Kigndoms and Castles gets a nice update as devs announce new Rome-based city builder

It might be six years old, but indie city builder Kingdoms and Castles has gotten regular updates since it released in 2017, and this year's apparently going to be no exception. Just today an update released, the Infrastructure & Industry update, adding all manner of community-requested buildings to streamline the making and supplying in your kingdom.

The community-suggested buildings are a suite of larger storages for Gold and Produce, as well as a larger reservoir for your aqueducts and other water distribution. There's also a bigger charcoal-burner, iron mine, and stone quarry. For your peasants' delight there's also an extra-large tavern for big cities and a smaller chapel for little towns. Overall it's a bunch of stuff that suits the late-game, where you have excess population or are settling smaller, satellite islands.

Kingdoms and Castles is a survival city-builder where you build an ever-larger fortress and city to defend from invading Viking raiders, dragons, and rival kingdoms. It's a very relaxed game, but has strategic depth all the same, allowing you to create elaborate defenses for your equally-elaborately-decorated and adorable cities.

Developed by Lion Shield, Kingdoms and Castles was the company's debut game. It was the first game released that funded on now-defunct crowdfunding platform Fig, netting backer-investors there double their money after its 2017 release. It has since expanded to a shocking degree, transforming from solo city survival to a pseudo-RTS, adding AI opponents last year in a huge free expansion. It also sports a single, modest cosmetic DLC, which I'm compelled to praise: Lion Shield could have made a lot more money by just releasing all that extra stuff as paid expansions. Instead, they gave it away for free and only charged players for some bonus parks and gardens.

Lion Shield just this past week announced their new game, Nova Roma, a colorful city builder based on the Roman Pax Romana era. It'll have a focus on disasters, rather than on Kingdoms & Castles' dragons and Viking attacks. Do be sure to keep Jupiter appeased so he doesn't thunderbolt your stuff, ok? While Kingdoms & Castles was crowdfunded, Nova Roma will be published by Hooded Horse.

You can find Kingdoms and Castles on Steam, where it's $15, or 40% at $9 until June 29th, 2023. It's also available on GOG.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.