In 1453, the city of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman forces of Sultan Mehmed II. The end of the long siege marked the final chapter of the Byzantine Empire. But the writing had been on the wall for the Byzantines for at least a couple of centuries prior – ever since the devastating plundering of the city by a European crusader army in 1204.
The story of the Byzantines is glorious and tragic. The Byzantines considered themselves Romans. They were the heirs of the eastern half of the Empire, outliving the fall of Rome by almost a millennium.
Yet their history is far less often told in modern popular culture than the various wars and conquests of the empire’s Latin half. Still, the Byzantines left a fascinating legacy – one covered in detail by some great books. The Fall of Civilizations podcast – which I highly recommend – devotes two fantastic episodes to the rise and fall of Byzantium.
in Paradox’s Crusader Kings III.
(In the 867 AD start.)
For much of its history, Constantinople was surrounded by three layers of stout stone fortifications. Many of the distinctive red-striped walls and towers still stand today in Istanbul, overgrown but imposing, carving through neighborhoods and along modern roadways.
When the Ottomans arrived to conquer the city, they brought enormous cannons with them – bombards that hurled enormous stones at the famous fortifications, eventually breaching the walls after a lengthy siege. The bombards included one oversized monster that took so long to cool down and reload that it could only be fired thrice daily.
After the famous signature trebuchet, one of the most popular late-game weapons in Ensemble’s Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings was the Bombard Cannon. In the game, the Turkish civilization – loosely representing dynasties such as the Seljuk Empire and the Ottoman Empire – was a gunpowder-focused civilization with a hitpoint bonus to their Bombard Cannons.
That civilization bonus, a tiny thing in the grand scope of the game, is partially a reference – albeit an obscure one – to the history-shaking Constantinople siege in 1453.
I wrote recently about strategies teams can use to build better game narratives. One powerful approach I didn’t mention is straight-up lifting themes from humanity’s rich past. While the Age of Kings Bombard example is a minor one, that touch of flavor added personality and a degree of grounding in reality to the experience. And some studios – and games – go much further than Ensemble did with Age of Kings.
For those of you who, like me, are fascinated by historical hooks in games, here’s a quick roundup of some of the best around.
The Ancestral Monarch: Civilization and its Progeny
The traditional 4X, best personified by the original Civilization and its sequels, relied heavily on historical theming. The model hasn’t fundamentally changed in decades: starting with a single city or settler, the player explores a map, technologically advances, and engages with other civilizations through a mix of conquest and diplomacy.
The genre – both thematically and mechanically – has proven to be a steady, consistent success with gamers. Older games in the genre like Call to Power have given way to modern takes like Amplitude’s Humankind and the upcoming Millennia by C-Prompt Games (published by Paradox).
(Full disclosure: C-Prompt was a recent client of mine and I did a small amount of work on the title. It’s a great game with nifty genre innovations built by a talented team – check it out when it launches next week.)
Major franchises in other genres owe a debt to Civilization and its progeny. The Age of Empires series drew a lot of inspiration from Civilization, no doubt in part due to the influence of the talented Bruce Shelley who worked on both. Another Civ-influenced real-time strategy game, Rise of Nations, was led by Brian Reynolds, the lead designer of Civilization II.
For most 4X games, the historical theming is a thin veneer over the mechanics. Games of the original Civilization and its sequels don’t play out like real history. Abraham Lincoln tangles with a nuclear-armed Gandhi; spearmen get lucky and defeat a nuclear-powered submarine. Like Age of Empires, Civilization uses light historical flavor to set up its sandbox, but then lets players go wild.
A couple of modern takes on the genre have tried to step closer to a more immersive historical framework. The smart Old World from Mohawk Games keeps its timeline focused on a narrower period, centering on ancient world nations like Rome and Egypt. The game puts more rails around the experience while simultaneously making the mechanics more complex than the usual 4X.
troops are helping out Seleucid overlords.
The lower-budget Aggressors: Ancient Rome and its equally-smart sequel Imperium: Greek Wars go even further. They include a highly customizable traditional 4X start, where players can begin on equal footing with nothing, but also a starting setup that attempts to mirror the historical state of the nations surrounding the Mediterranean Sea in the ancient world.
In this second mode, Aggressors and Imperium do a truly excellent job of creating alternate histories that feel plausible. Distinct starting conditions for each nation tend to recreate the traditional tensions. Rome and Carthage, through position and conflicting goals, are forced into war; in Greece, the heirs of Alexander tear each other apart before allying against external threats; Egypt’s power slowly declines as Rome and other players rise.
The narrative outcomes feel historically “right” in Aggressors and Imperium in a way that sessions of many 4X games don’t. To be fair, that goal is one many other 4X games aren’t aiming to achieve; like Age of Empires, they’re after flavor without the constraints.
Historically-themed 4X games walk a narrow tightrope. The more guardrails that a developer applies to create historical outcomes, the more constrained a player who just wants a history-themed sandbox will feel.
The Current Leader: Rulers of History
One can’t talk about historically-themed games in 2024 without mentioning Paradox. Their signature brand of real-time grand strategy games has proven to be a successful formula, both critically and commercially.
