I really enjoy a lot of aspects of city building, with history also fueling my passion to create cities like this.
How did you get into Memoriapolis?
I first stumbled upon Memoriapolis via a video from City Planner Plays trying out the game right after it came into early access. As soon as I saw the game's core ideas, like age progression and the cultural building system, I knew I had to try it out. So I bought the game around the end of August.
You're quite active in the Memoriapolis Discord community! How has your experience been with other players? Are we a friendly community?
My experience with the Memoriapolis community since joining has been fantastic. It's a very welcoming community, who are happy to help out with any issues you may be experiencing, and to chat about different aspects of the game.
Building a 100,000-Citizen City: A Challenge Accepted!
This community is where I first got the idea to reach 100k population in a city. I saw a few people talking about it, and one guy got really close but wasn't able to produce enough food to maintain the population. So after I had already started the city which would become my 100k city, Jourvinbourg, I decided to attempt the challenge. I founded Jourvinbourg because I wanted to try out the Riverside area, it was my 4th city at the time. I reached around 40k, and had tons of space left. So I shot for 100k, and after a bunch of sessions finally reached my goal on October 2nd, then promptly shared my city with the community. In total, it took me around 3 weeks to finish.
And now, I've stretched that to its absolute limits with my 150k city, Land of the Wasps. This time before starting the city, I knew I wanted to try for 150k, and when I stumbled into making a wasp coat of arms, I just thought it'd be funny to reach that record with a joke city, name, and leader name. So Land of the Wasps, led by Wasp McWaspface was born. Usually I like to create realistic-sounding names such as Jourvinbourg, based on other nations around where I mentally set my city, but this time I just decided to have some fun. Unlike with my 100k city, I reached 150k population only 3 days after founding Land of the Wasps. Throughout these two megacity projects, I've learned a lot of good tips/strategies for Memoriapolis, and I'll get into those in this section
Despite some early feedback about city size limitations, you've proven that it’s possible to build a thriving city in Memoriapolis. Breaking City Size Limits: Key to Success?
If you're trying to reach a large population goal, the most important thing to focus on in my opinion is what I call "Proximity Management". Basically how efficiently you use your wonders and surveyors' cabins. In Antiquity, try to use wonders to expand outwards, and only use surveyors' cabins when you absolutely need to, and if possible avoid placing them in permanent spots. You can delete surveyors' cabins as long as nothing depends on their buildable area. So you can use them to collect resources early on, but just be careful, because if just a single district forms in their range, they're locked in place permanently. Once you reach the Medieval age, you can expand your surveyors' cabin's range heavily, allowing you to really disperse. Learning how to expand outwards and sprawl effectively I'd say is the single most important thing along with proximity management if you want to build a big city. So here's some steps to take:
I recommend taking the strategist leader type, as incident prevention is needed, and the security zone increase is great for expanding in the Medieval age.
Starting in the antiquity age, you need a buildable security area to expand your city into. So get some wonders down, and maybe a surveyors' cabin or two. Make sure when placing these that they're as far out as you can possibly put them, upgrade your city center a bunch first. Also make sure that there's good open space around your wonders/cabins (not surrounded by mountains and swamps, stuff like that), you are trying to maximize and gain access to every inch of buildable space available.
Then start filling up every bit of that buildable space. You don't need to expand from your pre-existing districts, you can start small town-like areas, and eventually connect them all up later. Just place down a lot of cultural buildings, and a few decorative buildings with them to populate an area with districts.
To deal with satisfactions, run decrees. For each satisfaction, there's a decree which ups it every cycle. Constantly run these for your least satisfied satisfactions, the politician leader type helps here if you pick it, but you'll lose out on the strategist's increase to security zones. Without the politician leader type, you should be able to keep every satisfaction at least in the “grey”, and with it, you can keep them all teal if you play well, as I did with my 150k city. This is VITAL!!!
Try to build a massive rampart or two covering a large area, as this boosts attraction and will help people move in faster. Then later on you can upgrade your ramparts to provide various benefits for your city.
In the Medieval age, find some big open space to be your farm zone. Could be a whole peninsula like with my 150k city, or just an area of your main land mass. There's not many tips I can say for maximizing farms, but really try to fill every inch of your farm zone with farm land. And try not to use too many surveyors' cabins. Upgrade every cabin to max before placing farms, and upgrade all your farms to max level.
Then just keep expanding until you cannot expand any further. You'll do a LOT of waiting at this point (this won't be the case once the next 2 eras are released). With my 150k city, I was able to expand up to 130k, then just waited a few hours for districts to form all around my city, getting me up to 150k. During this time you can do other things, just make sure you always have your satisfaction decrees active.
What’s your favorite element of Memoriapolis?
My favorite part of Memoriapolis comes down to a battle between two things: the ages & wonders, and the actual city building. I love both. As an avid Civilization 6 player, wonders just feel super cool to build, and the ages system is a really fun take on the city-building genre. But the city building itself also feels really satisfying and intuitive. Though if I had to pick one, I'd say the ages & wonders really do make the game, they make Memoriapolis a truly unique experience.
Your tips for players looking to build large cities like yours?
Make sure to use the attraction filter as it's super helpful when determining where people will settle. If an area you want to settle is worse in attraction than other areas of your city, people will not move there until the other areas are filled in. So you'll need to build more attraction-generative buildings in that area. But remember, as long as your migration and food are both positive, people will always be moving into your city. So sometimes you just need to wait a little while. I had to do a lot of waiting in my 150k city, especially at the end.
Districts can form outside of your security and attrition zones, so at the end when you're really tight on space, throw some cultural buildings and decorative buildings right at the edge to maximize space. Make sure they're backed up by a security station though, or they won't generate much attraction (only the case in the medieval era with the attrition zones).
Farms can be used to clear large swaths of dense forest, this may be changed in the future, but it's useful for now.
As for resources, try to build a collector for each. In the Medieval age, you can get to a point where you have so much gold that you can buy literally everything you need, but that's pretty late-game. Try to get in as many factions as you can, and try to keep them all happy. I do this by separating zones of my city into the different culture types. I'll have multiple areas that are all economic cultural buildings and districts, and areas that are all military, ect. These different zones can border each other, and building this way minimizes conflict. This gains you a lot of gold, which you can spend on natural resources your land has run out of. Once you get to the Medieval age, this all gets easier. Unlock precious quarries, and build 2-3 of them, then upgrade them if you want more money. These gems are so valuable, that once you get a steady supply of them, you can buy anything. Set those up quick! Another thing to use is the prospecting workshop. I first tried them out in my 150k city, and immediately felt stupid for not using them before. Set them up near multiple different resource collectors, and have them running as you collect. This gives you infinite resources as the prospecting workshop works faster than any of the collectors. Once they run out of resources to replenish, they'll pause, and then you can unpause them again once resource deposits start running low. In my 150k city, there was no limit to how much they could replenish.
What’s next for your Memoriapolis journey?
As for what's next for me, I'm going to keep building. As the new updates come out, I'll be starting fresh cities with each one to get the full experience with the changes. I'll slow down a good bit right now as I've completed my major goals, but who knows? I might set my mind to something larger in the future.
Congratulations to DarkFrost for his amazing city! Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us!
If you’d like to be featured in an upcoming Community Spotlight, feel free to share your achievements (like cities, guides, fan art, etc.) on our Discord!
