Get Ready for Kaiserpunk: The Ambitious City-Builder Set to Redefine Strategy Gaming!

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Upcoming city-builder Kaiserpunk is generating a lot of buzz ahead of its March 21 release, with some already drawing comparisons between it and the latest entry in the long-running Civilization series. However, the small development team at Overseer Games doesn’t believe Kaiserpunk is a Civ 7 competitor. With Kaiserpunk, the team has certainly shown a lot of ambition, merging many gameplay elements in this grand city-building game, just as they did in previous projects. Players can expect city-building, production chains, diplomacy, and warfare as they aggressively expand their empires in an alternate 20th century world.

Thousands of players have already had a chance to test Kaiserpunk during its two playtests, and it’s left players wanting to come back for more of this unique title. Game Rant recently spoke with Kaiserpunk lead designer Danijel Mihoković from Overseer Games, as well as Sandra Neudinger and Jakob Munthe of Kaiserpunk’s publisher Elda Entertainment, about its unique blend of city-building gameplay, grand strategy features, and more. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Not A Civilization Competitor

Q: A lot of fans see Kaiserpunk as a competitor to Civilization, but you don’t think so. Why is that?

Mihoković: Yeah, it’s nice to read such comparisons, but simply put, no. Kaiserpunk was never supposed to be compared to Civilization, for Civilization is its own thing. It’s a pure grand strategy. Kaiserpunk is going down its own road. We’re primarily a production-focused city builder, more similar to the Anno series because that’s a big influence. I have loved the Anno series since the first one, and then we have the strategy layer on top of it to facilitate more depth, more mechanics, and more features. I would love to compete with Civilization, but not yet.

Neudinger: But I guess it would be interesting to add that it was a bit tricky. You guys struggled a bit with finding the genre where to place this game because the core is city building, but then with the grand strategy layers it becomes this sort of mix. We’ve started to call it a grand city builder. That’s what we have established now because that makes sense with diplomacy, trade, and warfare on a global scale. It’s not a grand strategy because you start thinking of Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis, and they go so much deeper and that might create a false expectation. In the end, it’s a city builder, so we felt “grand city building.” That’s probably the closest to describing it. You guys have done something pretty unique.

As a fan, I’d put it this way: I find it quite suitable that we remain autonomous, allowing us the freedom to experiment with our music. This style aligns perfectly with our brand, and it’s not the first time we’ve blended different genres. In fact, we relish in the challenge of creating unusual combinations. We prefer to add complexity rather than sticking to a single genre.

* After the release of Civilization 7, there will be another game called Kaiserpunk. What advantages could this potentially bring to you?

Mihoković: Since we’re so near the launch, I didn’t have time to check out Civilization 7 in any detail and I didn’t even have time to think about the potential benefits that we could reap from its launch. I think Civilization has its own strong set of fans, so I don’t think people will likely just switch to other games. I have nothing against fans who want to check out Kaiserpunk. By all means, we welcome them all, but as long as they realize it’s not a substitute for Civilization, not directly.

Munthe: Generally, when looking at how Steam is today and having 15,000 games released per year, it’s not really that helpful to look too much at competition. You need to trust your own game, trust the product you’re building, and hope that it works. There’s always going to be a lot of games that either don’t 100% meet expectations or overshoot expectations, and there will always be a lot of other things. I think the only way you can do it in the end is to trust your own game, do what you can do with that, and hope that people will like what you have, not compare it so much with what else is out there.

Mixing Genres And Important Gameplay Elements In Kaiserpunk

A: You brought up the idea of escaping civilization, and you noted that Kaiserpunk encompasses a blend of various genres. I’d like to discuss the challenge of harmonizing these diverse elements into a single unified concept.

Mihoković: The basic idea was very simple. We will just take two genres and slap them together, and it’s going to work awesomely. When we got to the more detailed parts, we started facing some difficulties, which is something to be expected. We have to mesh it well together so that you don’t get two games, but one game that works nicely with both parts of it. We had some previous experience with mixing genres in the previous games we made. We had some experience of things to avoid and making it easier for us to blend the genres more easily.

Primarily, I’d say sticking to mixing two genres instead of going even more is best. There were some questions about, for example, why we don’t have RTS combat directly. That would actually be the third genre mixing in, and then we could just go in a really wrong direction. We placed some basic ground rules from the start, so we didn’t go too far. That’s one of the key ways to help yourself in advance when mixing it well and, of course, the other is balancing it all out. It makes sense to have both of those parts of the game implemented properly. It will be, of course, up to the players to give their verdict on how well we did. I hope we made it well. I think we did, but I have a blind spot for it.

