When I first looked to buy Citystate I was looking just for a casual game without the level of detail that city builders like Cities Skylines has. I didn’t want a massive learning curve, having to study and fail numerous times just to play a city builder game in my free time. Luckily, I stumbled upon Citystate – which satisfied that itch and impacted me more than I would ever have guessed.
Citystate is developed by one man, if you take a look on the Steam page it says the developer is Andy Sztark – which is really impressive given the level of detail in this game. It is not your typical city builder however, even though it looks reminiscent of Sim City 2000 and that’s what I expected.
The game challenged my then more left wing leaning views and with the two advisor options you can choose from, Keynesian or Austrian, it exposed me to the Austrian school of thought, which then led me to Milton Friedman, and then Ludwig Von Mises. Views I otherwise likely wouldn’t have exposed myself to.
First off you create a nation, and choose from a series of principles and values of your nation. E.g. laissez-faire or to each according to his ability, each according to his needs, or somewhere more in the middle. As you go on throughout the game choosing various policies e.g. whether to nationalise taxi’s, whether to tax heavy polluting cars etc. the level of intervention you choose will shape your government type, which can be one of 26 types ranging from a Stalin style communist dictatorship to more Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, you can of course go more in-between to say a liberal democracy or capitalist welfare state. You can really put your views to the test and see how much you’re willing to sacrifice your views and principles in order to survive as a nation. Say perhaps you don’t believe in nationalising the banking sector? Well when you see the tax income it will generate you might be tempted, especially if you owe bonds.
You build residential areas, commercial zones, industrial zones and you can mine for gold or even drill for oil. Choosing whether to make the mine or oil fields state owned or privately owned. These will create jobs and therefore wealth which you can choose how much of that you wish to tax from each class and how much sales tax to charge. With access to these resources you can then build factories like a weapons factory to create more wealth and trade with other nations.
Eventually you may see sky rises begin to form, income go way up so you can build things like a monorail to relieve traffic jams or perhaps you may try to create a communist dictatorship like I once did and be left with social housing, farms and riots - yes there are riots, and you can choose how you wish to deal with them. Lower taxes or send in the army? The choice is yours.
The army can also be used to control the borders and stop refugees, if you do so well that people want to live in your state then you will have an influx of them which can pose a bit of an annoying challenge. Especially if you choose to restrict immigration. You can build refugee camps, let them come in and form slums or send the military to deal with them, you can even build a wall, it’s expensive but it can be done.
What is the end goal you might ask. Well, hatever you want it to be really, perhaps to make as much tax revenue as possible or to make peoples lives miserable maybe to test your political and economic views to see how they fare? Create a rich continent (you can create several states in one geographical area) or space colonisation - which is a thing in this game.
Since the game has just one person working on it, I do not wish to overly nitpick when it comes to pointing out flaws. Once you have gotten to a stage where you're trying to get to space colonisation the game becomes rather dull, you can likely just leave the game running whilst you go make a drink, have some toast and even run a few errands, come back and nothing really will have happened if your nation is stable enough except that you will have a lot more money to spend on fancy buildings or to go towards starting a colony, and it feels like there is a stage before that just missing - like it's a massive jump to it. Also, the slums can become very annoying and a constant losing battle to get rid of them popping up, with a monetary cost and a stability cost each time you remove them, leading to constant riots - however once you master the game, which it is fairly easy even for casual gamers, you will know how to prevent slums popping up too often. None of this takes away from the fact that the game is extremely fun for the most part and is worth the £12 ($15) price tag, as you'll find yourself going back to it often enough. 
Citystate II was announced last year and the development is going really well so far, I will likely write a few articles on what to expect from that because I’m eagerly anticipating this game. I just hope this one will be available for Linux.
