Scenario Map: Magdeburg

This week, we talked about the scenario map of Magdeburg. The city of Magdeburg itself was huge, rich and important in the late Middle Ages, but then lost a lot of its importance in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), when the catholic troops burned down the protestant city completely in May 1631.

To show you a little bit more about it, here it is: larger shots of the Magdeburg city map! First, you have one of the city and its beautiful cathedral, which used to be one of the most impressive buildings of all eastern Germany. In the second new ingame picture, you can see a market center and different businesses all around, important information to keep in mind since Magdeburg was considered to be a trade fair town (trade fairs and conventions were held in the city in its early years, around the 1030’s). Lastly, in the third picture, you can see that Magdeburg is also really rich in forests and agriculture. And since it was also the most important supplier of grains, Madgeburg was also known as the ”bread house” of Hansa.

If you want to read the full information on the city of Magdeburg, go on and read on!

Ok… Let’s start with some gameplay elements.

Madgeburg is one of the very first gameplay maps assembled to be released with the game. It has both single player and multiplayer supports. You will find very quickly that the storylines are dynamic, allowing you to play the same map but with different goals and a different storyline for you to guide the AI families.



Please, keep in mind that all the maps have AI-driven families. Those families, most of the time, are already rich and powerful, with members already in elected positions. Remember that these families are not necessarily your enemies. Depending on their values and principles (assuming, of course, that you all share the same ones), you may find in some of the families much needed allies.

What do we mean, exactly, by a “family’s values”? We’ll cover this aspect of the game more broadly in a few weeks, when we’ll talk about AI. But in the meantime, we can always tell you that every single group (families, secret societies, people from a certain neighbourhood…) are animated by a series of different values. Those values will guide and influence the choices they make, the preferences they have, giving each of them a distinct personality, thus creating a more realistic set of behaviours. You wouldn’t deal with the Starks the same way you would deal with the Lannisters, would you?

Also, as a map designer, you will have the same possibilities to create maps that we have. You’ll be able to start from an already published map, using a template, or to create new cities with vastly different starting positions. You could also create maps with six human families, with one of them powerful and the other five battling it out to take its place. Or you could create two factions of two families each. As you must know by now, the possibilities are endless. All in all, the Madgeburg map, with its beautiful layout and simple composition, would be a good entry level map to test the game and to use as a template.

But enough with all the technical aspects of the game. Not that they’re not interesting (of course, they are) but we also thought it would be compelling to talk about one of Madgeburg’s most illustrious citizens. Around Easter of 1497, the then twelve-year-old Martin Luther (the pioneering figure of Protestant reformation), attended school in Magdeburg, where he was exposed to the teachings of the Brethren of the Common Life. It is to be noted that he would later compare his education to purgatory and hell. As a man of multiple talents and of remarkable intelligence (who could also be brash and short-tempered at times), he started an academic discussion on the power and usefulness of indulgences in his Ninety-Five Theses of 1517. In 1520, he refused to retract his writings at the demand of Pope Leo X and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521. It resulted in his excommunication by the Pope and condemnation as an outlaw by the Emperor.

In 1524, he was called back to the city of Magdeburg, where he preached and caused the city’s defection from Catholicism (his return can be puzzling, considering what he thought of the year he spent there). The Protestant Reformation had quickly found adherents in the city, where Luther has been a schoolboy. All his life, Luther came to reject several teachings and practices of the Late Medieval Catholic Church and in the following years, Magdeburg gained a reputation as a stronghold of Protestantism, becoming the first major city to publish the writings of Luther. Some of his companions, at the same period, wrote anti-Catholic pamphlets in which they argued that the Roman Catholic Church had become the kingdom of the Antichrist.

Today, Lutheranism is one of the largest denominations of Protestantism. Did it all start while Martin Luther was a school boy, walking the streets of Madgeburg? We certainly would like to think so.