Nebuchadnezzar - constructing Mesopotamia one brick at a time.

I really enjoyed that game. I mean I hated the way it looked and the zoom in camera was like in your face when what I wanted was to go further back and take in the activity, but I kept hoping that after Hinterland, Hinterland II would be more polished, build on the idea and… sigh, well Majesty was in that area too.

COTN definitely lacked something. I played it for hours though, and enjoyed it, but there are definitely things that feel a bit… off with some of the newer gamers. And by new games I don’t mean the iterations of the ones I still enjoy (Anno, Tropico).

What you describe could be it though. It’s not enough to just have more of stuff, not more crops, which admittedly is fun, not more trade options, also wanted and needed, just… uhhh depth.

Maybe I’ll play Zeus this evening instead, finally finish the thing.

I agree with COTN. It ended up feeling…I don’t know the right way to describe it, but maybe “sterile” comes closest.

Ironically, I thought Caesar 4 was the citybuilder that TM knocked out of the park…but it seems like that game has almost been completely forgotten now. And I still think Zeus was really the apex of that design model. What a great game!

Pfft, that’s what Grumpus’ city block design threads were for.

My sense of CoTN was that it was a very good simulation, but not a very good game. It didn’t seem like it needed me after a certain point, frankly.

On a related note, you people are going to make me try to like Zeus again, aren’t you? I’m going to go reinstall it, love everything about it for a few minutes, then get infuriated with the walker mechanics and uninstall. I can see it all so clearly.

Maybe try Rise of the Middle Kingdom instead? Didn’t they improve the walker mechanics in that one above Zeus?

The walker mechanics were basically the same (because they’re simple, which is what makes walkers still a great solution), but Emperor did have more granular roadblocking systems. You could make gates and tell them exactly who to let through and not let through.

I have RotMK on disk around here somewhere - it doesn’t appear to be on GOG. I’ve got Zeus digitally.

Emperor Rise of the Middle Kingdom and Zeus/Poseidon have the same walker mechanics. They both represent an upgrade from Caesar III due to the addition of roadblocks. I cannot recall if Pharaoh had roadblocks on release or not. I vaguely recall roadblocks being patched into Pharaoh later but not being very accessible in the UI.

I consider Zeus/Poseidon the peak of the series b/c of the integration of the city building with the goals and scenarios, giving it a better “game” element than most of the series. Also, Emperor would be its equal but for the festivals that the player had to remember to click on every few weeks. With my ADHD that was a game-killer for me. If you don’t have ADHD, Emperor may be the best of the series.

As for getting mileage out of Zeus/Poseidon, here is the key tip for building your cities: for the areas where you need walkers to go in a certain path, be very careful in your roadbuilding. The best way to manage walkers is simply to NOT give the walkers bad choices. If the walkers have no choice but to go on the path you want, it’s all good.

For example, for residential areas, you want your service/market/support buildings and your houses all on a connected road (line, square, whatever works) with a long dimension (or half circumference) of 27 tiles (that’s as far as the shortest range walkers will go), linked to your main city road network by roads that are limited by roadblocks. (For example my residential blocks with an inner “square/ring” that links everything inside the block and is in turn linked via roadblocks to the main city.)

For everything else, the main thing to worry about is maintenance walkers, who have a distances of 43 tiles. You can set up loops or lines, where the maintenance walker is constrained to follow the path.

Note: if you can manage a loop, you can get twice the distance. For example in my residential blocks, I use a “square/ring” of 8X16 - the total circumfurence is 52 tiles (which includes the 4 corner tiles) and so a walker going 27 tiles will make it just around the corner before it turns back - since the shortest path home at that point is the “far” side of the loop, the walker will smoothly walker all the way around a 52 tile loop, even though it’s “walk distance” is only 27 tiles. In theory, with the longer distance maintenance walkers (distance 43) you could could make a loop of 84 tiles. Be sure to count the corners when counting out your loops!

Basically, the “patrolling” walkers will follow the roadblocks until they hit their distance limit and then they will run home the fastest way. It’s possible to set up “P” shapes and other shapes where the walkers will come home through roadblocks if they hit the turn around point at the right spot.

Eh, that got too complicated.

Here’s the basic deal: for bourgie housing your short walker distance is 27 tiles - try to make loops that make use of that. For elite housing, it’s more but I forget exactly. I typically just setup elites in long lines b/c you need a lot of space around the elite housing for beatification (parks and such).

It came out on GOG a couple of years ago. It’s called Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom.

OK, weird, I see it now. I thought I remembered seeing it added to GOG’s catalog but I guess I misspelled something in my search. What’s really funny is I apparently already have it on GOG. Oy.

Anyway, thanks for making me aware of something I already owned, and I mean that completely unironically.