A: Could you tell me about the key insights gained from your previous projects like Patron and Aquatico, and how player feedback has influenced these games in the past? Also, are there any elements from those games that will be carried over to Kaiserpunk?

Mihoković: I’d say everybody smart will learn from everything they do, and we have a number of games already behind us and every one of those was a good learning experience. Whether we do good or bad, or make a fantastic game or a lousy game still, it’s a good way to learn what doesn’t work, what players like, and what they don’t like. Aquatico and Patron were part of a different sub-genre. They were survival city builders. Kaiserpunk is going more towards production chain management, so more like the Anno series, as I said.

Still, there is a nice bit of overlap and there were some things that players found not precise enough in Patron and Aquatico. In the design of Kaiserpunk, we worked those things out, so players can get a proper picture of what exactly the status of their city is, how much they’re producing, do they have a surplus or not enough. One might say those are little things, but they can make or break a game. I’d say the biggest issues were precisely those things. Taking feedback from the players while they’re playing the game is important, so we know exactly what issues they have.

Q: It seems like a good point to come onto the production chains themselves, as it’s obviously a very important component in Kaiserpunk and there are over 90 to potentially manage. How crucial is it to keep them running as efficiently as possible? Could players or enemies disrupt these chains as a tactic during conflict?

Mihoković: I’d say both. The enemy can definitely disrupt your production chains and your supply chains on a global scale. And how important is it? It’s crucial. It’s literally the key aspect of the game. If your production is not working well, then you will run into problems. They will start with smaller problems and then slowly escalate gradually into bigger and bigger issues until your population starts to riot and burn stuff around your city and your head ends up on a pike and game over. So yeah, I’d say it’s very important, but you have a lot of ways to fix potential problems. It’s not like if problems begin, then you don’t have a shot at working it out. There’s always a way.

Neudinger: I guess now I can just share a fun story from when I started to really get into the game. Eventually, you move more and more over to the world map, and you get more and more bloodthirsty for just conquering. You can solve everything with diplomacy, but I was completely into just pumping out armies and everyone just had to rally up. Then I realized I hadn’t checked back with my city and how they were doing in a while. When I went back, I just saw that the food supplies were not in order. There was no bread. People were so pissed at me, and I was really close to the rioting stage, which would have meant that the economy would start tanking, and people would just not continue to support me in my important war. I realized I can’t forget my people at home, their morale needs to be where it is, otherwise I won’t be able to continue with my battle. That kind of micro-macro perspective is hilarious. It becomes really fun, and you realize that you can’t skip production, as each layer is so important.

Q: Clearly, managing the city is important, and the game boasts an impressive number of buildings – over 90, with many different upgrades based on how players build their cities. Could you outline some of the ways these upgrades may differ?

Mihoković: Well, there is technological development in the game. Again, this is not Civilization, but still, we kind of take some parts of it. The way you develop, I would like to call it “passive development.” The more you build certain types of buildings, for example, linked to agriculture, the faster you develop in the branch of agriculture. The same goes for military buildings or heavy industry, production, utilities, and so on. The same mechanic unlocks building upgrades as well, so you don’t have to wait until you max out a branch to have all the buildings. You will unlock them earlier, but you will still be gaining other bonuses through technological development, primarily those building upgrades. You can simply slap more buildings of the same type and it will work, but that’s not the most optimal way of doing things. You might run into some cash problems sooner than you think, so it’s better to simply upgrade existing buildings.

As you said, there are a number of different upgrades in Kaiserpunk, so it’s up to the player to see which part of the production process to optimize. Maybe they want to reduce the number of workers they need in the production chain to free them for something else, or simply enhance production to produce more at the same time and for the same amount of resources. It’s really up to the player. We give the tools, and we want the players to find the optimum way they want to run their industry in the city. That also works for the management of residents. Players have to keep their citizens happy as well. That means more production of luxuries. Again, it’s about optimizing the entire process of production and logistics.

Q: Could you explain a little bit about the diplomacy options that the players can expect?

Mihoković: Yeah, so if the focus of the game is production and management, and we wanted to have that part of mechanics in all aspects of the game, that includes diplomacy as well. Something that’s familiar in these modern times, diplomacy in Kaiserpunk is also done, in a way, through production. If you trade more with other empires, the better your status is with them and their status towards you. Once you reach a certain level, they will start accepting your currency as a mode of payment, but until then it’s simply bartering goods.

