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Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate - Leiden Medievalists Blog
(www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl)
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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TL;DR?
Curvy roads better than straight roads.
Thanks! But haha, that's it? That's the main critique?
Nah, I’m being snarky. It’s a comparison of a couple of games (like Settlers and Banished) to what’s actually known about life in medieval times. Notable differences are that in reality people didn’t have much to eat, also due to tithes by the church, whereas in games your entire goal is achieving huge (food) surpluses.
Also, in games you often build a town center and then start building further buildings quite organically, whereas in actuality towns were planned based on the surroundings.
The article is actually pretty interesting, not at all ‘stop having fun’ as another commenter’s meme here is saying. Though it doesn’t discuss Manor Lords.
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.