Author's Notes

So as you can probably guess, this isn't a real government ministry, given that the country in question does not actually exist. This is an alternate history project that forms the basis for a Cities: Skylines city I'm working on. (Further "author's notes" may be scattered throughout this site in italics, indicating references to our timeline or this project itself.)

Skrælige is a collection of islands off the coast of New England that is currently independent of both the US and Canada. It is also the site of the lone surviving Norse settlement in North America - in this timeline, some Norse colonists end up further south down the coast of North America. The settlement on Skrælige grew a little, but remained fairly small and isolated for a few more centuries. Its rediscovery in the early 16th century was huge news in Europe, but it truly rose to importance in the early 17th century as European colonisation began in earnest.

My Approach & Goals

Buildings Surviving to Today

My Approach & Goals

While this is an alternate history, the idea is to focus on Skrælige and not dramatically change history in the rest of the world. The discovery of a European settlement in the Americas would probably cause dramatic changes to the timeline, probably accelerating colonisation efforts - however, this project will minimize these effects as much as possible. The history must be semi-plausible, but ultimately an interesting story is more important than sticking to “ultra realism”. While I will try to research the history as much as possible, I’m not a historian - I’ll probably mess some things up or introduce some inaccuracies.

The project will cover all of Skrælige, but only the capital of Skrælborough is actually present in Cities: Skylines. This will be developed to certain “checkpoints”, where I’ll make a short YouTube video and some accompanying articles. I’ll try to have a complete timeline of everything happening between these checkpoints, island-wide though. There’ll probably be some separate sections describing my thought process behind the decisions in the timeline.

This takes a lot of inspiration/shameless rip-offs from other Cities: Skylines projects that involve building through time, such as donoteat01’s Franklin, Akruas’s Altengrad, the Presidio Bay Project by bsquiklehausen & Interurban Era, and Titan’s Ansburg. The city itself definitely won’t be as detailed as these, but the videos should be quite a bit shorter too.