Medieval Dynasty is a survival/town-building game with RPG Elements by Render Cube. It entered Early Access on Steam in September 2020 and got a full release exactly a year later.
You play as Racimir, an orphaned youth fleeing the flames of war. Luckily, he finds a lush valley, rich in natural resources and unclaimed land. Racimir can make a living however you choose- hunting wild animals, farming, gathering herbs, mining, or trading with nearby settlements. If he builds up his reputation enough, he can even start a family of his own, to inherit the role of player character once Racimir dies. Given time and careful play, his dynasty can become leaders of the region.
The game has minimal characterization, instead focusing on the experience of building a household from the ground up. It is notable for its Scenery Porn and immersive gameplay that is well-balanced between unrealism and micromanaging.
And it has the same font as Oblivion.
Medieval Dynasty includes the following tropes:
- Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
- For the sake of simplicity, seasons take anywhere between three (the default setting) and thirty days, rather than tracking the real year in-game.
- Rock salt is used directly, without any further refining. Normally, rock salt is quite literally refined by creating a strong solution and then evaporating the water.
- Aerith and Bob: Downplayed. Characters have predominately Slavic names, but there are also a few medieval Germanic names in the mix. Render Cube is a Polish company, clearly basing their fictional setting on regional variables, so it makes sense in such a context.
- Age-Gap Romance:
- Defied and downplayed with the player, the maximum age difference allowed is 10 years. (Potentially a 28-year-old player can be with someone 18-year-old, but not a 29-year-old player)
- Among villagers, the maximum age difference is 20 years.
- Apathetic Citizens: Played with. Villagers you hire have a morale rating. Fail to provide your side of the deal you've made with them, and they will quickly pack and leave your village.
- Arbitrary Equipment Restriction: You can't set more than one trap until the game feels like letting you. This is because traps are Simple, yet Awesome; they only require a few twigs to make, they get you free meat with no effort on your part, you can place them almost anywhere, and it only takes a day or so before they can be reused. If you were allowed to make as many traps as you want, it would trivialize the survival aspects of the game.
- Artistic License – Physics: Because the game uses Elemental Tiers, the properties of constructed buildings are reverse to reality. The in-game stone walls and wooden shingles have better thermal insulation than wooden walls and thatched roof.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Wooden crossbow. They're marginally stronger than bows, but take a horrendous amount of time to reset and require bolts, which are only worth using if you have the iron ones. And due to a few quirks of the engine, bolts have a nasty tendency to over-penetrate, hit the ground and get destroyed in the process, giving you a weapon with low damage, low firing rate and almost guaranteed destruction of every single bolt used with it.
- Artificial Stupidity: The only real way of fighting against bears - if you are insane enough to try - is to abuse the pathfinding issues they have in rough terrain, allowing to jump over them and regain safe distance to pelt them with some more arrows, bolts or spears. A real bear would simply snag you mid-air.
- Bears Are Bad News: Bears are by far the most dangerous animals you can face. And they usually roam around caves, making it extra-dangerous to even start thinking about mining. Bears are the only animals that are immune to the otherwise-One-Hit Kill|s that are crossbow bolt headshots and once they close on Racimir, he's pretty much dead.
- Boring, but Practical:
- Growing cabbage. It's the only crop that matures within a single season, it can be harvested en masse , and it's used for cooking potage, one of the most efficient nutrient sources (even without accounting for how fast cabbage grows) that you can access almost from the start. You will be hard-pressed to grow any other food crop thanks to the sheer efficiency of cabbage.
- Early on, wooden spoons and ladles are some of the easiest sources of money. All they take is sticks and are very fast to make. Yet they can provide enough money to buy all the recipes you will ever need, along with seeds and manure for truly massive farms. The only time spoons and ladles aren't so great is when seasons are set for very short durations.
- Woodshed trivalise gathering logs. You can fell trees yourself, but it's time-consuming, the logs are some of the heaviest objects and the trees take time to regrow - lots of it. A woodshed, with even the crappiest lumberjack, is going to produce 12 logs per day without felling any actual trees. The downside is that Racimir won't be gaining related experience.
- Bratty Half-Pint: Fenenna is a Fiery Redhead child with serious attitude. Racimir ends up running errands for her, trying to work her into buying Sambor's woodcarved figurines. It takes him a while to figure out that the kid is just messing with him.
- Changing Gameplay Priorities: Your main focus early on is simple survival and maybe toying with basic construction and production. However, eventually the game progression is organised in a way that encourages you to automate raw resource extraction by hired villagers and go from a survival sim to a village mayor sim, building a self-sufficient settlement and providing for the next generations.
- Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: With the Inspector ability, animals are highlighted in different colouring depending on how dangerous they are, and objects that can be interacted with are highlighted in yellow.
- Command & Conquer Economy: Played with. Unless you assign people to specific jobs, they will simply stay in your village, doing nothing. However, once assigned to a building, they will act according to their own AI. Structures can only be built by Racimir.
- Construct Additional Pylons: You need housing for incoming workers and future generations. You can provide a roof for two people per house, regardless of its type, and either one or two slots for children, as long as you house a couple together. Once the children grow up, they can stay inside, but if you plan to further expand your population, they will need their own homes.
- Cool, but Inefficient:
- A variety of objects, especially specific types of clothes, are pretty terrible sources of income when used as Shop Fodder. They take extra resources and time to make, not to mention all the refining processes needed to get there.
- Subverted with iron tools. While setting all the structures needed for iron mining is a hassle and locked behind a few different tech gates, once done, iron tools are just strictly superior to anything else and it pays off handsomely.
- Crapsack World: The world outside the valley is your standard medieval fantasy mix of grimdark and Dung Ages, with wars, famine, poor peasants being abused on a regular basis and what not. Various characters, Racimir included, moved to the valley precisely to escape the terrible lot awaiting them anywhere else.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Just about everyone in Iordan's pack. In fact, their traumatic lives before meeting together are part of what let them bond as a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits.
- Disc-One Nuke: There is a supply of iron tools and a few high-quality bows scattered in the wilderness in specific areas at the game's start. They are significantly better and faster to use than anything you will be able to afford for a long while, not to mention produce. Their location is fixed, so getting there is about either stumbling on them, memorising their position or checking an online guide.
- Easy Communication: You can at any point in the game open the related menu and swap around worker placement in your builds, change production mode or even fine-tune the exact feather-to-meat ratio gathered by your hunters, despite being an entire day of travel away from your settlement.
- Elemental Crafting: You start with improvised tools made out of wood and stone and it takes quite a while and effort to even unlock the ability to smelt any sort of metal. The metal tools themselves are tiered through copper, bronze and iron, with iron being behind another few tech gates. However, you can buy better tools at any point of the game, as long as you have the money and reach Jan the smith in Hornica.
- Elemental Tiers: For tools, it's wood, stone, copper, bronze and iron. For construction, it's wattle/wood/stone and thatch/planks/shingles.
- Eyepatch of Power: Sambor is missing his right eye, yet is by far the toughest and most imposing character in the game, while being a former highwayman who found a new purpose in life. In fact, the eye-patch only adds to his rugged looks.
- Exposed to the Elements: Not wearing proper clothes is a great way to get hypothermia in the winter and heatstroke during summer. Hats, in particular, are badly needed during the summer, especially when working in the open sun.
- Fame Gate: Reputation is tracked personally (how much a given person likes you) and broadly (what your dynasty has accomplished). Women will not be amenable to flirting or marriage if they don't like you enough, and people won't settle in your village unless your family has proven its worth by raising buildings, finishing quests, etc.
- Famous Ancestor: By peasant standards, anyway. Iordan was a self-made entrepreneur whose success inspired Racimir, his nephew, to settle in Bostovia. He's dead by the time Racimir arrives (murdered by bandits who attacked his trading caravan), but his friend Uniegost lets Racimir live near the town anyway, for old times' sake.
- Fanfare: Whenever you level up a skill, technology or progress or finish a quest, a short fanfare plays.
- Fetch Quest: The majority of quests are about bringing X to Y. Sometimes, a Chain of Deals might be involved. Prior stocks of X can be used to throw the game Off the Rails.
- Game-Breaking Bug: Early builds of the game suffered from a potentially game-crashing bug caused by projectiles over-penetrating and piercing through terrain, then indefinitely falling down in the void below. This caused an enormous draw on the CPU to keep track of their infinite travel. Eventually, it was fixed shortly before the game finished Open Beta.
- Great Offscreen War: The war that made Racimir an orphan in the opening. There might also be a war fought by the current king, and his herald will be to collect extra taxes or food, either as provision for his troops or to be distributed in ravaged parts of the kingdom. But the valley itself is always safe and sound.
- Guide Dang It!: Good luck figuring out how and where to find salt without a guide, especially since caves are some of the least frequented parts of the map (not to mention being in complete wilderness), and they attract bears. To a lesser extent, the same goes with metal ores, but you will unlock meat salting in the first few in-game days, while you might not even figure out there is metal smelting in the game until much later.