@Sharpe Thanks for the detailed advice, hopefully I can get over the hump this time.

My pleasure! Please do the same for me when I need it (and I will).

https://i.imgur.com/R1fdEt3.gif
One of the largest issues for some is that it just ain’t Caesar III, whether literally (nostalgia) or in mechanical similarity due to changing away from the walker-based system of yore. Also, a bit rough around the edges in places which hampers the experience sometimes. The military\combat has never been the best part of Impressions/Tilted Mill city-builders but military in Caesar IV could be a bit cumbersome and buggy at times, further adding to the issue.

Personally, I quite enjoy the game once I grokked onto how to play it properly. It leans into a number of things that Caesar II did, including the music if I remember correctly, so in some ways it can feel more like a successor to that game more than Caesar III. Still retains the same puzzle-like challenge to city block design, more important later in the game for the very high requirement missions, without frustrating people with seemingly dumb and random service walkers.

A common complaint I have heard from people, who obviously did not make it far enough into the campaigns, were that the maps felt too small and restrictive. Which to be fair, they can be a bit restrictive when you are first starting out and are learning the game because your city designs are likely going to be inefficient and occupy between 1.5 to 2 times the space of an efficient, well planned city.

This is my efficient city on the Caralis scenario, which is Mission 3 of the Republic campaign, which is on a Small size map (256x256). So, depending on the complexity of the scenario Very Small (128x128) and Small (256x256) it is not hard to see how people still getting to grip with the game might butt up against the edges of the playable map space due to over-building from inefficient planning, and probably not know it due to still being in the learning process.

It’s not until the fourth mission of the Republic campaign with Corinth or Tarraco that the game’s map sizes start to feel more open, as the Medium Map size (384x384) gets introduced. Which is a whole eight missions into the game if someone does the Kingdom (Tutorial) campaign, and doesn’t play the alternate mission choices present through the Republic campaign. So, someone has a lot of gameplay to get through if they feel like they are butting up against the early map sizes.

I suppose any game coming off the heels of Caesar III’s legacy was always going to have a hard time of it though, especially eight years later once a hardcore fanbase had settled in to their ways. Some things in Caesar IV work contrary to how they do in Caesar III, which is a lot of assumed knowledge and muscle-memory to unlearn.

I’m pretty sure I played all of Caesar IV, but other than being 3D and not having walkers, I don’t remember much about it. And I never went back to replay it. When I consider doing so, I just assume it’s going to feel like CivCity or Grand Ages Rome or one of those other aggressively mediocre 3D builders, with none of the familiarity/nostalgia of Zeus, Pharaoh, or Emperor. Probably a bit blinkered of me.

Heh, I actually feel the exact opposite way. I thought that the scenarios were too gamey in Zeus–I remember multiple times looking at the goals for the scenario, and then looking at the starting situation of the scenario, and thinking that it was literally impossible to complete the goals, because the needed resources were nonexistent. So I had to wait and wait for some mysterious trigger to add a trade partner or something. I thought Pharaoh was much better; I didn’t feel like I was jumping through hoops while the developers were saying to me “now look at what I can do with this scenario scripting!”, but rather that each new scenario stressed a different part of the resource model (more or less).

Disclaimer: I only played Zeus for the first time a couple years ago, and I was already kind of turned off by the cartoonish graphics and voice acting. I do think it had the better set of systems, between the gods and the armies and “diplomacy” (such as it was), and I wish they just let it breathe a little more.

Emperor was also the only MP one in the group, and yes, of course I played it MP. I really enjoyed the music of Emperor too and COTN. The others were not memorable, that I recall.

Zeus and Emperor seemed to push the this is the right place to start your city and this is very, very wrong. I don’t recall getting screwed so royally in the other game by sticking something where some monster is going to popup. Emperor it might’ve been where he armies show up or something.

Battle in all these games suck. I find it strange that I still don’t want it completely gone, but the mechanic for them just has been exactly right.

Yeah I still see Zeus and Emperor as the pinnacles of the genre, really. At least the historical part of the genre. Shame about this Nebuchadnotgonnaplaythis game, hopefully they can make it better.

I still can’t tell if the game is flawed or if the reviewers out there just don’t have the respect for the game’s pedigree that clearly many of us here do. Hasn’t someone here picked it up? Give us a good city-building-nerd perspective?

Children of the Nile was my absolute favorite among all those titles.

Mine too. The walker stuff in the Impressions games never appealed to me so I bounced off most of the builders in that era. I liked the first two Caesars but then it was pretty much just SimCity for me up until Children of the Nile.

What’s the pedigree, exactly? Do the designers have a resume at all? Actual question, I don’t know who designed it.

If the pedigree is just “this is kinda like these other games that other people made 30 years ago,” that wouldn’t make me enjoy it any more.