Kalypso today announced their new game in a Gamescom livestream, revealing their ‘city ruler’ game Urban Empire.

Urban Empire is a hybrid of a strategy game, a management game and a city builder which sees you taking the role of an important family, tasked with building and ruling over a new city as mayor. The game starts in 1820 and as time goes by years advance until the game ends at 2020. This means that you pass through at least five different eras, starting from the Industrial Revolution, playing through a national awakening, the time of the two world wars and the decades between, going through the cold war era and finally ending up in the modern time and a little beyond.

Choosing between 3 maps, you build your city by setting out areas to build, setting out a network of roads from a few choices offered and then assigning areas to residential, retail and industrial. Then you place down services and let your city build around the assigned area. The first service you will need to place will be the City Hall where you do most of the political parts of the game, choosing to alter taxes, funding; proposing laws and working with the political parties to try and keep a balance between keeping them happy and also the regular citizens, which are divided into several difference classes as well.

As time goes on, you use brainpower (accumulated through the years with schools) to research new technologies from a ‘web’ that allow for new services, buildings and business to be built. Citizen happiness will have an effect on these as well, with middle-class happiness improving the quality of goods and the efficiency being affected by working-class happiness. Both improve with high happiness levels.

Keeping the balance is important as over the years you risk being voted out of power if you lose favour with enough of the voting public. The first era though has been described as a ‘tutorial’ so that by the time that is a risk, you should know what to do to prevent that.

If you’re interested, the game is already up for pre-order. Currently the release date set on its Steam page is January 20th 2017, so keep your eyes open for more information as we approach that date.