- I Was Quite a Looker: Everyone talks about how beautiful Kestrel was in her youth, but when Racimir meets her for the first time, she's in her early 70s and looks the part. She's still remarkably spry for her age, thou.
- Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Racimir is a lousy jumper and can't climb at all. Thus, unless terrain favours it and you are jumping downslope, any wall higher than chest level is impossible to brave.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Some dialogue options include discussing a dream where Racimir feels someone else is in control of his body, looking through his eyes as he builds a house and commenting that he's hungry. An NPC can respond that they have a similar dream where they are frozen with their arms horizontal.
- Meaningful Name: Almost all of the pre-existing villages have easily identifiable, Slavic names explaining their main economic activity or at least their geographic location: Hornica is a mining settlement in the mountains, Jezerica is by the lake, Rolnica has a windmill and most farming-related traders, Denica is at the bottom of a river valley; and so on and forth.
- Mister Seahorse: When the ability to play as a woman was added in a patch, the obvious question came up of what to do about pregnancy, which previously resulted in the mother taking 18 years of maternity leave. Solution: leave the gameplay unchanged, have the husband get pregnant instead.
- Morale Mechanic: People under your employment have a set of needs to fulfil, including housing, food, water and heating. Not providing any of those will keep dunking their morale, and eventually drive them away from your village. After all, who would want to stay in a place where the most basic needs aren't fulfilled?
- Non-Combat EXP: Experience is to make you a better survivor, not better at fighting. An experienced player might be tougher and have better weapons than a new player, but both will have the same options and abilities. Notably, the the vast majority of quests are nonviolent (collecting berries, building structures, carrying messages...), and quests give you a lot more experience than actions.
- Noob Bridge: Short seasons are better than the maximum setting of 30 days per season. By mid-summer of the first year, you will be stuck in a game where you have to simply sleep off the rest of the season time and again if you set them to be 30 days long, because there will be nothing left to do, to the point of resource depletion. It will also require far more resources to maintain your village in running order, since you will have to feed people over longer periods of time, while having the exact same space to do so.
- Only a Flesh Wound: It is entirely possible for deer to run while a spear is lodged in (and back out of!) their innards.
- Railroading: You can't specialize in one occupation at the outset, you have to follow a set route through all of them. The learning chain goes: house, workshop, loom, hunting lodge, barn, etc. Unless you use an infinite experience cheat, you cannot go from house to barn, or start out knowing how to fish.
- Refining Resources: One of the main gameplay elements is refining just about anything into something more complex, and often even refining by-products of other refinings (like using straw from threshing to make straw hats). And despite it being mostly a farming sim, there is even a metalworking aspect to it.
- Retired Monster: Iordan's merry band in general, given they were a friendly pack of rascals and con artists, but Sambor specifically. Twice. First, he retired from being a regular highwayman and joined Iordan, becoming his Big Guy. Then, once the years caught up with them all, he settled in the valley with the rest of the pack.
- Ridiculously Fast Construction: If you have enough materials, building walls only takes a few seconds of holding down the mouse key.
- Romance Sidequest: Wooing a lady into marrying Racimir and his potential heir. It involves lots of talking about specific subjects and paying close attention to the preferences of the character in question - certain topics will decrease your success meter and you are better off not even bringing that up.
- RPG Elements: Racimir and the workers under his employment gain experience in fields related to their current actions. For Racimir, it operates as Technology Levels. For his workers: how many resources they can gather/process per day.
- Savage Wolves: Wolves are one of the few animals that will attack you just for getting too close. In Uniegost's personal quest, Racimir must collect intel on an unusually large pack of wolves, and warn nearby villages.
- Settling the Frontier: Your main task in the long run. The valley is sparsely populated and has only a handful of farms between the pre-existing villages, leaving plenty of room for your own. Racimir's main motivation was to escape the war, and he heard stories about the valley being both remote and peaceful, while lacking people to make it prosper, giving him the original idea to head there once his village got razed.
- Simple, yet Awesome:
- Traps of various kinds and types. They provide large quantities of meat and additional resources pretty much for free, as all it takes are sticks and maybe some stones.
- Copper tools. They are a significant improvement over wood-and-stone tools, while not requiring all the extra effort that goes with smelting bronze nor building a mine to access iron ore. Most importantly, their extraction rates mean they require less swings than default tools, without having "lost" extraction tied with bronze tools. And you can set up copper tools production in the first few days.
- Shop Fodder: More than half of the objects you can make in the workshop serve no other purpose other than being sold off, at a much higher value than the input resources. Including things like cart wheels, cutlery, baskets and so on that have absolutely no application on their own.
