How do I justify that city-states are the dominant state form on a whole continent?I know of greece...

Honestly? It's probably got to do with the full blown collapse of the Roman Empire, the Byzantines pulling out later, and Rome becoming the center of the Catholic Orthodoxy. The Popes had a vested interested in making sure that there was nobody who was such a big wig in their local territory that they could threaten the papacy (a lesson learned from the constant arguments they ended up having with the Holy Roman Empire, or perhaps proved the wisdom of that original stance, I forget which came first).

By avoiding direct temporal power, and by having the highest local lords officially only on the levels of city state 'princes' it helped a lot.

A second helping factor is that almost every single city in Italy was built to be entirely self sufficient in just about everything. The only uniting factor was the Aqueduct network and the road system, and both sorta fell into disrepair after the fall of Rome.

Every single Italian city could more or less be it's own functioning trade nexus with other parts of Europe, Asia Minor, and Africa. They were perfectly placed for it, could all maintain their own food growth, and the only large empires nearby that could threaten italy, had entire mountain ranges between them and Italy (A factor that actually played into Rome dominating Europe in the first place).

Next, there's the fact that Rome never got super good at integrating the italian peoples into Rome, Rome, until it was already near collapse, never made the changes necessary to be a nations spanning empire, rather than a city state (which is what it's original laws were based upon the assumption of, and were a leading factor to the rot that caused the republic to fall, the empire to rise, and then fall again).
>cont.

>Elaborate on that. Why would culture somehow slow down or anull the logical trend towards larger nations/empires?

It's a lot more random than that. Over a VERY long time there's a trend towards states with bigger territories, but for every 10 steps forward there are 9 steps back. In the last 50 years we've seen states get bigger:

- EU expansion
- East and West Germany reunite
- North Vietnam invades the South

And we've seen states get smaller:

- Collapse of USSR
- Split-up of Yugoslavia
- Brexit

Medieval and Renaissance Europe was even more chaotic than that. Had a few invasions gone differently, France and England could have been the ones with hundreds of little statelets and Italy and Germany could have had unified monarchies. In fact around the 10th Century that would have looked the much more likely outcome until the Investiture Controversy dun blew everything out.

tl;dr if you want to justify city states, then "because wizards", "because dragons", and even "just cuz" are perfectly good reasons.

There's also the fact that as a trade nexus, and the center of civilization and knowledge before the Middle Ages, they were one of the few places that did not suffer a total collapse of education and such. They had a much higher basic level of education, by no means universal, but where as other nations -often- had uneducated and illiterate leaders, the same was not true for Italy, something that was transfered over from Rome where the patricians -had- to be educated to be able to participate in their society.

All of these things made a perfect storm where italy, for a good chunk of time (though by no means an incredibly long one as these things go), was able to maintain city states that basically worked on the basis of "we fuck with each other until somebody from outside tries to fuck with one of us"

otherwise: is right. It's a trend, but universally that trend -does- go to centralization. I'd personally argue that it's more a case of 5 steps forward, 3 steps back myself.

fantasy setting?
>political struggles for land/resources and power
>civilized races overwhelmed by the wild things of the world
>especially short lived, fragile humans
>city states are the most viable means of protecting and running a society: anything larger than has traditionally crumbled or caused a war for independence far too often for anyone to bother anymore

>is right. It's a trend, but universally that trend -does- go to centralization. I'd personally argue that it's more a case of 5 steps forward, 3 steps back myself.
also it's never a universal thing even in supposedly self contained systems.

The falling apart of China's empires generally lead to the rise of unified kingdoms in south asia and even the Indian principalities getting their shit together.

The fall of the roman empire, and the Byzantines and Persians picking each other to death allowed for the Arabs to unite the penesula, and pick up the pieces that Rome left behind in their African and Oriental colonies in a way that Byzantine never capitalized on. The Islamic Golden Age is generally credited with giving us the foundation for almost every part of modern western technology. Sir Francis Bacon and the Franciscans would never have invented the Scientific Method as it is still practiced today if not for basically co-opting a very similar, but nor formalized system, practiced by Muslim Natural Philosophers. And surgical tools have not changed in any significant form since they were invented in the early Sultanates.