Whether you want to experience the ancient world in Imperator: Rome, explore (and exploit) the Americas in Europa Universalis IV, or struggle through the class conflicts of the early industrial age in Victoria 3, Paradox has you covered. Indeed, with mods, you can even take your alternate history experience from one game to the next.
The most interesting branch of the Paradox tree is Crusader Kings III, covering the period between the end of the Dark Ages in 867 and the aforementioned fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. It’s my favorite title of the bunch, combining the usual grand historical strategic decisions with a personal focus on a quirky cast of your dynasty’s family.
may be tiny, but we have a lavish court and
an extra dose of multigenerational inbreeding!
Perhaps Paradox’s biggest competitor in the historical games space is Creative Assembly’s Total War series. Though their offshoot into the Warhammer world has grabbed all the headlines of late, their signature mix of turn-based strategy and visually impressive real-time battles is time-tested and still great fun.
With subjects ranging from feudal Japan, medieval Europe, and the Napoleonic era, the Total War games are well-researched and, at their best, highly immersive. If you’re looking to push pseudo-miniatures around an electronic battlefield, especially within the context of a plausibly historic strategic layer, you can’t do much better.
Well… I take that back. Because I still have one more game to talk about. It’s a low-budget game that, unless you can’t stand turn-based mechanics, outdoes Total War and makes a plausible run at challenging Paradox’s grand strategy games.
The Scrappy Usurper: An Innovative Indie
AgeOD has been around for a long time making various quirky, sluggish strategy games covering topics such as the War of Spanish Succession and the American Civil War. But in their recent partnership with Slitherine, they transitioned to a new engine and released an innovative, polished, and thoughtful historical grand strategy game in Field of Glory: Empires.
Like most of the games I’ve discussed, Field of Glory: Empires is focused on warfare in the ancient world. Yet it’s far from a map-painting game – in fact, trying to conquer every province is the easiest way to get into trouble.
I’m sure that growing blob of Persians to
our east is no real threat, right?
Instead, like the dynasty-focused Crusader Kings series, Field of Glory: Empires is centered around legacy. Your nation-state can entirely collapse before the game’s over, but if you did enough to be remembered – for example, the glory of ancient Egypt, or the legacy of Alexander the Great – you can still win even if you’re technically out of the game.
At first, Field of Glory: Empires feels more like a deterministic board game than Paradox’s fuzzier systems-heavy historical simulations. But a lot is going on under the hood. The simulated economy, relying on a giant set of randomized buildings interacting with fixed map resources, has plenty of depth. Army composition is important, terrain matters a lot, and the various civilizations play differently.
Field of Glory: Empires shines best when paired with one of the best turn-based wargames around – the companion tactical title Field of Glory II. Tactical battles from Empires can be exported to Field of Glory II and played out in a near-seamless process that closes one game and opens the other.
(I confess to doing a fair bit of auto-resolving for small or insignificant battles in both Field of Glory: Empires and the Total War series. But I play out the more interesting ones and the ones where I can turn an auto-resolved loss into a win.)
Legacies of the Past
With a few experimental exceptions, games aren’t scholarly works of history. Nor do they have to be – they’re entertainment. Like the shows I, Claudius and Vikings, games with historical themes are mostly just flavored to resemble real history.
It’s a sad fact that most historical games focus heavily on warfare and the conflict between empires and nations. I can think of a few that don’t – the excellent narrative game Pentiment, or the underrated RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance (though that title’s still set during a war and features a lot of personal hand-to-hand combat).
Still one of the best expressions of “living
through history” found in gaming.
There’s no denying conflict has been a major driver throughout human history. Empires rise and fall, cultures shift and change and merge, and the aftermath of a major war shapes the next era. It’s not surprising that violent, paradigm-shifting wars of conquest are what many historical games focus on.
Just in the last century, the plight of Jewish people during the Holocaust, the horrors inflicted by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the Armenian genocide in Turkey in 1915 followed by a devastating diaspora, are poignant reminders that we don’t just learn about history – we are constantly living through it.
More modern analogies to Constantinople’s collapse are all around us. A tragedy is still unfolding in Ukraine; so too is a devastating and disproportionate war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
One of the most insightful moments in the Fall of Civilizations pair of episodes on Byzantium’s collapse comes at the very end of the podcast. When Constantinople fell, refugees streamed out of the city. Many fled to Western Europe, carrying centuries of accumulated knowledge, books, and art with them.
That influx of tidbits of knowledge contributed directly to the European Renaissance. Further, Byzantine maps provided fresh guidance for explorers sailing west or around the southern tip of Africa to open up new trading routes with China and India.
In that thesis lies a hint of something that games with historical themes achieve when they’re at their best.
No one should rely on a real-time strategy game for an accurate history lesson. But if a player wonders why a Turkish Great Bombard in Age of Kings gets a buff, then reads a Wikipedia page on the Ottoman Empire, and that leads them to a more scholarly discussion of the fall of Constantinople, they might end up learning something new.
And for just a moment (as Field of Glory: Empires suggests matters with its nontraditional victory mechanic) knowledge spreads, and the story of the Byzantines lives again.
Many of the games mentioned are on sale on Steam through March 21. If you miss this sale, they’re regularly discounted. Follow the links in the article to the Steam store pages. See you next week!