Foundations

These games make claims about the world. This page says where those claims come from, which ones are argued about, and which ones we decided not to make. It is not a history lesson — it is a statement of provenance.

The axiom

Empires is built on one idea, and it is worth naming because most games in this genre are built on a different one without saying so. The idea is that what characterises people is not a ladder of increasing complexity but the freedom to move, to disobey, and to remake the terms they live under.

Everything the civil layer does is a version of that. A person you force walks for the edge of the map. A site that takes a charter stops obeying you. Choosing how to meet someone — welcome, employ, or force — is choosing what kind of society you are making. And the steps are reversible: losing legitimacy and falling back to something simpler is a real state of the game, not a game over.

David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (2021).
The whole civil layer. Three freedoms people have historically exercised — to move, to disobey, to reshape their relationships — are the three things Empires lets you take away, and charges you for taking.
Caveat — Strong on the argument, contested on the evidence: specialists have shown it presses individual cases harder than they hold. We adopt the structure, not the reconstruction.

What a game like this has to cover

A useful checklist for designing power is to ask which kinds of power exist at all. We use one from historical sociology, not as a theory we endorse, but as a way of noticing what is missing. By that checklist, Empires spent most of its life being one kind of game:

Military built out units, structures, counters, the tech tree, and razing an HQ

Economic half built gold and the Command exist; there is still no stock, no debt, no price between players

Ideological just started the oath is the first piece — an order that grants legitimacy and forbids an action

Political just started work posts and the three verbs decide who obeys whom; tribute and charters are not built yet

That imbalance is the reason the civil layer exists. The missing halves are not nouns absent from a catalogue — they are relationships: who obeys whom, who keeps the surplus, who is allowed to leave.

What this game refuses

A civilization game that does not name the models it rejects is adopting them by omission. These two are the common ones, and Empires is built against both.

Elman Service; Morton Fried, Primitive Social Organization; The Evolution of Political Society (1962; 1967).
Band → tribe → chiefdom → state. Empires does NOT use mandatory stage progression: its civil steps are reversible, and losing legitimacy or losing sites is a legitimate state of the game, not a failure.
Dismantled by Yoffee and by Graeber & Wengrow. Almost every civilization game still encodes it silently.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997).
Geographic determinism. Empires does NOT make terrain decide who wins: land changes what coercion costs, not who deserves to rule.
The strong version is rejected by most anthropologists; Blaut's critique of diffusionism is the counterweight we read alongside it.

What this game does not model

Left out on purpose, and listed so the absence is a decision rather than a silence.

Debt and credit: The richest civil mechanic there is, and the most expensive. The game has prices and no deferred obligation.
Gender and the sexual division of labour: Absent from the whole design. Modelling it badly would be worse than not modelling it — but the omission is ours to declare, not to hide.
Kinship: The real unit of almost every pre-state society is the kin group, not the individual. Empires uses the individual because it is playable.
Slavery as a named institution: The game models coercion with flight. Slavery is social death and inherited dishonour, not merely forced labour — naming it without modelling it would be worse than not naming it.

Per game

Each game on this site sits on a body of knowledge, and each has a limit worth stating out loud.

Flags Vexillology: Flags change, and a flag is a claim by a state about itself — never a claim by us about a people.
Races Statistical series: Each series has a source and a cut-off; a ranking is of the records kept, not of the world.
Map Political geography: Disputed borders are disputed. Where the pool has to pick one rendering, that is a rendering, not a verdict.
Anatomy Anatomical nomenclature: Terminology is convention agreed between anatomists, not a fact of nature.
Books Literary canon: A canon is an editorial choice. This one is ours, and it is partial.
Roots Etymology: Some roots are consensus and some are hypothesis; the quiz does not distinguish, and that is a limit of the format.
Empires Historical and political anthropology: It is a game about relationships between people, not a simulation of any society that existed.

Sources, by what they support

Ordered by the mechanic each one justifies, not by discipline. A source that does not hold up a mechanic is not on this page — a decorative bibliography is the easiest way for a page like this to become a display. Entries marked contested are arguments we borrowed the shape of, not settled findings.

Land, density and coercion

Why abundant land pushes a ruler toward force — and why force needs enclosure.

Evsey Domar, The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis 1970 Free land, free peasants, and a rentier class: two can coexist, never all three. It is why the amount of open land on the map is the same dial as the politics.
Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa 2000 Low population density over abundant land makes authority expensive to broadcast — the same problem seen from the ruler's side.
Robert Carneiro, A Theory of the Origin of the State 1970 contested Circumscription: coercion works where people cannot leave. In the game, a forced worker walks for the edge unless you close it. The strong version of the theory is a minority position today. The game uses the intuition, not the historical claim.
Ester Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth 1965 Population pressure drives intensification — which is why a housing ceiling pushes technique, and not the other way round.

Storage, surplus and inequality

What has to exist before anyone can hold more than anyone else.

