Emperor is a great entry in the series. It’s maybe even a touch more refined than Zeus mechanically, although I personally feel like it has a little less flavor. Enjoy!
For some reason Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom flew in under a lot of people’s radar compared to Caesar 3, Pharaoh and Zeus. Those who have played it often fondly recommend it though, so it was great news when it finally came to GOG. And it might very well be the peak of the series from at least a mechanical perspective.
Also, oddly enough, Emperor tried the whole multiplayer City-Builder thing way before SimCity (2013) with both cooperative and competitive scenarios available. Which should still be playable to this day via Direct Connect, LAN or virtual LAN to my knowledge. Honestly, Emperor probably executes the idea of a co-operative multiplayer city-builder better than most other attempts I’ve seen so far, which ain’t bad for a 2002 game.
In other news, Lethis - Path of Progress and Children of the Nile - Complete Edition are both in this week’s GOG weekly sale and are discounted by 50% or more. Banished also happens to be on sale currently apparently but I can’t see it in any of the promos, so when that discount ends I don’t know.
For mere ~$2.50 I can heartily recommend Children of the Nile for anyone craving a sort of spiritual sequel to Pharaoh. While it’s a different kind of game mechanically compared to the walker-based Impressions Games style city-builders the game design behind it is pretty interesting; coming from many of the same minds that were involved in Caesar, Pharaoh and Zeus.
Wow. Someone actually tried Emperor multiplayer?
Does anyone else remember an advertisement for Emperor that showed two cities, and one was building a monument that was a giant middle finger directed at the other? Am I making that up??
Emperor RotK wasn’t as good as Zeus or maybe even Pharaoh. The forced feng shui mechanic felt arbitrary and unnecessary: in every Impressions city builder, there already is a sort of feng shui mechanic built in that requires aesthetics for residential buildings to advance to a certain level.
I remember the ad, and I’m like 90% sure it was for Emperor, but I can’t find a scan of it anywhere online.
Zeus with its Poseidon expansion is the best one of the Impression city builders. Emperor added a few mechanics that made the game worse (Feng Shui, Ancestors had to be controlled by hand) and only one real improvement (residential walls).
Didn’t Emperor also add crop rotation? I don’t remember needing to do that in Zeus, but it’s been a while, so I could be wrong.
If i remember right, Emperor added some fun stuff, some additions unique to the setting but they also took a few steps back. Zeus is the better game, but if someone likes Zeus I would imagine they would still enjoy Emperor.
I just replayed Emperor several months ago after it came out on GOG and I don’t think there was anything like crop rotation. It has big farm buildings that then allow you to grow whatever crops are available in the area surrounding it. So you kinda tend to make patches of different crops.
Zeus’ farms were more freeform than that, weren’t they? Now I can’t recall.
Emperor: RotMK certainly puts the greatest effort into the idea of seasonal crops and utilising that seasonality to boost productivity. The game sports an abstraction of crop rotation rather than replicating the exact minutiae behind crop rotation. You are actively nudged towards using the concepts behind crop rotation through the gameplay mechanics, with workforce efficiency and farm productivity being the carrot on the stick.
In practice, due to how crops are zoned and managed in-game, a visual representation of crop rotation requires constant micromanagement by the player. The sanest way to manage farms is to divide each farm’s field up into halves, thirds, quarters or fifths and dedicate each zone to a different seasonal crop type. Visually that will look nothing like crop rotation, however, at the abstract level you have implemented the ideas of crop rotation… even if the systems and representation could be deeper.
Yeah, that sounds right. Although I don’t think there’s ever a limit to how much land your farmhouse can work at one time, so I don’t think there’s a penalty to surrounding it with one crop type. Maybe I’m wrong, though, and there is a small difference I never noticed.
I’ve played through all of Pharaoh and some of Cleopatra recently (having missed all the impressions games earlier)… sounds like Zeus should be my next stop?
Definitely.
The art style if you’re coming off of Cleo/Pharaoh can seem a bit cartoonish, but it really works and you’ll get used to it quickly. And, you’ll come to appreciate the more vivid color palette.
The monument building isn’t quite as satisfying (I mean, pyramids…sphinxes…hard to top it) but it still serves a valuable function and looks neat. And the mechanics are more refined.
At the time of its release, and after pouring a hundred hours into Zeus back 17 years ago or whenever, I really thought I might be one of the best strategy games ever made.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
THAT
Yeah, can’t help but agree with all that.
At least from what I’ve read of the math involved, when it comes to min-maxing Emperor’s farms there are some penalties to operating a whole farm with just one crop. It typically isn’t the kind of thing your average player notices or needs to know to complete the game however. That’s more reserved for scenarios, with difficulty level set to max, that offer a challenge even to advanced skill level players.
