Product Description
As a provincial governor charged with spreading the glory of Rome your mission is clear; build cities, foster trade and industry, make money…. More >>
28
Feb/10
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Product Description
As a provincial governor charged with spreading the glory of Rome your mission is clear; build cities, foster trade and industry, make money…. More >>
I was disappointed with the disk. I shouldn’t have ordered it from a cheaper company becaue the disk doesn’t always work. It will only play on 1 out of 4 computers in our house and the graphics sometimes don’t always show up properly. You get what you pay for; at least this time.
Rating: 4 / 5
I have played this game few years back and wanted to buy a new CD and have fun – this CD that I bought for 8$ (including mailing), was worth the cost and game is fun.
Rating: 4 / 5
This game is so much fun and so addicting! There are a million different ways to play since you can build your cities however you like. If you like empire building games you’ll love this one.
I thought the pleasing the gods thing was a bit cheesy at first but it really adds to the overall game play in that you need to keep the gods happy for extra favors and so they don’t bring wrath down upon your city.
Very little warfare, you only have to build an army to protect you city. It’s all about building your empire and supplying Caesar with whatever is demanded of you. That is the hard part because he might demand something like 10 armor within 12 months. If you don’t have your iron mines and armor production already in place it will be impossible to meet his request. However, you do have a reserve of money from your governor’s paycheck and you can send that to him instead. Best to save the game often in case you mess up too much. You can start over from a point cause each level of the game takes hours, or days depending on how much time you put in it.
The really fun part is planning your housing blocks. For houses to evolve they need supplies of food, protection and water first. Later on your citizens will ask for libraries, hospitals, schools and entertainment. Then of course you need to have plenty of tax collectors in place and also export your goods for income.
It is really fun to watch your little huts become large houses and then villas and then palaces. For your people to be really happy, each house needs a supply of pottery, armor, furniture and wine. This is not easily accomplished since, pottery for example, you need to get the clay either by importing it or if you’re lucky enough to have available clay pit fields you can mine it yourself. Then you need pottery workshops to produce it, and storage facilities to hold until it’s taken to market. Keeping in mind your work force must be close by and supplied with everything they need.
For food you can build shipyards and wharfs for fishing, orchards, farms, or raise livestock. There is always a limited amount of suitable farmland and places to build for fishing and mining so that the game keeps you scrambling for resources as your population grows.
Overall it’s just a very fun game! You can set the difficulty to easy and just enjoy building. For more of a challenge raise the difficulty level and sweat it out when your entire city envelopes in flames or the enemy wipes out your city and crashes your buildings.
The levels seem endless cause I’ve never managed to play through the whole game. Unlike Age of Empires III which took only 2 days to go through all the campaigns. You definitely get your moneys worth with this one!
Rating: 5 / 5
I have owned this game for several years and played it many many times. It’s based on a cool concept and if you aren’t too detail oriented and don’t care about the details, you can have many hours of fun. BUT.. and this is what made me stop playing it completely… when you get “good” at the game and start working hard on the cities, it has some nasty bugs that pop up.. and when they do they normally completely ruin the event you are on.. even though you’ve spent a few hours.. it will suddenly do something WRONG.. a storage quits being recognized, a graphical bug will effectively lock a certain area of the city, etc.. this is EXTREMELY frustrating after all that time on it.. and the only recovery is to start over.. there is no “fix” that will correct the problem. I couldn’t take that anymore.. and as far as I can tell its random as well.. you just don’t know when or under what circumstance it will happen, but it WILL happen.
These problems have been known by the company for years, but since it was bought out and they had already made their initial money on it, they simply dragged it out forever.. finally even quit suggesting they would patch it.. as far as I know the game is completely unsupported now and has been for many years.. the only option is to buy a later version. I got Pharoah PHARAOH GOLD – (PHARAOH+CLEOPATRA, 2CDS)(GOLD edition has the add-on Cleopatra) as it is in effect the sequal, works similarly, and it is pretty much bug-free .. it has its frustrations, but the game doesn’t just “break”
I still rated it a 3 since you can enjoy it and it is fairly clever.. and I like the British accents
.. but I can’t really recommend it. edit: It is quite an old game and should be available for under $15. If you can find it in that range you might consider it.
Rating: 3 / 5
I used to play this game when I was a teenager.. and I am happy I bought the CD again after the previous got damaged.. It’s a very smart and intelligent game, that challenge your understanding of a city economy and necessity… in a very old world, but still so common with the reality now a day
Rating: 4 / 5