Alain Testart, The Significance of Food Storage among Hunter-Gatherers 1982 contested Storage, not farming, is what lets inequality accumulate. In Empires gold evaporates each turn, so inequality is something you must go and unlock. Contested: there are cases of storage without stratification and of stratification without storage.
James Woodburn, Egalitarian Societies 1982 Immediate-return versus delayed-return: the difference between consuming what you get and investing it, which is where dependence begins.
Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest 1999 Equality is actively maintained by the group, not the absence of politics — which is why welcoming someone as an equal has rules of its own.
Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics 1972 The domestic mode of production underproduces on purpose. Output is not always maximised, and a game where it always is has assumed something.
Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler 2017 contested Inequality has rarely been reduced peacefully. It is why accumulation, once unlocked, is meant to be cheap to create and expensive to undo. Deliberately pessimistic and much argued with; Boserup is the counterweight.

Legibility, tribute and the limits of complexity

You can only tax what you can see — and seeing more costs more.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State 1998 You govern what you can read. Tribute in Empires requires being able to see the site it comes from.
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed 2009 Flight is the oldest answer to domination. It is the rule that makes forcing someone a decision instead of a bonus.
James C. Scott, Against the Grain 2017 Grain is taxable because it is visible, countable and harvested on a known date.
Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies 1988 Complexity has diminishing returns, and collapse can be a rational response — which is why more buildings is not automatically better.

Gift, exchange and obligation

Joining as an equal is not the absence of a relationship. It is a different one.

Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don 1925 The gift obliges: give, receive, reciprocate. It is the shape of welcoming someone rather than employing them.
Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific 1922 Exchange that is not trade — the kula ring as the classic case.
Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions 1992 What is kept back anchors power as much as what circulates — the critique of Mauss we keep in view.
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation 1944 Reciprocity, redistribution and exchange are distinct ways of holding an economy together, not stages of one.
Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons 1990 Shared resources governed without a state and without a market — the road the game leaves open when you never unlock accumulation.

Orders, bonds and urban autonomy

The three orders your hero can swear to, and the caveat that has to travel with them.

Georges Duby, Les trois ordres ou l'imaginaire du féodalisme 1978 contested The three orders as an IMAGINED order — a justification produced by one of them, not a census of any society. This is the caveat the game owes you: presenting the scheme as 'the three kinds of society' would be false. Empires presents it as what an order claims in order to legitimate itself.
Marc Bloch, La société féodale 1939 Vassalage as a personal bond with obligations both ways — the model for a person defined by what they are tied to.
Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 1984 Charters and communes: autonomy negotiated, not granted — the shape of the townsmen's bargain.
Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1973 The timar: land granted in return for military service. Swearing to the warriors costs you a work post, permanently.
Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme 1979 Market and capitalism are not the same thing — which is why accumulation is an unlock and not a stage.

Legitimacy and symbolic power

Consent is cheaper than force. That is a mechanic here, not a moral.

Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft 1922 Types of legitimate domination, and the routinisation of charisma: the hero who becomes an institution.
Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali 1980 Ceremony IS the power, not its decoration — the reason wonders and prestige should be mechanics rather than score.
Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere 1929 Hegemony: consent costs less than coercion. It is the economics of swearing to the prayers.
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice 1977 Symbolic capital and symbolic violence — domination that does not need to announce itself.

Coerced labour and regimes

Why the game models coercion, and refuses to name what it does not model.

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death 1982 Slavery as social death and inherited dishonour — the reason Empires models coercion with flight and does not call it slavery.
Moses I. Finley, The Ancient Economy 1973 The ancient economy is not a market economy in miniature.
John V. Murra, The Economic Organization of the Inka State 1980 The mit'a: tribute paid in labour rather than in coin.
Robert Brenner, Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe 1976 contested Agrarian class structure decides the trajectory. The 'Brenner debate' is a named controversy; we cite the argument, not a verdict.
Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World 2008 Free and coerced labour as a continuum rather than a binary — which is why the same person can change state without changing type.

Revolt and moral economy

People revolt when the terms change, not when they are simply poor.

E. P. Thompson, The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century 1971 Revolt answers a broken norm of legitimacy, not absolute hunger. A poor, stable civilization does not rise; a rich one that just tightened does.
James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant 1976 The subsistence ethic — what people believe they are owed.
Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant 1979 contested The reply: the peasant as an individual maximiser. Cited as the other half of a classic controversy. We show the pair, never one side.
Barrington Moore, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt 1978 Why obedience, and not revolt, is the normal case.

State formation and comparison

How states came to be, and why comparing them is harder than it looks.

Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power 1986 The four sources of power, used here as a coverage checklist for design — the table above is that checklist.
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States 1990 War made the state and the state made war; capital and coercion as two roads. The bridge between the military half of this game and the civil half.
Bruce G. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study 2003 contested Seven early civilizations compared side by side, where the similarities turn out as structured as the differences. Which is why giving each civilization in the game its own distinct rule is a design choice for playable variety — not a research finding.
Norman Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State 2005 Takes apart the evolutionary typology the game refuses to use.
Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony 1989 A polycentric world system before Europe — the ground for an empire that taxes flows instead of fields.
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence 2000 The divergence is late and contingent, not built into anyone's culture.

Found something misattributed, or a caveat we owe a reader? That is a bug, and it is worth the same as a crash. The design document these pages derive from lives in the repository alongside the game.