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[AltarofScience]

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[Maniacal]

Our third game was SimCities Societies, which marked the return of the SimCity franchise!

ಠ_ಠ

I'm not going to hold my breath on this one...

 

[Arakhor]

I was a great fan of their earlier games, especially Pharaoh, but I can't say that I'm a fan of the cartoonish people featured prominently at that link.

 

[Arakhor]

Those two buildings aren't lit too realistically, but they don't look too bad. Did you ever play Children of the Nile? If so, what did you think of that?

 

[Arakhor]

I own a copy of Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, but I could never really get into it. I bought Children of the Nile & its expansion from Gamer's Gate, but it's in a very large pile of games I own digitally but haven't yet played.

 

[Arakhor]

I don't recall now, to be honest. It's been years since I tried to play it and it was sitting in my spare cupboard until last year when a friend wanted to try it out.

 

[GoodGame]

Tilted Mill is most famous for Children of the Nile, which is an excellent city-builder, I think based on the Empire Earth engine (Titan?). Simcity Societies was a decent game, just not a real SimCity.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Didn't they also program "Hinterland", that city builder / aRPG crossover?

ಠ_ಠ

I'm not going to hold my breath on this one...

Societies was completely different from the previous SC games, so it was probably a big disappointment for most fans. BUT:

I played it quite a bit, and if you think of it as "another Sim City like" game, it was actually not too bad. Yes, you could build goofy stuff and the engine was terrible (same in Hinterland ), but the gameplay on high difficulty levels was quite challenging. Plus: The idea of having the whole city theme change depending on the buildings you made was a really interesting concept.

It certainly wasn't a milestone like SC 1 or SC 2000, but the reputation it has is much worse than it actually deserves. It was just falsely advertised as the wrong game.

 

[sophie]

I found Pharaoh to be the 2nd or 3rd best of the impressions-related historical city builders. I found Zeus/Poseidon to be the best. Emperor or Pharaoh would be second-best depending on whether you prefer the Caesar III style or the Zeus style mechanics. Really that's the only important difference. Both feature tedious monument building, an arbitrary religion system that can really screw you over for no reason at all, and a story mode that features you spending hours carefully setting up a city only to have to start-anew in a totally different area the very next level. I just don't like Caesar III at all, although many would beg to differ.

As for later iterations in the city-building franchise (Caesar IV and Children of the Nile) I just can't imagine a city builder in 3d. Just like I can't imagine Age of Empires in 3d. It's just too hard for me to grapple with so I ended up disliking both games.

 

[Nintz]

Pharaoh was always was personal favorite, though I played Emperor for quite some time more recently. I think it improved much, without tweaking the formula beyond recognition. Pharaoh is still the best I think, though.

As for Zeus, I never really got into that one. I played it for awhile, but I found that the economy system didn't click with me for some reason. Despite the others making perfect sense, the Zeus one always seemed to be that you needed X resource at Y time. Only, it was extremely difficult to get X resource before building/project Z was created, way after Y time. Probably just bad luck or something, but it didn't work out for me.

Never played CotN, and only dabbled in any of the Caesars (III and IV) for a insignificant amount of time. Can't comment on those.

 

[sophie]

Pharaoh was always was personal favorite, though I played Emperor for quite some time more recently. I think it improved much, without tweaking the formula beyond recognition. Pharaoh is still the best I think, though.

As for Zeus, I never really got into that one. I played it for awhile, but I found that the economy system didn't click with me for some reason. Despite the others making perfect sense, the Zeus one always seemed to be that you needed X resource at Y time. Only, it was extremely difficult to get X resource before building/project Z was created, way after Y time. Probably just bad luck or something, but it didn't work out for me.

Never played CotN, and only dabbled in any of the Caesars (III and IV) for a insignificant amount of time. Can't comment on those.

Interesting. I always found it to be fairly easy to get the economy up and running in Zeus. The only buggy aspect of the game was wheat, which always seemed to result in disaster for me (particularly when horses become involved). On the whole I found Zeus to work a lot more smoothly than say, Emperor where you are constantly beset with food shortages if you don't set your mills/storage yards up in such a way to mitigate it. For me it got to be so frustrating and so consistent a problem that I would always end up having to put in an extra overflow storage yard for each food source to make sure there was always a backup as Mills constantly run out of food due to low storage limits.

