I still play it now and then! I also played it, you guessed it Multiplayer. Only one that I know of that was MP in that genre.
Woah, yeah, I’ve never known anyone that’s played it multiplayer! Remember when every game needed to have multiplayer?? So… did it work?
It did. It wasn’t great though. I mean you could trade with your team mates, usually had to because each person had a different map and therefore access to resources others didn’t. There was a weird thing about it not liking people who had the same IP address so things like Hamachi, years later, had issues because of that.
I thought it was a good start to more to come but I guess that next one was kind of the disaster the Sim City was…
I’m convinced it can still work. MP can happen in these genres.
Some of the later missions were annoying.
Especially any missions with a warfare component.
I also got used to the cartoon aesthetic but it was definitely more that I learned to tolerate it than anything else (and I would quickly read the intro text and try to shut out the voices).
I actually don’t mind that they took a mythological rather than historical approach–I think the gods, monsters, and heroes mechanics are pretty cool. I probably would prefer a historical one but I appreciate the mythological one, too. It also has the advantage of being better able to ignore anachronisms, since it’s all taking place in the Golden Age of the past (sort of, I mean there’s the Peloponnesian War, but whatever). Whereas in Pharaoh at the end of the game you get the best military units (chariots) along with the biggest pyramids, when (at least according to this guy on Twitter) they’re separated by five hundred years or whatever.
Oh yeah, one more complaint about Zeus: some of the campaigns were really frustratingly paced. I think it was the rise of Athens one, but I remember there being several scenarios in a row where the goals included things like collecting resources or conquering a rival, and I’d open up the map at the beginning and look around and realize it was impossible to complete until some event happened that allowed me to gather or import or whatever. That was really frustrating.
I don’t mind events coming along like monsters or army invasions (e.g. in Pharaoh) and whatnot, but I would regularly arrive at a point in the scenario where I’d basically be done and waiting for some event to fire.
I just played through the whole Zeus campaign, and the things you say are true, but for me they were rarely frustrating. I usually have some basic good-citifying goal I can make for myself while I’m waiting–setting up a new industry for export, or optimizing my goods storage or whatever. If anything, I had a couple of episodes where most of my goals were already complete at the start from the previous episode!
Anyway, they don’t make games like Pharaoh and Zeus anymore! I wish Lethis worked as well, and I’m hopeful about the Aztec game because that’s a cool setting, but not holding my breath.
Zeus is my all time favorite of the series, but what’s weird is that Emperor would actually be my favorite except for one thing. Zeus features refinements to the core walker mechanics that made it superior to the prior entries and then Emperor improved upon that with the food-combinations mechanic. However, Emperor also featured one thing I truly hated, which was the non-automated festival of the deities mechanic. I loved setting up systems in these games and letting them work without a lot of micro-intervention. The festival mechanic in Emperor broke that for me, plus it was an extremely poor fit for my ADHD.
I tried Lethis briefly but for whatever reason it just didn’t feel like it had a hook.
That’s a AoW: Planetfall stream?
Also there’s a City Builder and Colony Manager thread around here somewhere that’s for broader CB/CM discussions.
Hahaha, you fell for his ruse. Now you have to buy the game.
edited. Will go find this thread.
Industries has a thread already!
The GREAT news: Pharaoh is getting a remake!
The less than great news: by the developers of Lethis.
Still…might be pretty good.
Yaaaa…ay?
Fairly excited about this. Wait and see mode, but I Want To Believe.
Uhhhhh, those gameplay shots are 100% the original city assets, probably uprezzed but otherwise unchanged. Not sure how I feel about that. I guess it indicates their intention to hew very closely to the original game… If they’re doing that with artwork, they’re probably at least defaulting to that with gameplay.
I’ll set my dial to “cautiously optimistic”!
Unlikely to be the original city assets, but very convincingly recreated none the less, because no one has access to the original source material to upscale them. That’s lost to the wind these days and long has been since Impressions closed down. And well we already know what up-ressed Pharaoh looks like due to the widescreen fan patches, and this definitely has a noticeable sublte but different artistic vibe to it.
I just hope they add intelligent AI pathing for walkers. I just hate to spam my city with service walkers because some road just never gets fire inspectors or waters deliveries because the AI just randomly chose to not go down that row 4 times in a row.
Seems more like a Remaster than a Remake.