So yeah, singular nations fall apart, but new ones rise, often adopting the best practices of the others. The entire reason that the Arabs were able to kickstart the Islamic Golden Age for example is that the Byzantines were quite literally just throwing away the philosophy, engineering, and learning texts of ancient rome. We had though we had lost -all- of Aristotle's knowledge until it turned out that the Arabs had been using it the entire time it was supposedly lost with the fall of Rome.

Sorry to harp on the Islamic Golden Age example, but the fall of Rome and the low middle ages (eroneously called the dark ages) are the major example given of empires inevitably falling apart and humanity regressing.

Parts of humanity regress. The whole of humanity keeps moving forward. The only period in all of human history where that can conclusively be said to have been a total collapse was the actual historically named Greek Dark Ages, and we're not even sure there because there's some compelling evidence that northern africa picked up the slack, as did Persia, from the collapse of the Peloponnesian League and such.

Its not even hard to do IRL:
1. Coast settlements
2. Eventually some fuck makes a city, because that is just that what happens
3. Turns out everything between the coast settlements is basically a uncrossable wasteland unless some fuck wants to try to settle the land
4. Hence you get city states, unless some King goes on a empire rampage, so he can cut his hair and fuck his waifu

I would argue that the Bronze Age Collapse would be a closer to a total collapse, but even then China was relatively uneffected.
A true total collapse would be the result of a modern thermonuclear war.

Well, in Italy the Comuni were kinda sparked by two things:

1) revival of commerce and goods production
2) absence of feudal lords particulary powerful/the cites were too close together to just have powers "in between"

(the Hanseatic League had a parallel story, interestingly enough)

Plus, wars didn't need that many people in that age.

Now the intersting part to me is that we think of city-states like it means "you could walk the whole state in a day or two", but that wasn't true after some centuries. An extreme case might be Venice in 1400 and later, 200+ km from Friuli to nowdays Lombardy, but it wasn't the only one. Hardly a continent or what we think of european middle-size nations, even, but still. Decently different landscapes as well.
It was still a city state tough, shit went on in Venice proper and the rest of the cities weren't directly involved in the government.

>personally I'm a big fan of dragons as rulers of city states. They want to decide shit from their lairs and the surrounding city with their humans/whatever subjects, but they have a country to manage which they can oversee in a day/half day of flight.

Make it so the world was once dominated by a strong cosmopolitan empire fighting against different kingdoms from the outer territories. The empire then collapsed after the capital, now the biggest city state, fell under a civil war after the ruling class made something questionable.

Put all the biggest city states in strategic points:
-Big ports of commerce and naval production
-Big planes with farms constantly harassed by raiding groups
-Big mountains with tons mines
-Other trade hubs
-Places of cultural importance like the once capital of the empire

Make it so now a different ruling class took control of each city once the common military shattered, now defending themselves using militias or mercenaries.

Since every city had control of important resources and the central authority fell, they can have leverage on each other by offering the resources they need. And now since there's no coordinated effort they have to rely on local defense. On top of that, since there's no Imperial identity, people revert to the cultural identity they had before unification.

You can now decide whether you want the cities to have close alliances, if you want to make different alliances of city-states to have clashes, etc.

Also make it so there's constant threat of raids in villages, driving people to the cities. They can be anything from Orcs, invading armies, wildlife, bandits, etc.

So Australia, colonized a millennia earlier

I was reffering to a nearly closed system. I was under the impression there wasn't a lot of contact between the collapse of the Mediterranean civilizations at the end of the bronze age since there's not a lot of evidence of somebody else picking up the pieces and then rebuilding, then bringing the knowledge back with them.

Also total thermonuclear war is highly unlikely at this stage, too many players. Whoever launches the first strike would probably have total retaliation launched against them by the other, what? 16-20 other nuclear powers in the world? Their allies would desert them, they'd be on their own and get wasted. There'd be damage, but not total systemic collapse. At the very least Africa would probably survive it because there's no valuable targets on the central and southern continent are there? And they have the mineral wealth to jumpstart the necessary programs and move right past petrol based products that would be necessary as a transitional fuel source between wood/coal burning and reknewable sources provided they got on the ball immediately. And the internet itself is basically hardened against it, tons of shit would be lost, but the overall infrastructure would remain intact.

What about a continent sized Greece?

A less-than-realistic but kind of cool idea: Continent wide Holy Roman Empire

tens of thousands of electors, each with their own city state, are kept in line by a vague, faraway, but still powerful Empire that exists only to keep everyone from merking each other.

I don't know if that modification ruins it for you, but it'd be an idea I'd personally be pretty interested in playing in.

This thread is relevant to interests I didn't know I had

Vast wastes, mountains, some other blocker between cities that make the land and connection thereof pointless.

Four and a half second-strike-anywhere, two sanctioned first-strike-local each of which is working on local second-strike capacity, one unsanctioned second-strike-local, one unsanctioned first-strike-local, one abandoned first-strike-local program, and one backburnered first-strike-anywhere program.

The only plausible third-party retaliation cases are, in descending likelihood, UK against attack on USA, UK/USA/France acting as a bloc against with a major conventional offensive across Europe, China against attack on North Korea (less out of any fondness for the Norks and more because the launch order will need to come down while it's still unclear whether the incoming attack is landing in Pyongyang or Beijing.)

Central and South Africa are likely to receive at least a scattering for four reasons:
a) They're a growing source of raw materials and food production for China comparable to SEA for Imperial Japan.
b) South Africa is a a former nuclear weapons state with an active space program, i.e. a potential player in an "everyone shoots everyone" war.
c) Precisely because of the lack of immediate targets, the Commonwealth swathe across southern Africa may still play into British or American contingency planning for long wars.
d) Also for long wars, Africa is positively wormy with uranium deposits.

That said, a total collapse is extremely unlikely even following any full exchange that doesn't involve the US or Russia specifically targeting human extinction. We have the ordnance to flatten the planet, bot a doctrine which expects duds and shoot-downs and is designed to make the rubble bounce in New York and Moscow a hundred times while leaving plenty of county seats of 50,000 in Kansas or Xinjiang untouched.

It might to ask yourself: how do nation-states form out of city-states? If you know how that works, then you can just prevent the nation-states from forming.

Just check Hellenic city states. Vast areas of nothingness, other people on much lower technological and cultural level, not enough resources to build anything else than local outposts, and coming from city-state model yourself.

i say collapsed and fractured empire is your best bet. i'm thinking about the old chinese warlord periods. whilst not city states, there were lots of them covering large amounts of land.
also, you could have your continent sparsely populated to make it a true continent. i'm now thinking of the usa. each state is basically a city state, if central government vanished, there could be a situation where each city state vies for control.

alternatively, depending on what kind of continent this is, colonisation would also work.

the imperialist establishes numerous small city states across the continent, not allowing any to get too big. then *insert disaster* happened and the colonies are now all on their own.

in this situation city states would more likely occur as the imperialist would not have allowed a lot of communication between city states - they might even bred hostility between them. divide and conquer right, have all your subjects hate each other more than you. when central command collapsed, all cities carved land for themselves.

Bronze age.

Have fewer cities

>How do I justify that city-states are the dominant state form on a whole continent?
Not easily. The existence of large city-state societies such as Italy, Greece and ARGUABLY Mesopotamia (where it wasn't quite as simple, most of those were actually entire countries with just one major capital) was heavily caused by a whole network of important social, economical and also geographical elements. Greek city-states, for an example, were almost entirely a product of a specific geography in greece, where there is not that much arable land and open landscapes worth colonizing. You could not really have anything similar in say, Egypt or Southern Russia and Ukraine. So having city-states dominant across entire continent, across all of it's different landscapes and geographies and is very unlikely. It's also - frankly speaking, BORING. It's a very artificially sounding proposition, suggesting completely unlikely cultural uniformity and lack of variety in your local political and social forms: just one universal pattern blanket applied to something as massive and varied as a continent.

While I could understand that you found the idea of a city-state being interesting and you might have wanted to explore in great detail and had some interesting hooks for it, I'd still recommend making them dominant only in a few regions, and focus on those. There is nothing wrong with having a major region controled by city-states. It's just when you needlessly want to apply it on huge landmass when it stops working.

It's not that I don't symphatise, by the way. I have a boner for city-states and I have a lot of them in my world. There is a fairly simple explanation: There is extremely little agriculture available in my world. Not only that most of the environments are derived from Central Asia and Middle East, making most of the high-altitude mountain ranges and great, meager steppes or deserts making farming land scarce. (cont.)

