Kaiserpunk is a truly unusual game, starting with the genre itself. Conceived as an exciting new strategy game set in an alternate reality where Civilization and Sim City have merged into one, Kaiserpunk stands out as something completely different. It's neither a classic city-building simulation nor a grand strategy genre. The oddities just pile up as you manage an early 20th century city, facing workers who are rioting because their small town of about a hundred illiterate residents doesn't get a daily newspaper.
Managing such a city, whether large or small (which inevitably grows gigantic), becomes a balancing act, guided by the spirit of the comedy of the absurd. Every decision can destabilize the economy, and the only way to solve the problem often involves further expansion, which brings with it new instability.
Your adventures in trying to solve labor crises often result in increasing production and introducing luxury goods to appease them - which of course leads to new challenges, like starting factories and finding the resources to mass-produce gramophones and radios.
Production chain
Based on the scenario described above, you might think that Kaiserpunk is a city-building simulation that explores society and its needs, rather than just workers and resources, like many tabletop strategy games. However, you would be sorely mistaken. Everything about people in Kaiserpunk feels like an almost absurd abstraction. Consider the basic category of the population - workers. Their happiness and maximum tax efficiency depend on two luxury goods - clothes and newspapers. Leaving clothes aside, we come to the main question:
How to make a newspaper
The answer depends on what we mean by “newspaper,” what population group they are aimed at, and what technology is available. But since this is Kaiserpunk, the process involves early 20th-century industrial production, tailored to a population of a hundred or so people who probably can’t even read.
So how do you start the production process? First you need cellulose. To get cellulose, you first need trees, for which you need forestry, not a lumberjack, but an entire building dedicated to exploiting forest resources. Next, there is the indispensable electricity (which, for example, you can get from windmills), and then a pulp mill, a paper mill, and a printing press. Finally, you get newspapers. Books, on the other hand, still don't exist.
Newspaper distribution and writing
This is not considered in the industrial process. The focus of the game lies on the complexity of transforming one resource into another through a series of industrial steps. Cellulose, a key ingredient in newspaper, is also used to produce ammunition, making the absence of weapons an additional gap in the system's balance.
Workers
Workers, in this simulation, appear as a versatile resource. They cultivate farmland, work in industry, produce and consume luxury goods. Yet, despite their presence in key economic sectors, they never seem like real people. This dehumanization of workers permeates the entire game. You unlock jazz clubs only after turntables and radios are already in full use, although live music existed long before those technologies. Drinking water only comes into play after you introduce chemical processes, although everything, including plants and forests, needs it from the start.
It's this bizarre dissonance that provides some of the fun. Kaiserpunk is very self-consciously poking fun at its own absurdities, as the game's cinematic elements regularly confirm. What's not fun, however, is trying to manage this house of cards of an economic system with the limited tools the game provides, while facing stringent performance and time demands.
Continuous growth to unattainable heights
Kaiserpunk demands ambitious endeavors from players. Always bigger and better, until you reach a point where you're so far ahead that you might as well quit the game. The need for growth is constant, even when the enemy AI becomes completely irrelevant.
Let's go back to our newspaper example and take a closer look at the role of cellulose in the production process. Cellulose, obtained from wood processing, is used to make paper for magazines, but it is also a key ingredient in the manufacture of ammunition. Over the course of a few hours of gameplay, these two production chains consume five units of cellulose each cycle, while the cellulose factory produces 24 units in the same period.
Once you build a pulp mill, its huge cost of money and electricity results in a surplus of pulp. To make the investment worthwhile, you must produce large quantities of paper and ammunition, first to satisfy the needs of the workers and then the army. However, increasing the number of workers requires new jobs and additional resources to meet their needs. At the same time, the production of ammunition requires the formation of an army, and its existence entails the need to wage war, which opens up a whole network of interconnected production chains, as complex as the pulp process.
Balancing these demands is extremely challenging and, even more problematic, often inefficient. The game constantly imposes new types of workers with needs that are difficult to satisfy or creates a surplus of materials that threaten to become waste. If you approach Kaiserpunk as a grand strategy game, rich in intricate production lines and conflicts that mimic the grueling war efforts of the early 20th century, you will feel right at home. But if you were expecting a city builder set during the Second Industrial Revolution, with an emphasis on the internal politics and morale of workers within the framework of social classes, this game may not meet your expectations.
What is missing from Kaiserpunk?
I must admit that I personally did not enjoy the constant and ever-increasing growth of my city and empire, no matter how much Kaiserpunk wanted to impose it. Still, I can understand how someone might enjoy feeling the constant pressure of improvement. However, I can hardly imagine anyone being able to tolerate the currently available in-game tools needed to achieve this kind of efficiency.
The problems are often small things that could be fixed in the future, like clunky menus that don't offer sorting or search capabilities, to tiny resource icons that make it difficult to distinguish workers from producers (especially when the portraits are 20 pixels). While individually, these flaws would be just an irritation, combined they make it significantly harder to operate the simulation in the manner that requires precision and control, which is the core of the game.
Additionally, occasional choppiness and odd audio glitches further mar the fantasy feel of a well-oiled economic system. If the game weren't so rigorous and complex, these glitches might be easier to forgive. On the other hand, it could be argued that the challenge of learning how this system works, through imperfect information, is a key part of the game's experience. This, after all, fits perfectly with the theme of building a new empire during the interwar period.
I think Kaiserpunk still has room for improvement, but at the same time it's a game worth your time, especially if you're a fan of complex, endless strategy simulations.
Kaiserpunk is currently on sale on the Steam gaming platform until March 31st, and the price of the game has been reduced from 30 euros to 27.
Performance:
To try your hand at this new combination of strategy and city builder, you need at least the following performance:
- procesor i5-3470 ili AMD FX 6350
- 8 GB RAM memory
- GeForce GTX 1050 3GB graphics card
- Windows 10 or higher
- 8GB of free space on your hard drive
- Vertex Shader 5.0-Pixel Shader 5.0.
Rating: 8
Bonus video:
