Winter is a season you either love or hate. You may adore it because you think snow is pretty or like to ski. Haters usually hate it for the cold. But either way, you’ll soon come to respect it, just by having to live through it in the new upcoming game, FEUDUMS.
Winter in this 4X MMO-strategy game, set in the Middle Ages, is as brutal as it was in real life. Luckily, the game is not completely all cold and frozen misery. The Feudums time cycle mirrors real seasonal change. There are the usual four seasons and each has a different effect on the game. Summer flows into fall, falls turns into winter, winter thaws into spring and spring heats up into summer before starting the cycle again.
The game further subdivides each season into early, mid, and late because each time frame can have a specific effect - especially on medieval agriculture.
For example, you will spend “early” spring sowing your spring crops and dealing with new livestock babies. “Mid” spring finds your serfs weeding the winter crop and gathering livestock dairy products. During “late” spring, you’ll only need to worry about dairy products.
Food, as you might expect, plays a huge role in the development – and happiness – of your population and your feudum. People must always have enough to eat, else there are negative consequences both to your population (as people starve) and also to morale (as survivors looks for someone to blame!)
There are spring and winter crops to help keep your population fed year round although everything slows way down for those cold winter months. The winter crop is harvested in late summer while the crops planted in early spring are reaped in early autumn. During the long winter months, with the exception of some livestock being slaughtered, a feudum’s population must live off its stores.
Each feudum is expected to be self sufficient to an extent. Any surpluses are sent into a player’s treasury which serves as a virtual warehouse for all resource types including food. The player’s treasury will help offset any shortages one area may be having. Diplomacy is always an option too. Perhaps a fellow Lord could spare some resources? Or will he could sense weakness and attack?
Heading into winter, a Lord or Lady must be sure that the level of food is great enough to supply a population over the winter. Unfortunately, food can also spoil, so there is a fine line between how much you can store vs. how much is used.
As in medieval days, most activity grinds to a halt during the winter. Armies move much slower. Military units in the field can double the cost of their upkeep. Battles take more time and automatically have a lot more causalities. Winter is a brutal time.
Gathering food for survival is still the number one task for your feudum’s serfs to do. There are both spring and winter crops that must be sown, weeded, and harvested. Serfs can also tend livestock to generate additional stores of food – dairy and meat products.
Eventually, the game’s goal is to allow modding - especially for the seasons. This means someone could change the internal working of the seasons for a specific game world. For example, you could change the seasons to a perpetual ice age where the farming "season" is only in “early” winter (just a few ticks in a year) or create a Game of Thrones Westeros setting with very long summers and winters only. The ideas are endless.
Feudums is due out in early 2016. Already, the game’s Map Creator - used to create game playing maps - is available. The second build - feudums management - will be released shortly. There will be a total of five builds before the complete MMO is finished.