The same works for military trade as well. To reach a military alliance with an empire, you need to exchange or trade military equipment, vehicles, tanks, etc. Also, there’s scientific exchange, and once you manage to get all three segments high enough, to the maximum. Then, you will reach an actual full alliance with the empire and make it more likely that the empire becomes a part of your empire. You simply incorporate them, but not entirely, because there will always be someone perhaps not happy with the idea. Part of their regions will secede into a new faction or neutral territory.

Q: Like an autonomous region?

Mihoković: Yeah, but just something for you to reconquer.

Moving Toward Launch

Q: Thousands of players joined the two play tests for Kaiserpunk, giving you a lot of valuable feedback. What was the biggest lesson learned from these play tests and player feedback?

Mihoković: Yeah, the play tests were awesome. We did something slightly different from the previous games. We had a specific aim for each play test that we did. The first one was to gather as much info as we could on performance, on how well the game is working. We deliberately chose large maps and one single large city, and we needed to gather as much info as we could on how it would work on different computers. We gained a whole lot of information, direct diagnostics files, and all that. It’s very useful to plan ahead for performance reasons.

The second play test was to see how well we adjusted to the feedback of some of the stuff from the first play test because, in the first play test, we had a tutorial and some sandbox gameplay. There was a lot of feedback on it. We actually completely changed the entire tutorial and the intro to the game for the second play test based on feedback from the players. It proved to be necessary, and we couldn’t leave it like that. That was the first part of the second play test, and then continued on with the sandbox playthrough specifically for the user experience, the interface, and how well people can find their way in the game. A whole new tutorial and UI. It was overwhelmingly helpful altogether. I wish we had more time for a third play test. That would be really nice.

A: Could I perhaps share some thoughts about where this game might be headed in the future?

Mihoković: The future I’m currently looking at is March 21st. That is the launch, and when things calm down a bit, then at least I will even start considering anything post that. I think I’ll be on Kaiserpunk for the foreseeable future. I’m certain we’ll make some improvements to the game, then more things like free content updates and then DLCs. I don’t know. We’ll leave it for later. For now, let’s get players playing it and then see what needs to be done first and foremost.

Small Development Team

Q: Is there anything else that you would like to add?

Neudinger: I think it might be worth shining some light on something that we have been discussing. Many people will think “that’s a massive game with hundreds of developers” and here we have an indie publisher and indie developer of 11 who created this game, which is super ambitious. Me, Jakob, and Robin, our third co-founder of Elda, even if we worked for Paradox for over a decade on great titles, what we really believe is that the smallest of teams can make the greatest of games. That’s been our thorough belief from the get-go. One of the interesting things was when Jakob launched Cities Skylines and I tagged on shortly after, and we’ve been working on that for so many years. Colossal Order had a small team when they developed the game.

Munthe: Nine when it started and 11 at launch.

Neudinger: Yeah, a super small team and yet it became such a massive success. I think we really believe in that, that it doesn’t have to be these really large, slow-moving and sometimes even less innovative machines. It can be done on a smaller scale, especially with management games, where the simulation and the deep systems are sort of what drives creativity. That’s something we really loved when we met Overseer. They’re doing something super ambitious, but it’s a small team, and it’s a big chance for both of us to do it.

Munthe: Absolutely. For me, even the first time I remember seeing this game a long time before we talked professionally, I knew this was a game I should work with. This is a brilliant game. The reason why I’m still working with games is that there are still so many great games that deserve to be made and deserve to be played. I think a lot of people have toyed with the idea of combining map painting and world conquest with the city builder. I think the last time I saw a proper trial was maybe Caesar 2, which had it in a deeper form, and we haven’t really seen anything coming out of that that actually does it properly.

What truly captivated me about Kaiserpunk when I first encountered it, even as a casual fan, was the seamless integration of strategic map play and city construction. Essentially, every resource, from rations to artillery shells, all the way up to aircraft, ships, tanks – everything is produced within your city. The responsibility lies entirely with you. Your citizens are conscripted and sent off to war. To me, this immersive aspect of the game is truly remarkable. It’s not about adding a map mode that feels disconnected from the city mode. Instead, it’s one unified experience. I’m thrilled to be contributing to this game because I believe it’s one of those titles that deserves attention and playtime.

Neudinger: Danijel and Overseer, you guys have done so well. It’s one city which, as I understand, is needed in order to not be able to have a loading screen between the map layers. You want it to be seamless when you move between them, and it works so well. It really works and that’s what’s so amazing. So, let’s hope that the players really like it as well. We do, but who knows, right?

[END]

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2025-03-16 16:33