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Great Empires Collection 2 The following report compares gadgets using the SERCount Rating (base on the result count from the search engine). |
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POPULAR HAT - 2006-02-13 11:39:00 | © Copyright 2004 - www.hat.net () | sitemap | top |
The best way to view these games, IMHO, is this:
Caesar 3 is the progenitor of the City Building Series proper. It featured the introduction of basic concepts such as labor walkers, warehouses, foreign trade, sea trade, and so on.
Notably, when compared to the rest of the series, it lacked roadblocks. Given that roadblocks were put in the subsequent games due primarily to fan demand, their absence in C3 is easily understood and forgiven (particularly since you can, with only a minor amount of effort, make city gates confer the exact same benefit to your city as roadblocks provide to the other games). And since it's still possible to build functioning housing blocks without either gates or roadblocks, the lack of them isn't a problem, and is more of a challenge to your designing skills.
Pharoah and Cleopatra took the basic C3 engine and added a vatload of complexity. It was still the same basic engine, but with many more features: Monument construction, seasonal farming, industries requiring more than one type of raw material, and riverborne combat with boats, to name just a few. The numbers were also adjusted to make the game more challenging than C3: each level of housing holds less people than housing of comparable level in C3. Thus, keeping your industries filled with employees became much more of a challenge.
Pharaoh (and Cleopatra) is considered by many die-hard fans of the entire series to be the most challenging of the 4 games.
With Zeus, the game engine was given a major revamp. Gone were the labor walkers, who needed to pass by occupied housing in order to acquire employees for a given industry. Instead, any industry on the map would find employees as long as it was connected via road to any occupied housing.
Also gone were the forts. If your city was invaded, your citizens poured out of their houses to defend the town from invasion -- with a concommitant effect on your industry. (When all your employees are out fighting the bad guys, there aren't many left to make olive oil.)
Elite housing was made in a new way. In C3 and Pharaoh, if you wanted elite, high-tax housing, you had to grow it from small tents and shacks. In Zeus, you were given elite housing plots, which you could simply plop down anywhere you wanted (assuming they would fit, and you could support them, and the desirability of the area was sufficient).
Zeus also introduced the episodic format of the series (something that I, personally, consider a bit of a step backwards). Instead of starting at the dawn of time and going through the game city by city until the final mission, you are given a series of episodes. Each episode may have you developing multiple cities, and returning to one or more of them at various points of the game. You might start off building Athens for a few missions, then switch to building a colony city (which will provide goods to Athens when you're done), and then switch back to Athens (which will be exactly as you left it).
There were many other adjustments made to the basic City Building game engine that made it almost (but not quite) a new game. However, you could still see the skeleton of the C3 game engine underneath the hood.