City States is intended to be the first evolution simulation ever, allowing the player, becoming the head of a Late Mesolithic period tribe, to take his tribe through the history to, finally, forge a Nation. While there are several games, claiming to give this option to the player, all of them simply propose a historic look for a fast military conflict. The evolution is nothing else that a chain of weaponry upgrades, with sometimes historical names, that have to be memorized and repeated by the player to win. The player always knows for sure what his final “country” will look like, no matter what his actions or the situation around is. The only unknown is the speed with which the player will follow this one-track road, - the faster, - the better the player is. City States, on the other hand, sets the player into an interactive world, where his actions, the behavior of other tribes and the world itself will act together to produce a multitude of possible outcomes.

City States is the main project of Goblinz, a French development team. The project was developed since 1999, but due to our amateur status, the development was slow. We were present at MILIA 2000 in the Developers Village, but didn’t start looking for an investor until late 2000. Having an investor, we took a more professional and structured approach.

After restructuring, which included abandoning other full-time occupations and hiring several members in Moscow, creating management, rules and schedules for both teams, work went much faster and now City States is in its final stages. The base of the project was re-done and was adapted for multiplayer games.

The graphical engine was completed during the summer and we are currently finishing game data structure and the graphics.

Features :

• Possibility for the player to choose himself the weapons (over 15) and equipment (30) and training of any unit, thus creating any unit. The graphical representation reflects in all details those choices.
• Up to 32 000 soldiers in a game.
• No two soldiers of the same kind look exactly the same (in a standard Unit of less than 200 soldiers).
• Soldiers 40% bigger than in any RTS.
• 140 different structures in a least 4 different styles with 16 graphical variations for each.
• A home graphical engine allowing compressing animations and large sprites up to 5 times, which enables incomparable animation quality and unprecedented size of characters and structures.
• Numerous possibilities to customize your nation to fully suit your playing style.
• Largest map ever seen in an RTS.
• A real living world with villages, legends, ruins, political formations, citizens with individual interests and complex life patterns, theatre plays, gladiator fights, chariot races, riots, espionage and much more...

Multiplayer

City States was written with the idea of a multiplayer game in mind. Thus, no object in the game receives its orders directly from the player, but passes through a virtual server. Furthermore, all orders as well as the random events and animation movement was designed to minimize data transfer. City States supports up to 16 players, although we feel it is way too much for the genre.

Among the multiplayer modes available will be the typical deathmatch, team deathmatch, independent battles (no evolution), defense (designing and defending a fortress). There will also be more original modes, such as playing traders or bandits in a huge artificial intelligence controlled world, passing a technology or note from one player to another (or stop it from being passed/steal it) or simply playing City States in a cooperative way either controlling separate cities or even one city by several payers.