In most city builders I usually wind up feeling like an urban planner or a mayor. In Memoriapolis, which launched into early access on Steam today, I feel more like a god-emperor because the city I’m managing isn’t just going to grow and expand for a few years or decades or even centuries, but for millenia.

There’s a bit of Civ in this new strategy city builder, in other words. You’re doing some traditional survival city builder stuff by building farms, quarries, and woodcutters, harvesting resources and using them to expand, setting up trade routes and expanding your buildable territory—but you’re also shaping your city’s culture and managing mega-construction projects called “Wonders” as you grow from the age of antiquity to medieval times and beyond.

I played a bit of Memoriapolis this week and it’s doing some interesting stuff. You don’t have to micromanage quite as much as in most other city builders, though that’s a bit of a double-edged sword. You don’t build roads or dictate the borders of farms and residential areas: place a farm and your itty bitty farmers will begin plowing fields and growing crops without your help, and neighborhoods will begin to rise around your city center all on their own. It’s got a nice, organic feel to it and it’s enjoyable to watch your city take shape, but one of the joys of builders, generally, is making all those little decisions yourself.

You do have to manage your city’s resources, from lumber to food to gold, and make sure the conditions are right for your city to prosper and attract more citizens. Factions quickly begin arriving: in my game my city became home to nearly a dozen different groups like Spartans, Carthaginians, Thracians, Epicureans, and more I dimly remember from my long-ago school days. Each faction has its own interests and desires, which can be reflected in the city you’re building. If you want to keep a military faction happy you might build an arena or gladiator training facility like the Ludus Magnus, while building a college would appeal to eggheads like the Hippocratic Doctors. Each faction can be taxed separately, too, which gives you another avenue of appealing to them (or pissing them off).

These factions also play a part when you’ve built your senate and want to start passing laws. I really wanted to pass a “Love Your Neighbor” decree because there was some growing tension among the various religious groups in my city, but since my four biggest and most influential factions were all military in nature, they weren’t too hot on the love stuff and the chances of it passing were pretty low. They were happy to vote for a city-wide curfew, however. I’m sure appeasing military strongmen won’t come back to bite me, ever.

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There are also world events to participate in. Macedonia asked me if I’d help it besiege Amphipolis—without checking my history books I will assume it’s an aquatic city of fish people—in exchange for a new prison filled with slaves. That didn’t sit right with me, so I defended Greece, which granted me a different building to add to my roster. Later, the Greeks, emboldened by my assistance, prepared to go apeshit on Rome. I sided with them. I’m tired of hearing about Rome. Sack it! These types of events can cost resources and have other effects: by staying friends with the powerful Greeks, my city’s safety rating went way up and my citizens morale did, too. Again, I suspect the Greeks going ham across Europe might have negative consequences for me later.

As my city grew I eventually started construction on a Wonder, the Sassi di Matera, which takes massive amounts of resources to build. Luckily I’d started dabbling in trade early on, building a marketplace and establishing merchant routes between off-screen cities (except the one I lost by letting Rome fall) so I could buy all the materials I never researched and produced myself. Building a wonder lets you advance to the next age, where your city can continue growing.

Memoriapolis is pretty neat and has a different feel than most city builders, since you’re typically making bigger decisions about the overall direction of your city instead of fussing around with roads and parks and decorations. I do wish I could zoom in a little closer to my city—there’s a bit of animation on city streets and farms, but it’s all so wee my city doesn’t particularly feel alive. I don’t expect to follow individual citizens around like in Cities: Skylines, but it would be nice to peer a little more closely into places like the arena and see what’s going on. 

Memoriapolis launched into early access on Steam today. Developer 5PM Studio says the plan is to stay in early access for four to six months, though that timeframe may be “dependent on feedback from the community.”