Civitas: The city building video game KS

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**kenshin620**

Coincidentally launched nearby Sim City 2013?

Should be interesting to see how this develops (no pun intended

)

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1584821767/civitas-plan-develop-and-manage-the-city-of-your-d?ref=category

What is Civitas?

Civitas will be a revolutionary, open ended, community driven, highly moddable city building game, where you are not only responsible for terraforming the land, zoning, and building the structures, but you will also be able to manage many other aspects of your civilization. Civitas can either be played as a single player game, or you can play online with other city builders to make entire regions, share resources, and compete for citizens to build the largest city. We will not limit you to one or the other, both will be full featured and complete. Feel free to play it whenever, wherever, and however you want. Civitas will be available for Mac and PC through various digital download services.

The word "Civitas" is the Latin term for "citizenship" or "city-state", which is a great description in itself for what you will be able to build from the ground up in this game.

The very basic flow of the game will follow this design:

Terraform the land
Zone the land for your city
Build the structures that make up your city
Manage all aspects of the city for everything from transportation, utilities, emergency management, natural resources, and commerce.
Continue to grow your city. Meet the demands of the civilization you have created and respond to natural and unnatural disasters to make your city as great as you want it to be. Civitas will include a fully featured day-night system for added realism.

We have already started working hard on the tools and features to allow players to experience a level of freedom that has never been offered in a city simulation game before. But, we are not setting anything in stone. We want to build a community as well as amazing game. We will be asking for feedback from beta users through out the entire development cycle to make sure players have everything they need, and as much freedom as possible.

For instance, the terraforming system in Civitas is going to be far beyond what anyone else has offered in a city simulation game before. We are working towards letting the player do more than simply just flatten land or add trees. You will be sculpting everything from shorelines and river systems, to entire mountain ranges and canyons. We want you to be able to truly create the perfect canvas for your city. But we also need this system to be extremely user friendly so that it can be as powerful as we need it to be. We will need your feedback early in this process.

And of course the obligatory "Why"

Why Civitas?

Out of all of the possible types of games our fledgling studio could pick as our first project, why did we pick a city simulation title as our first effort?

Easy, it was out of a combination of how much we loved some of the original city simulation games back in the early PC days and our displeasure with the direction the new SimCity has taken under the iron fist of EA. We don't agree with the removal of single player, the lack of terraforming, lack of modding, and above all them forcing the worst form of draconian DRM on its players known as the "Always On-line" requirement. They are seriously not going to let you play their game if you aren't online. Anyone that has ever been forced to play under that DRM knows how terrible it is. Not only can your internet access stop you from playing, if EA is having any server issues (Yeah those never happen right?) you'll get a nice fat error message instead of your game starting. Forget playing while traveling or anything. This is not a good recipe for a simulation game. EA should really just rename it SimFarmVille and get it over with.

Then they started banning people for simply disagreeing with the "Always Online" DRM requirement. That was really the last straw for us. We came from studios that had to be hindered with orders like that from publishers, and it took so much away from our final products. We can build a better experience. We don't have to treat our players like that.

Those issues aside, this type of game is actually a perfect fit for the talent that we have assembled currently. We are suited very well to work on a very technical game of this nature. Not only can we make it technically sound, but we can also make it a beautiful experience with our artists real time experience. Can we make cut scenes that rival Blur or Blizzard? No, not yet, but we can make it look really good in real time.

Plus this type of game can only survive with a dedicated fan base. We know that. We are not building another FPS for the masses; we are building a game for a niche market of players that love this genre as much as us. And we will work with everyone to make sure Civitas is well worth your investment of time and money.