The upcoming city-building game Kaiserpunk blends its main genre with elements of grand strategy, as players aggressively seek to expand their empire and gain advantages over rivals. Naturally, this gameplay has drawn some comparisons with Civilization thanks to the inclusion of diplomacy, warfare, and the importance of a city’s production.
However, Kaiserpunk developer Overseer Games says the game is not a competitor to Civilization and is more akin to Anno, if a comparison is to be made. Oversee also emphasized that it is a small independent team ultimately doing its own thing and that the March 21 release date being so close to Civ 7‘s launch is a pure coincidence. Speaking with Game Rant, lead designer Danijel Mihoković, along with Sandra Neudinger and Jakob Munthe from publisher Elda Entertainment, discussed the ways Kaiserpunk stands out from Civ 7.
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Kaiserpunk Is Its Own Experience
The emphasis on city-building and production chains is made clear by the development team, though they did note that there are some parallels with 4X grand strategy games. The flattering comparisons had not been consciously intended during the creation of Kaiserpunk and came as something of a surprise. As Mihoković said, “it’s nice to read such comparisons, but simply put, no. Kaiserpunk was never supposed to be compared to Civilization, for Civilization is its own thing.” In fact, while Civilization 7 is a definitive 4X grand strategy experience, Kaiserpunk is harder to label. As Neudinger added,
“[The team] struggled a bit with finding the genre and where to place this game because the core is city building, but then with the grand strategy layers, it becomes this sort of mix. We’ve started to call it a grand city builder. That’s what we have established now because that makes sense with diplomacy, trade and warfare on a global scale. It’s not a grand strategy because you start thinking of Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis, and they go so much deeper and that might create a false expectation. In the end, it is a city builder, so we felt “grand city building.” That’s probably the closest to describing it. You guys have done something pretty unique.'”
At Overseer and Elda, they try not to focus too much on what other developers are doing; rather, they concentrate on their own work and trust that its quality will shine through when the game launches. The sheer number of Steam games out there, including new releases and long-standing, beloved ones, means managing expectations is important, and that there’s little reason to look at “competition” too closely in this regard. It’s better to trust the product they are building. As Munthe said,
“I think also, generally, when looking at how Steam is today and having 15,000 games released per year, it’s not really that helpful to look too much at competition. You need to trust your own game, trust the product you’re building and hope that it works. There’s always going to be a lot of games that either don’t 100% meet expectations or overshoot expectations, and there will always be a lot of other things. I think the only way you can do it in the end is to trust your own game, do what you can do with that, and hope that people will like what you have, not compare it so much with what else is out there.”
Of course, the team pointed out that any Civ fans are welcome to play Kaiserpunk, regardless of there being similarities or not. They will continue working hard on the game post-launch, so they encourage those who are intrigued to check it out come Kaiserpunk‘s release date of March 21.
City Builder
Strategy
Management
Simulation
War & Military
- Released
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March 21, 2025
- Developer(s)
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Overseer Games
- Publisher(s)
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Overseer Games, Elda Entertainment