City States
City States is a cross-platform MMO strategy game supporting unlimited concurrent players in a persistent medieval world.
Players build cities, wage tactical warfare, and compete for economic dominance through a deterministic simulation that synchronizes thousands of players.
The player-driven economy responds to supply and demand while combat emphasizes strategic planning over reflexes, ensuring accessibility across all devices and connections.
EU
2022
Full Technical Implementation
Unity3D, Azure Backend Infra
Technical Implementation
The game architecture centers on Azure-based infrastructure designed for massive scale.
The deterministic simulation system ensures all game states remain perfectly synchronized across thousands of concurrent players while maintaining responsive gameplay.
Deterministic Simulation
Every game action produces identical results regardless of when or where it's processed. This allows the client to run ahead of server validation, providing immediate feedback while the authoritative server confirms actions asynchronously.
Local Simulation & Eventual Consistency
Players experience zero-latency interactions through local simulation. The client predicts outcomes based on the deterministic ruleset while queuing commands for server validation. When discrepancies occur, the gentle rollback system interpolates between states rather than snapping to corrections.
Conflict Resolution
The server maintains authoritative state while allowing clients to operate on predicted futures. Timestamp-based ordering and deterministic resolution ensure fair outcomes even with significant latency differences between players.
Features
City Development
The city management layer simulates individual citizens, resource flows, and production chains. Players balance population growth against happiness metrics while specializing their economy through branching research trees. Each building placement affects adjacent structures, creating optimization puzzles as cities expand into newly unlocked districts.
Global Persistent World
A single procedurally generated world hosts all player cities simultaneously. Terrain generation creates strategic variety through resource distribution, defensive positions, and travel distances. Points of interest spawn dynamically, creating contested objectives that drive player conflict and cooperation.
Tactical Combat
Turn-based battles unfold on hex-based terrain with elevation, cover, and environmental effects. Unit types follow rock-paper-scissors relationships modified by equipment quality and hero abilities. The combat resolver runs the same deterministic simulation, allowing players to analyze replays and refine strategies.
Economic Systems
The global marketplace operates as a real-time commodity exchange. Players place buy and sell orders that execute automatically when prices match. Market depth visualization and historical charts enable sophisticated trading strategies. Regional price variations emerge naturally from player specialization and geographic resource distribution.