- Shown Their Work:
- Shovel design is a pre-industrial one, with only the cutting tip being made out of metal (and in the case of wooden shovels, obviously not even that).
- A wide-brim hat has better protection from hot weather than any other piece of clothing. In real life, protecting your head from direct sun is the best protection from heat stroke there is.
- Skill Point Reset: Talking with your wife (once you get married, that is) has an option to reset your skills so far. It is framed in-game akin to having a mid-life crisis.
- Small, Secluded World: The valley. Its remoteness was one of the main draws for Racimir, as it's at least far away from the Great Offscreen War.
- Snipe Hunt:
- Downplayed with Walrod. Upon learning who Racimir is, sets him out on a quest to gather 1000 logs of wood (that's enough to build an entire village from scratch, and while using only wood for that), ostentatiously to build a palisade. Seeing Racimir's panicked reaction, he quickly explains that he was just messing with him.
- Fenenna sends Racimir on a handful of annoying tasks and Fetch Quests, supposedly because she needs his help. She eventually admits that she was just having fun at his expense.
- So Last Season: Once you have metal smelting set up, even simple copper tools completely outshine the starting wooden-and-stone tools, reducing them to a total emergency if your current tool breaks down while in the wilderness.
- Not Completely Useless: However, there is a variety of jobs for your villagers, where there is no real point in providing them with anything better than the most primitive tools. The best example is hunting, where villagers using stone knives is pre-requested to even make it cost-effective as an activity done by NPCs.
- Stat Grinding: The skills and technology systems require an ever-increasing amount of repetitive tasks performed in relation to their respective skills and tech trees. It eventually reaches such high levels, flat-out grinding will be required to progress any further.
- Super Not-Drowning Skills: You can't drown, period. You can't dive, for that matter, but there is just no way to drown.
- Technology Levels: The game has a few different gates on progression, which are effectively technology levels. You must gain both sufficient on-hand experience in given field and build specific structures (which in turn must be unlocked first with related experience in different fields) to gain access to better tools, more efficient production or simply new recipes. The number of possible structures to build is restricted by your general progress, which is both time- and experience-locked.
- Too Awesome to Use: Until you get a forge going, metal tools are just too good to be true, even if found in the forest or an abandoned mining camp. And even once you get yourself copper and bronze production going, iron remains a luxury.
- True Companions: Iordan, Uniegost, Sambor, Wolrad and Kestrel formed a roaming group of good-hearted con artists, helping the needy. But as time progressed, and both age and their personal issues started to catch up with them, they eventually fell apart.
- Unstable Equilibrium:
- There is a tier 1 Farming skill that offers a chance to double the yield of a single plot of land, with 25/50/75% chance to trigger. It's as busted as it sounds. Plus, just by preparing land for a single field, you should get enough experience to unlock all three levels of that skill.
- Once a steady supply of input resources is provided, grinding related skills and technology becomes incredibly easy. This is particularly visible with Building technology. There will be a point in the game where you will be swimming in excess stone, while stone walls offer the most experience. All it takes is to continuously build and tear down a gable wall segment (it gives the same exp as any other wall segment, while taking half the resources), and any loss of material sustained this way will be easily overcome with the excessive amount of stone you already have, further diminished with the proper perks.
- Worker Unit: There are peasants sitting around the campfires in pre-existing villages that can be hired to perform various jobs in your structures, from banal things like water-carriers to seamstresses and blacksmiths. Their performance depends on their skills.
- A World Half Full: The valley, when compared with the rest of the setting outside of it, is Arcadia, rather than a sparsely populated wilderness full of natural dangers. But that is because the rest of the setting is in the middle of a bloody war, and everyone would rather be far away from it.
- You Have Researched Breathing: The progression of structures related to animal care can sure feel this way. You need a separate building for each type of animal in the game, and each is unlocked separately. Getting a cowshed after first unlocking three kinds of barns, a stable (itself preceded by a donkey shelter), and few different kinds of coops is really grating. For contrast, a basic foundry can do everything the most advanced version can, but simply houses fewer workers when set for automated production.
- You Require More Vespene Gas: There are a few different "main" resources, restricting the development of your own village:
- There are obviously various construction materials needed to build structures.
- Both Racimir and people under his employment require food and water. The workers also need housing and heating.
- Buildings require not only input goods, but when operated by villagers, they also use tools to stay operational. In fact, running out of tools is the main reason why production stops.
- And then there are the villagers themselves. Not only Command & Conquer Economy is in effect, but you simply need people to operate your buildings, as there is only this much you can do yourself.
