The very first step
Welcome
Welcome to the first post on the Imperia Borealis devlog.
I'm Christoffer Södergren. I'm building this game together with my wife Camilla, from our home on Gotland, a small island in the baltic sea in Sweden. I grew up walking the medieval streets of the beautiful city of Visby, and somewhere along the way the idea of building a game set in this part of the world was born and quickly turned into something we couldn't stop working on.
This blog is partly for you and partly for me: a place to share what we're building, and a place for me to think out loud about design decisions, problems, and lessons as we go.
What is it?
Imperia Borealis is a browser-based multiplayer strategy game set in northern medieval Europe. Right now it takes place on Gotland (yes, where we live), and over time the world will expand outward across the Baltic. You build an estate, trade with other players, form alliances, wage war, craft gear, dive into religion and a knowledge tree, and quite a bit more.
If you've played Travian, Tribal Wars, or even Utopia, you'll recognize the bones. If you've played Crusader Kings, you'll recognize the appetite for depth.
Future posts will go deep on combat (which is MTG-inspired and phase-based), the trade-scarcity economy, parishes and territory, the knowledge system, and the experts that quietly run everything in the background. For this first post though, let's start where every player starts: the estate.
Estate economy & buildings
Every player runs an estate, which is basically your little medieval home base on Gotland. You've got land, experts (workers), and a handful of buildings, and the whole game radiates outward from how you choose to develop them.
The loop is simple on paper. You assign workers to buildings, buildings produce resources every tick, and resources let you construct more buildings (or upgrade the ones you have). Bigger buildings let you do more interesting things: train units, craft gear, study knowledge, perform religious rituals, dispatch caravans.
What I like about this system is that it's deliberately not infinite. Your estate has a tier (Village, then Hub, then City), and each tier caps how many distinct processing buildings you can run. So you can't just build everything. You have to commit. Are you the lumber-and-bows estate? The wool-and-cloth estate? The one with a runehall and three breweries? That decision shapes who you trade with, who you ally with, and what your army eventually looks like.
It's the layer everything else in Imperia Borealis plugs into. Combat needs units, units need barracks, barracks need stone, stone needs a quarry, quarries can be improved by experts, experts can be improved. And somewhere in there you're also juggling caravans and a faith economy and a knowledge tree. It sounds like a lot, but in practice it sneaks up on you. You log in to "just check on the build queue" and forty minutes later you're redesigning your whole estate.
That's the goal, anyway.
If any of this sounds like your kind of game, the easiest way to follow along is the Discord, where most of the day-to-day conversation lives. You can also sign up for the newsletter if you'd rather get the posts in your inbox.
Next post in a few days.
Christoffer