As with almost all construction games, Memoriapolis is not exempt from resource management, particularly food management. However, our aim was never to make Mémoriapolis a resource management game, even though resources have an important role to play in the overall gameplay loop.
However, building a city also means meeting the needs of its inhabitants, and at the top of the list of needs is adequate food.
Generally speaking, we wanted resource management to be simply an underlying mechanism for maintaining the city's balance and not a central loop in its development.
On the other hand, it was important for us to address an issue that is too often ignored: how to properly manage the surface area needed to feed a large population.
The fields are organised around the city.
If you've already played the game, you'll have noticed that surface area management is a key issue and that you have to make organisational choices that will affect the development of your city and the way it uses the surface area available to it.
Pomerium in Antiquity and attrition in the Middle Ages are systems that limit and frame your development choices. As a result, knowing where and when to place farms will very quickly become a crucial issue.
When you build a farm, you choose how many fields it will be made up of. These will be organised within the farm's action area, which, depending on its level, will guarantee a fixed quantity of food production.
These fields are big. Very large. The size of a neighbourhood. So they consume a large area at your disposal and block the development of your neighbourhoods.
Well, not really.
This is another of our original points, and one that ties in with the title of the game itself.
Cities are made of memory.
Each of your decisions will have a lasting impact on the city, and it's not impossible that your very first road will one day become a central boulevard during the Age of Enlightenment!
By the same token, fields are likely to become residential areas.
When you close down a farm or destroy its building, the fields will become wasteland which, if they are within the catchment area of a building, will become housing estates.
Once the farm is destroyed, the fields become wasteland.
So you'll regularly have to push agricultural production outside your town, while your old fields become new districts. We think that this system will make it possible to create realistically shaped towns in which the organisation of buildings 'remembers' their history.
With new buildings, wasteland becomes housing land.