Cont from It is also because main crops: wheat, rice, corn etc... simply aren't available in this part of the world. This naturally means that there should not be enough food abundance to establish settled, urbanized societies - and so it was through out major part of the history. But modern history began when some people made contact with a strange "alien" race visting from across the sea. These "Celestials" are willing to provide humans with massive supplies of food - in exchange for human slaves.

This influx of food allowed urbanized societies to emerge and civilizations to be rebuild (though for an obvious price).
The point being: people did not settle down based on arability of land, and did not form smaller agrarian communities across it, but rather, established a network of major cities connected via major trade-routes, with huge swathes of open landscape between them, mostly inhabited by nomads and remnants of older, hunter-gatherer type tribes. There is not much of what you could call "countryside". This kind of isolation, and lack of claim to empty steppe lands between the cities, fostered a fairly heavy city-focused societies and - of course being well defensable, many of these maintained or claimed independancy, being city-states.

So that is how it works in my world. But it would be completely wrong to claim that these city-states are completely dominant to my world. There are plenty of more regular kingdoms and empires aggressively uniting individual cities. And there are still many smaller settled communities living of less-profitable crops like lentils or fruit-orchards.

Also, I focus on a relatively small region: roughly the size of China or smaller. It's not even 1/4th of the entire continent.

Pic related is my major source of inspiration.

Elitary caste holding on to advanced knowledge.
Only insiders may perform complex technical work, and outsiders with skill are harrassed or recruited.
The surrounding region relies heavily on the city, which is practically the only major centre of industry on the continent. Other settlements depend on the city as a source of medicine and advanced tools, goods which are traded from there at absurd rates. The city in return subsists in an environment which isnt well suited for agriculture, and cannot sustain itself without shipments of food and raw materials from a huge tract of territory.

Monsters roaming the land, unlike your pic, walls need to be raised to protect the farmland because the monsters are omnivorous.

Due to the City walls now covering the farmlands as well there is a certain limit of how large the city can get. City walls are way more expensive then a fort/castle wall, so the cities are mini countries, expansion would mean making extention to the walls or finding a solution to the monster problem.

All cities are kinda isolated, while they are somewhat aware of each other, they don't really have much to war, as they have an actual enemy.

The individual city states have something that allows them to retain their independence.

Every city state has its deity that defends the city with a overpowered avatar.

Every city is in control of ancient defense mechanisms that they can maintain but not replicate.

Food production in the free countryside only allows for scarce subsistence farming while the cities have a secure foodsource.

Why do you need to justify it?

Make sure the entire continent has the same landscape as Greece.

Just make the terrain hard to control.

But the Incas had a huge empire with no carts and horses.

Terrain/transport technology is the most important factor.
It has to be difficult enough to get around that maintaining large empires is difficult. In Greece for example, the terrain is rocky, mountains are common, winter cuts off entire parts of the land for months on end, and there aren't any proper navigeable rivers.

Culture is another important one, if there's no history of large empires in the past, there's less impetus for people to push for another one. A focus on individual freedom, and an ethnicity that stresses your city as your ethnicity rather than some overarching collective identity is also a good way. If you're more focused on how you're from Cityopolis and the other guy is from Townopolis and ignore that you're both Continentalese, there's again less impetus to band together.

Finally, politics: local nobility should be strong. Nobles from Cityopolis don't want to merge with Townopolis because that dilutes their power and risks putting them under the thumb of stronger nobles in the other town. Local politicians and such don't want it because that might endanger their city privileges. Local guilds or big merchants don't want it because it means they'll find it harder to compete against the other guilds and merchants in the merged town. Conflicts between cities should be just common enough that there's always some simmering rivalry, distate, or unresolved issues that also act as impetus against larger merges.

You don't need to make it a stable dynamic. In fact, the campaign will probably have more oomph if there is the current dominant political system (whatever it happens to be) is not stable.

My current campaign is set in a world where you had a set of 16 gods who directly ruled the world, backed up with their own personal power, and they died off suddenly, and civilization as that world knew it pretty much collapsed, since for time out of mind, the only form of government is "Do what your local deity tells you or die".