Pharaoh (thing)

Pharaoh, like Caesar III before it, can be described as a cross between Sim City, The Settlers and Age of Empires. Your overall goal in the game is to move up the ranks and become Pharaoh by accomplishing missions consisting of building cities with various goals. In some missions you need to have the housing evolve to a certain level, in some you need to defend the city against military attacks as you build a small monument and in others your goal is to create an efficient city with a very large monument. Each mission features its own map that usually presents challenges to the player. Like having all sources of food across a river, or the necessary raw materials for a monument spread out all across the map. Plopping down a pre-fabricated city will very often not work. In almost every mission you need to provide your people with food, products and entertainment and find a good way to keep the city solvent.

Pharaoh's strong point is the great amount of interaction between the various elements of the game. In Sim City you simply zone an area for Industry. In Pharaoh you pick particular industries and then need to worry about how to supply them with raw materials and workers. You also have to worry about how to get those finished products to the people or to traders.

To demonstrate this I'll explain how to go about doing the most basic thing in the game: Feeding your people. Housing in Pharaoh evolves as it gains access to more of what the people want. Without food your people will live in run down mud huts or even tents. The main type of farming in Pharaoh, and this is a big difference from Caesar III, is flood plain farming. The Nile appears in every map and usually has a flood plain around it. On the flood plain you can plop down a grain farm, for example. The farm will need access to a Work Camp by a road to have peasants work it, so you have to build a road. You now need a Work Camp. The Work Camp will send out a walker to find people to work. He'll follow the road and if he passes by a house and there are people available for work the Work Camp will start...err...working. So, you need some housing somewhat near the Work Camp, but not too close because Work Camps aren't very desirable places to live by. Great, you now have peasants going out to the farm to work it. They will plant, tend to, harvest and even deliver the wheat. But, they need a Granary to deliver the wheat to. Once the Granary finds some employees it will except the wheat when it's harvested. Next you will need a Bazaar, which is basically a market. Once the Bazaar has workers it will send someone out to get the wheat from the Granary and bring it to the Bazaar. Finally, the Bazaar will send out a walker to deliver the food. This person will randomly meander down the road and seemingly attempt its best to never reach any housing. If your roads are simple enough though, the Bazaar worker will reach a house and sell them some wheat. Your little patch of Egypt is no longer starving.

Now you'll just need to provide firemen, architects, fresh water, religious access, entertainment, etc. Luckily these things just require a building with employees and send out a walker to bestow their usefulness on the housing passed. You might also want to invest in an army, lest a small band of Libyans come by and wreck everything. Another system similar in complexity to food is industry. Your people want items, and you need money by selling excess products. In general, you need to buy, mine or harvest a raw material then create an industrial building to process it. The finished product then goes to a Storehouse to be sold to the people by a Bazaar, or sold for profit to a trader.

After managing to set up a food and industrial system you'll also need to make sure it keeps working. A break down in any part of the system can disrupt the whole thing. This can lead to mass starvation or bankruptcy. A city can literally fall apart if enough things go wrong with these systems. And with flood plain farming a major problem is built in. The flood is not the same every year, and, in fact, is sometimes non-existent. A string of bad floods can leave your city's food stocks empty if you don't quickly start dealing with it.

A city that is pretty far along is quite interesting to just look at. Hundreds of walkers scurry about delivering food, passing out water, checking the structural integrity of buildings, etc.

The biggest difference between Pharaoh and Caesar is the addition of Monuments. Throughout the game you are assigned the task of building Mastabas, Stepped Pyramids, "true" Pyramids, the Sphinx and Sun Temples. In general, to complete these tasks you need to mine or import stones, establish guilds to provide scaffolding and work the stone at the site and provide peasant labor form Work Camps to move the stones from a storage yard to the site. The monuments are basically built brick by brick. You can follow a particular hunk of plain stone from a mine, to the storage yard, to the site via a sled pulled by peasants sometimes up and around scaffolding and finally being placed by masons. Some of the bigger monuments are extremely large compared to your city. Nothing in Caesar III (not even hippodromes and coliseums) compares to these accomplishments. Unfortunately, waiting for these things to be finished can sometimes take awhile.

Caesar III introduced using walkers for everything, and also introduced the walker problem. They never seem to go where you want them. They'll wander all over the place except where you need them. In Pharaoh, Impressions has added roadblocks. By correctly placing these you can gain a lot more control over your walkers, but it's still occasionally a problem.

Pharaoh should appeal to anyone who has played Impressions previous city building games. People who like The Settlers should like Pharaoh too. In general, if you like the challenge of handling a complicated system of interdependent units you should like Pharaoh.

Impressions has also released Cleopatra, and add-on that includes new missions and several new features.