Nebuchadnezzar has now released.
Yep!
Middling review at PC Gamer:
They like it but think that the fact you have to draw the paths of markets is really heavy micro for late-game (something that was already predicted upthread), the trading system can lead to early fail states (seems like something that could be very easily patched if it’s an issue), and sometimes issues with the production chain (which sounds similar to previous games in this ilk so not really a knock).
Drawing the paths of market workers is really the only thing holding me back right now. I also don’t like the completely arbitrary paths they would take in Zeus etc., so I understand the problem they are trying to solve. I just don’t think adding micro like this is the solution.
Unwise trading, poor production chains and getting your pathing right… isn’t that all a huge chunk of a city builder game anyway? I mean I can see where pathing could get obnoxious, but I am hoping they don’t have a million pathers.
We have the processing power nowadays that this should have been a non-issue. No excuse for it really.
Well, his claims in the review sound like a typical problem in these kinds of city builders. I.e. workshops getting overfull with one good so they stop accepting any other goods, which means the markets can’t access them, which means houses demote themselves. The same thing happened in Zeus, Pharaoh etc. and it means you need to be careful about what is going into workshops. It’s one of those things that isn’t necessarily a game’s fault, as it’s part of how the game works. If he doesn’t like how these city builders work then that’s fine, but if you didn’t have a problem with it in Zeus then it won’t be a problem here.
Right… but I always considered learning that kind of balance as… learning how to play. I mean isn’t that really part of these games, part of the fun and frustration and well maybe starting again knowing better next time?
I guess the newer types are a little more generous in being able to recover but the older style type games… yeah, if you messed up your production schemes, then you’re screwed or you go through the painful process of tearing down and rebuilding and well the things you learn to do after playing these. Yeah, there were some lean years in my Pharaoh games for having to shift things around… aka eat the cost and lose the supply of reorging.
The complaint doesn’t make sense to me because that’s how these games work… part of the actual challenge of them.
I also remember in earlier city builders that it was completely possible to fail and be forced to start over. That seems to be less of a case in “modern” city builders - usually you can muddle along for a time and restructure/rebuild so going back to the ‘old way’ I can see being a shift.
It might also simply be I wasn’t smart enough to recover and restarting a mission was easier. But unlike something like Anno 1800 where a game will last … forever… Pharoah/Zeus/etc., missions were a bit smaller and contained so restarting lost a few hours, not tens of hours.
This reviewer (GamerZakh) states that the game allows infinite money if you just set up one trade route. He argues that the game does not push back enough.
The pics in that review make it look like reviewer-person just built roads everywhere and then complained about micromanaging routes. The key to those Impressions-style city builders was to be smart about building roads.
Here’s an example from Zeus/Poseidon:
There you can see I have four residential blocks of the absolutely-best-bourgie housing (the elite housing is down off the bottom of the screen) which are surrounding and supported by two blocks of infrastructure buildings. Each residential block (you can see two of them in full in the upper part of the screenshot) has an inner square-ring road, blocked off by roadblocks, around which all of my residential walkers happily circulate. Each infrastructure block is arranged such that the walkers all go counter clockwise and circulate happily.
It took me quite a while to figure all that out but I was mightily pleased when I did. Once set up, no micromanagement is required at all.
As for infrastructure you can see that I have some food storage set to get fish and some set to get veggies (onions). I also have two warehouses per block set to get fleece and olive oil (to supply the needs of my bourgie citizens), and I have all the necessary entertainment-production buildings in the infrastructure blocks, with the actual entertainment venues plonked in with the bourgie consumers.
Even 20 years on I can look at the mastery of that block design and smile.
Those 4 residential blocks provide almost 9,000 population and only consume part of that as workers, leaving a massive surplus for export industries, elite housing and military. I have 5 triremes (frigates) fully staffed in that city and 3 Sanctums (Hermes, Athena and Great Zeus) and I just finished a big pyramid and am working on my second.
To be fair, that kind of block design is not something that the typical player develops even hours into Zeus or Pharaoh.
Here “smart” means “gamey.” This was always my problem with those Impressions city builders - I wanted a game about managing an ancient city, but they wanted to give me a game about solving the completely artificial “road puzzle” created by the mechanics
Well @vinraith, you are basically right, but as someone who did solve the puzzle I still love those games with a great love.
I’m sincerely glad, and you’re clearly not alone in that. For my part, they’ve always frustrated the hell out of me because they look like a game I really want to play, but the actual act of playing them is not at all what I’m looking for in a historical city builder.
I don’t think I ever finished Zeus. I should though. I still have it. Unlike Pharaoh/Cleo and the other, Zeus was the one where you can’t just sweat it out until you finally hit that goal and finish the scenario. It’s the one where you completely screwed up city comes back to haunt you in a later scenario, and now you’re just kind of… uh oh.
I tend to like these styles of games a little bit more than Tropico and Anno because they’re slower, like sit back and tinker, watch things happen. With Anno, I’m like rushing to get to islands before my competition does and screwing around with boats all the time. I don’t get to see that those 4 farms are out pacing my one workshop as easily.
This game looks cool. If those are the only complaints, and I get a newer UI, sharper graphics, and figure out this pathing thing… sounds like it’s for me to me.
No fires or building collapses either, or armies (the last one might be a benefit for some!).
I haven’t played this game yet but personally I don’t think I will try it before a sale. One of the coolest things about Zeus for me was working towards building the temples and having a god or two walking around your city applying buffs. The monuments in this game just don’t excite, and there’s less diversity, colour, and ambiance in the design.
With a big enough set of locations that must be reached optimally, no processing power is going to solve it (it being the well known Traveling Salesman Problem). However, there’s a lot of tricks if optimal is secondary, which I’m guessing they’re overestimating the importance of.
I’ve only a passing interest in the game to care to look if it’s the case and how much optimality they don’t need, but some problems are really unsolvably too slow in many applications, unless you redesign what the game offers or can do with calculating less stuff. Pretty similar issue to the Stellaris job/pop system.
It sucks to see it happen yet again, but once more we appear to have a small-studio attempt at a city builder that seems to have struggled with mid-to-late game issues with mechanics and scale.
Hopefully the issues present will be fixable in the future.
Is that from playing it or based on reading about it?
I was lucky enough back in the day to be on the playtesting/beta test groups for Children of the Nile and Caesar 4.
Both games when they were given over to closed alpha testing had passable UI, and nice art/graphics assets. And within a few builds released for playtesting, you could do most stuff you can do with city builders.
But the thing I noticed with both games (and with Hinterlands, which was a little different from a city builder, but same developer) is how much time was spent fine tuning small game mechanics and the late-game scaling. For almost half a year, you really couldn’t see any visual difference between subsequent builds, because Chris Beatrice and the Tilted Mill folks were tuning and adjusting and adding and subtracting gameplay stuff under the hood. And I got the impression it was a very painstaking and difficult process to get things just right.
I fear that this final push is what a lot of recent and upcoming games in this genre too-often miss. Seems like it’s reasonably easy to get into the red zone, but taking the ball across the goal line is pretty tough.