Hi Everyone!
We’ve always found ancient Rome fascinating, especially the daily life and housing. In first hand accounts, original texts, and letters you can find they were very much like us. They had similar complaints about their apartment being too noisy, the roof leaking, or neglectful landlords.
There were a wide range of housing types in ancient Rome, from small homes to towering apartment buildings. We’re taking heavy inspiration from actual ruins and research to implement housing in Nova Roma.
Housing Types
So far, we’re supporting a few different housing types:
- small houses
- apartments (insula)
- larger houses (domus)
The small houses operate much like you’d expect, you just need to satisfy their basic needs. The apartments and larger homes will need access to more resources and services beyond the basics, including access to aqueduct supplied water. They’ll also provide more tax revenue.
Mixed-Use Buildings
One really interesting thing about ancient Rome was that on the ground floor of apartment buildings (and some domus style houses) there were shop fronts individuals could rent out. This mixed-use type building was very much like the kind you find in cities today.
We want to represent this in Nova Roma so we’ve implemented a new system in which you can make mixed use buildings. We’ve set up the apartment buildings with special slots on their ground floor available for shop placement.
Shops (Tabernae)
You’ll be able to select different shop types to place inside these ground floor slots, everything from food courts to barbers. The apartment and shops are independent buildings. The shopkeepers may or may not live at the apartment where their shop is located, and they’ll need to go out and collect the resources they need to run their business.
We’ve taken a lot of inspiration from the historical research on the types of businesses that populated these ground floor areas (you can read more about that history here). More historically inspired shop types will be coming later! On that note, a little disclaimer that we are not historians so some things may end up a bit different than how they actually were in ancient Rome. As game designers, we’re trying our best to balance the history with compelling gameplay.
Until next time!
-Pete, Michael, & Sam