Indeed, Zeus would be the most logical step after Pharaoh + Cleopatra. You’d be able to tell Caesar 3 was the first after experiencing Pharaoh, still worth playing eventually if you like the setting just obviously not as refined as later games in the series.
Basically, Pharaoh/Cleo is Surfer Rosa.
Zeus/Poseidon is Doolittle
Rise of the Three Kingdoms is Bossanova (A fine thing in its own right that maybe just misses some of he magic of the first two releases, but which you’ll be happy to play years down the line when you wish there was more of this style.)
Trompe l’Monde is… Children of the Nile???
By the way, Children of Denial the Nile Complete is on sale on GOG for pocket change. Until Friday, if I’m not mistaken.
Unrelated, Triskell Interactive were seeking feedback on Lethis - Path of Progress around the Impressions Games subreddit a few months ago and explained some of their ideas for the sequel. Also, in-game map editor confirmed for Lethis 2, as long as they stick to their word.
Preliminary Lethis 2 Details
Hey guys!
We’ve just started working on Lethis – Path of Progress II, and I wanted to use the opportunity to gather feedback. For those who don’t know about Lethis – Path of Progress, it’s a city builder we released in 2015 as an homage to the Impressions city building series. It has issues, but it was our first professional game, and we’re still pretty fond of it, hence the sequel.
I can already start by saying that, once again, there will be no combat in the game. That’s just not the direction we want to take. Also we’re now a team of 2. Way more experienced now, but still, not with the production capabilities of 6 people (and I’ll only make a combat system the day I get my hands on the Lords of the Realm IP). The main idea is that the game is gonna take place in a world where the Empire of Lethis fell after a socialist revolution. Instead of having two types of housing (and some class warfare) there is a single one, but it can specialize. After reaching a certain level, depending on the services the walkers provide to the houses, they evolve differently. We’re not set on the number of specialization, but it’s gonna be in the line of artisans, merchants, artists, etc…
These houses will provide specialists that can be assigned to production buildings, monuments, and will confer bonuses for your city.
Obviously the idea is that merchants will be helpful with trade, artisans with production, artists with monuments and entertainment services, you get the idea.
We’ve taken steps to normalize distribution of goods & services, since there were too many different things in here. Between the resources that are consumed per inhabitants, the ones consumed per house, and the one consumed by the service building every time they send a walker out, you easily get lost.
Resources will now only be consumed by the service buildings that will only distribute access to the resource to the houses through the walker. The only thing that concerns a house is if it has access (if a walker passed by) or not.
There will be steam, automatons of course, but many noticed that the first game was not as heavy on steampunk as the Victorian aspect of things. We feel like it was balanced enough so we’ll add a few new things but we don’t want to overdo it.
We’re working on a new food system inspired by our love of French cuisine, a newspaper creation system, are bringing back the boulevards from Zeus and are going to both improve the base and add new fun stuff. I can already confirm an in game map editor this time.
We discovered with the first game that there was a big gap in skill between the players interested by the genre. Veterans tended to find what we did way too easy while newcomers had a hard time grasping certain mechanics. We’re going to spend much more time on a proper tutorial this time, we’re also gonna changed the way we approach difficulty. There will be 3 game modes, but instead of just touching on numbers, we’re going to activate or deactivate certain mechanics for the two modes other than normal.
For example, in Relax mode, lack of appeal won’t prevent houses from leveling up, and we’ll introduce a system for the walkers to reduce the impact of randomness at crossings (I’m toying with a lot of ideas on this, we’ll see what works the best).
In Advanced mode, we’re going to activate sub systems like fallow for your farms, seasonal effects on production, etc…
It’s ok to be terrible at management, but it’s also cool when games offer a challenge for those who want to.
So these are the big ideas, but if you have anything to add, I’ll read everything. More monuments? Bigger monuments? A stupid idea for a mechanic we’re never going to implement despite its obvious popularity? A complain about the lack combat anyway? On a more serious note, things you’d like to see expanded in the sequel, or things you wish you didn’t have to deal with. This is meant to be a discussion ;-)
Been playing through the campaign scenarios for the first Lethis after acquiring it in this week’s GOG weekly sale, along with Children of the Nile. Fortunately the game has been stable so far for me in both performance and crashes to the desktop so I’ve been enjoying playing through the tutorial and campaign scenarios. Though I can see why grizzled veterans of the Impressions Games describe it as easy, and yet it can be rather challenging for new or casual players. Thems the challenges of designing a game that will appeal to a wide variety of skill levels, especially when lacking user-generated content support to fill in gaps.
Luckily I’m not of a high enough skill level to completely invalidate my enjoyment of the scenarios, haha. So I’ve been having fun digging into block designs, the gameplay mechanics, and soaking in the art design. It has a promising core that could really shine with the right refinements to the gameplay, balancing and scenario design.