The only problem I had with Zeus was that it was an altogether far too easy experience. Between trade and outrageous-level taxation I was always able to make money hand over fist by the first year, and insolvency was never an issue for me. This stands in stark contrast with Emperor where the first 2 years are essentially a race against time to get all the necessary infrastructure and industry up and running (with trade routes) before you inevitably drop below -2000 cash. If you could get the silk/laquer/bronzeware industry up in time you'd be fine, if not...restart, or hope you had some nice friends to bail you out. And there were some levels where they didn't give you a solid moneymaking outlet at all (some of the great wall missions). So that was always the fun of those games.

But what I liked about Zeus is that for the duration of the mission you stuck with the same city. This takes out the tedium of having to redesign a city 6-7 times in a campaign, which was nice. And I felt like the goals were usually more varied than they were in Emperor. I particularly liked the missions where you had to get a hero to slay a monster so you could get the access you need to a certain resource so you could satisfy the last goal (Such as having to get Hercules to slay the Hydra in the first mission of Zeus and Europa so you could satisfy the marble requirement). Some of the hero requirements could be tough in the right circumstances (such as wine requirements, when the only wine producers on the map are Mt. Pelion and those guys are always dicks in Zeus) and it added an extra layer of challenge to the game. Again, I also liked the way they handled religion in this game. There's no arbitrary *pay attention to me* mechanic. If gods like you they'll like you, and if not, tough spit. It allowed me to get away from keeping my eye on the religion tab at all times and just enjoy the game. I also like in Zeus that it's legitimately possible to get cities to like you. In Emperor no matter how hard you try nobody is going to cut you a break, even if they are nominally your vassal. In Zeus you can get cities to like you if you put some effort in, and it pays off in the form of them giving you plenty of helpful gifts if you do (it actually gets rather annoying in the end game when you're waiting for that one last objective and periodically you get spammed with messages of cities giving you gifts or notifying you of how awesome you are).

 

[sophie]

I constantly asked for and also sent out gifts in emperor and i rarely had cash problems. i could often get several thousand gold from allies or vassals. I never really had crop problems either during campaigns.

I do agree that constantly starting a new city was a massive pain.

What difficulty were you playing on? I tended to ignore cities unless I needed something from them. Cash wasn't a problem, but only once you could get the required industries set up. My problem is that I like to have absolutely everything laid out before I build my first house so I tend to blow a lot of money before anybody's even moved in. As for crop problems, I don't know. I tend to spread things out a lot so there is a lot of travel time between the farm and the mills. Since the mills have low storage limits if you're producing a large variety of crops a market worker can clear out your stock in one trip, causing a transportation nightmare if you don't have readily accessible reserves (which I started doing in every level). Again though, much more streamlined in Zeus.

 

[Yeekim]

This takes out the tedium of having to redesign a city 6-7 times in a campaign, which was nice.

Given that designing a city was what those games were essentially about, I don't quite get this complaint...
EDIT: Never played Zeus though, so maybe my lack of experience with alternative approach is the problem here...

 

[Nintz]

@ Owen Glyndwr-

Zeus is a strange one for me. While there were times that everything fit together, those particular games proved much too easy. Most of the others were long, tedious games that forced me to play something very possible, technically easy even, but time-consuming. Namely when you had to import a resource that only one or two people had to build an obscure monument that I wouldn't have built so early in any of my sandbox games (unless it was a hero to defeat a really early monster). I didn't like that feel.

Emperor, in contrast, seemed to present more of a gradual challenge, for me. I rarely set up industries early on, and almost never had cash problems. I tended to keep things very small until I needed to expand. Obviously in contrast to your "plan everything" style, so I'm guessing that is where we have a disconnect. Zeus is much more suited to that style of play.

 

[sophie]

@ Owen Glyndwr-

Zeus is a strange one for me. While there were times that everything fit together, those particular games proved much too easy. Most of the others were long, tedious games that forced me to play something very possible, technically easy even, but time-consuming. Namely when you had to import a resource that only one or two people had to build an obscure monument that I wouldn't have built so early in any of my sandbox games (unless it was a hero to defeat a really early monster). I didn't like that feel.

Emperor, in contrast, seemed to present more of a gradual challenge, for me. I rarely set up industries early on, and almost never had cash problems. I tended to keep things very small until I needed to expand. Obviously in contrast to your "plan everything" style, so I'm guessing that is where we have a disconnect. Zeus is much more suited to that style of play.

True. And don't get me wrong, I do love Emperor too. I just didn't like the ancestor management and some of the more tedious monument projects (in particular the later Great Wall missions. The challenges themselves are great, I love arid levels and having to deal with limited space and not having easy access to moneymaking resources, but building the walls themselves have always caused problems for me). I guess you just prefer the game you started with.

Also I find the Zeus music to be the best of the franchise. But again, that's the game I started with.