Niche Gamer Plays is an ongoing video preview series where our staff take an in-depth and yet concise look at classic, current, and upcoming games across all current gaming platforms.

The latest preview video we’ve prepped up for you all is for indie developer Thibaud Michaud’s super hardcore city-builder / 4X game, Ymir.

Featured above, you can find roughly two hours of me playing the super ambitious game – while sipping beer and talking about a multitude of industry things, and Niche Gamer stuff.

A note: I did a previous stream for the game but barely scratched the surface, so make sure to watch this one and future streams instead.

Here’s a rundown on the game:

Ymir is a 4X multiplayer strategy game combined with a city builder where each player develops a civilization of Pigmen starting at the stone age. 
The game is divided in 2 main interfaces : a worldmap view and a regional view. Each world tile matches a unique procedurally generated isometric zone that can be explored, settled and built on by players. In each one players can find random resources such as ores , animals or plants depending on the climate, relief and vegetation of the region. 

Key Features:

• Pigs with clothes.
• Multiplayer on local or persistent servers.
• Complex socio-economic simulator for a challenging city-building experience on its own.
• Technological evolution with hundreds to techs, from the stone age to post-iron age.
• Fully procedural worlds where each region is random and unique.
• 7 biomes, each one with its own specific resources to encourage player-trading.
• Advanced diplomatic and economic tools to setup treaties ( right of passage, taxes, payments, trade agreements… ) and trade routes between players.
• Real-time battles.
• WILL remain free of any pay-to-win.

Main game modes:

• Real-time mode : a ‘classical’ mode to be played alone or with a few friends, meant to be played with the permanent presence of all players and to be stopped/continued over several playing sessions.
• Persistent mode : a more “MMO” mode where the game server is to be left running 24/7 at all times even when players are offline and where actions take much more time than in the real-time mode. Meant to be played with the maximum number of players on a day-to-day basis, with games lasting several weeks.

Ymir is currently available for Windows PC, via Steam Early Access.