So, you mean not a city building but a village building?

You might run into a problem of lack of content. Because, what can you have in a medieval village? Plots of land, houses, exactly one inn, exactly one church/shrine, exactly one mill, maybe some blacksmiths and other artisans (but not too many since these goods are taken from a city in exachange for the food). It would be very difficult to design...

So, you mean not a city building but a village building?

When you said this, I thought of the Settlers VI. You can't say you're building a city there, as the population probably never goes above 500. Yet the game has surprising amount of depth. Hunter's huts to catch wild game, Butcher's shop to turn it into food. Then a soap-maker that uses the fat to produce soap for hygene. Woodcutter huts to provide wood, broom maker for more hygene. Farm for cows or sheep, cheese maker, banner maker (for citizen happiness), beekeeper huts, meadery, wheat fields, bread maker. On top of that, the way you earn gold is from taxes to the shops

The reason why you'd need more than one, at least in that game, is that each shop can produce limited output - i think up to 9 citizens can live off of one shop. But even with a hundred citizens, that means you need quite a few shops (of different variety - for example the breadmaker, sausge maker, smokehouse, cheesemaker all satisfy the 'hunger' need)

Actually that game sort of matches the original description in this thread, though its obviously not exactly the same. Still, I think it's something to learn from if making a village-building game.

You might run into a problem of lack of content. Because, what can you have in a medieval village? Plots of land, houses, exactly one inn, exactly one church/shrine, exactly one mill, maybe some blacksmiths and other artisans (but not too many since these goods are taken from a city in exachange for the food). It would be very difficult to design...

In the time period this game is taking place...there very few cities, most regions were mostly self-reliant since trade and travel had nearly died out. Like mentioned in the text:

While constructing and planning the settlement is a major aspect of the game, the greatest challenge for the player will be managing his estate. This is done by optimal people management skills and squeezing the maximum potential out of the land and your peasants. If the player fails to properly run his estate, the settlement will fall prey to various dangers such as peasant rebellions or famine and should the player character, the lord, die either from hunger or be killed in a rebellion the game ends.

While the whole constructing is one feature of it and certainly one that should be enjoyable, the main focus is placed on the management of the fief/estate. Fail to do so and harvest will fail, your home will fall in disrepair, ... generally bad things will happen if you rule the land without any care. You yourself have little control what your peasants are going to do for a living on their own. They just take up their land tenure and start living their lives, the only impact you have on them is deciding what their obligation is towards you yearly for that tenure (most often help harvest crops on your land during harvest season).

However, the feudal contracts also forces you to uphold many obligations such as protecting them from any harm such as famine. As feudal lord you are obligated to offer relief during times of famine. You will have a choice there: will you give them food or not? Doing so, will make it harsher on your family, but refusing to do so might cause a rebellion that might cause a game over, or kill many of your subjects, subjects that are not easy to replace. You will also have to protect them from exterior threats such as bandits or Norse raiders.

And finally, you will have to ensure that your land will be productive enough so that you will be able to uphold your duties as a vasal to your liege for every year you too will have to pay tribute, failing to do so will also cause a game over.

While village/city-building is the genre, like most their is a strong management aspect to the game and most of the focus will be spent here. Secondly I am not aiming for a big game... I am doing this on my own, you know.

weymiensN

2D is fine for data representation which is a key part of debugging/tuning your simulation -- you have to be able to watch things happen to see what is right/wrong so you can adjust the code (usually adding lots more endcase handling to the behavior logic)

You WILL need a good way to see the internal states of your entities (not thru a debugger except as last resort) - that is highly inefficient

Animated actions only show what the logic decided and not WHY it decided

Add a text logging window (echo to file) to do detail traces and a plethora of easily insertable debug routines to dump relevant information and to ad hoc add more variations of the dumps (the old PRINT statement method of debugging is completly relevant to this kind of programming)

Also you want to be able to SAVE the entire state of the game exactly so that you can recreate exact situations you observe and then want to run again after adding debug tracing code

Likewise build up a situation builder that lets you place specific objects to gether to interact (like an arena) so you can test lots of the likely combinations this may even go as far as setting/forcing them into specific states to act out what they do next. Have a script language (ebven if its native code) to assemble these 'situations' to have them instanly invoked/setup for debugging/tuning testing

If your goal is to learn c++ then I suggest writing c++ components for an existing game engine.

Writing a platform something from scratch involves huge amounts of skills in software architecture, datbases, content management, data types and their quirks etc. My experience from "writing stuff from scratch to learn" is that I always get stuck in issues related not to the core language & syntax, but boring things like how different filesystems work or how the png image format is built up. I then end up spending days reading and studying fringe systems/apis etc.

I think it's much more rewarding and actually more educational to mount oneself in a framework and work with the api from the inside in a specific language. The api will force a certain amount of correctedness out of you which you won't learn if you roam and do your own thing.

Note that most of my coding experience is in java and javascript/php + various xml formats.