...is awesome!
I'm playing it for the first time now and I can't beliieve I never gave it a try before. So many nice and inventive mechanics for ancient egypt, and so many nice animations for citizens everyday lives! At 8 not even on sale it's a steal.
With how impressive this 10 year old title is, it's a shame citybuilders was on life support as a genre for so long untill the slight revival recently. I guess it must have been very performance heavy for its time though, as my city is starting to run choppy now in 2014, let alone how it must have been in 2004.
It's a nice sight when the people flood down to the banks of the nile to farm the land as the inundation gives way.
Dominating the main city are the Cult temple of Thoth with it's long processionary pathway and the plaza of the dead surrounded by the Temples of Osiris and Anubis and close by the noble family tombs.
Cult temple of Thoth, patron god of the city and god of scribes, knowlege and hieroglyphs. Apparently he basically created the universe by writing down the physical laws through the power of science. Also he has the head of an Ibis. Pretty much the coolest god obviously.
People here are obsessed with death, so I had to make the Temples to the gods of death and the underworld quite prominent.
On the tip of an island in the Nile is the temple of the sun god Ra. Whenever the flood is unusually high the temple is flooded, but through the blessing of Ra always miraculously survives. Or it might be a bug with the fact that it was first flooded while still under construction, or temples might simply be flood resistant, but I'm going with the intervention of Ra Himself option.
More in the center of city life are the temples of Amun and Hathor. The temple of Amun, god of commoners is walled and surrounded by family tombs of lesser rank to impart a sense of quiet and order on the peasantry and to separate it from the slums it faces. The temple of Hathor, god of entertainers and place of regular festivals is more open in the middling parts of town.
The Temple of Bast is center of a small shrine complex that supports a small offshoot of the city on the far bank of the Nile. Watch out for shopkeepers assaulting you with offers on the way in.
So far I have built 1 very small, 1 small, and 2 medium pyramids with a relatively small labor force, but with my new project of constructing the great pyramid much farther away from the main city, things are a bit different. A small city is being developed to support everything needed for construction. This thing is four times bigger than anything else I built and I'm starting to get worried I won't be able to finish it before Pharaoh dies.