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City Builder: The Next Generation!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 23 / 25
Date: November 07, 2004
Author: Amazon User

There's a kind of game called "city builders" that started with Sim-City years ago, made a big jump in something called Caesar III, and continued on through Zeus and Emperor. You build... well, CITIES... but it's fun and they're historical in cool time periods etc.

Children of the Nile is the inheritor of this tradition but it's made a big jump. It's 3 dimensional, people-oriented, thought-provoking, scenic, engaging, and FUN. Think "Sims3 meets Pharaoh" and you're sort of in the ball park.

If you've never played a city-builder, try this one. If you've played city-builders and have been looking for something new and next-generation, try this one.

Strangely, it seems to unify adults and kids in its fascination and interest. Am currently tussling with my daughter (11) over playing taking turns :-). Make no mistake, it's fun enough for kids and teens but sophisticated (and fun) enough for demanding adults.

A great game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 18 / 18
Date: November 11, 2004
Author: Amazon User

If you liked the old impression city builders you will love this one too! Amazing graphics of your city now fully in 3D so you can walk with your people on a leisure stroll or look at them while they do every days work. You can here them talk as there are more than a thousand lines in the game!

You can do so many great things like building pyramids with a totally new infrastructure system that doesn't need roads. In the older games you only had the walkers to upkeep the infrastructure but now you got famalies with three people in each and a lot of them and all these people will struggel every day for food and goods they need.

At first this gameplay seems a bit strange but if you play it a bit you will easy attach and will see that it is very interesting to layout a city that doen't depend on roads like in the old games but on a more flutend structure this time.

You can build fantastic monuments and wage war aggainst opponents on the world map and by this achieve great your place in egyptian history!

I do very like this game and play it every day as it offers me every time something new.

"Pharoah/Cleopatra" by Sierra is better

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 93 / 104
Date: November 14, 2004
Author: Amazon User

"Immortal Cities" is designed by Chris Beatrice, who also designed "Pharoah/Cleopatra". This game does have stunning 3D graphics. The animations are nice. The interface is a little less than perfect. But the biggest problem, in my opinion, is gameplay speed: even on the fast speed, gameplay is slow. I sat around twidling my thumbs a lot while waiting for enough stored food or stored bricks (or other resources) so that some project or building could begin. I have a 2GHz machine, and turned down the graphics quality etc, but the game is not an action-packed game. "Pharoah/Cleopatra" had more ability to keep my interest despite the more cartoony graphics. The manual gives a good introduction to the game, and the in-game help is great.

You can trade resources in this game, but each trade partner city only offers one resource, unlike "Pharoah/Cleopatra" where multiple trade items were available in each city. There are also only 5 games to the campaign instead of the dozens of campaign levels in "Pharoah/Cleopatra". The characters do have lots of silly little lines as they talk to each other, but that gets old pretty quick and you'll turn them off. I wouldn't compare this game to "The Sims" at all .. you have no control over specifically what each person says or does. The best you can do is toggle a specialty. Yes there are families, but the wife basically does the shopping, the kid gathers resources, and the father creates the resources. In the end, this is still a "walker" kind of game .. the priest walks from his home to go shopping, then goes to the temple or hospital to perform his services, etc...essentially the same as "Pharaoh/Cleopatra". The AI routines for the little people are nice, which is good because you'll be spending a lot of time watching the people while you wait for other things to happen. You do a lot of watching, which makes the game less exciting.

Minimum System specs: Pentium 3 - 800MHz or higher. Windows 98/2000/ME/XP. 128MB RAM. 1.1Gigabytes uncompressed harddrive space. DirectX 9.0b compatible video card with 32MB memory and compatible sound card with 16bit sound.

Recommended specs: Pentium 4 - 2.0GHz processor. 512MB RAM. 64MB video card with full DirectX9.0 support.

The game is rated "E" for Mild Violence. The violence comes from two sources: fighting and killing the wild animals that attack, and fighting and killing the human raiders or enemies.

Overall, this game might be interesting to pre-teens or those who never played "Pharoah/Cleopatra". Despite the 3D graphics, I would recommend that you not waste your money on this game ... instead go get a copy of "Pharoah" by Sierra (ASIN B00002CF9G).

surprisingly cool

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 20 / 20
Date: November 15, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Picked this up over the weekend after gamestop ran out of RCT3. I have to admit that I've been surprised by what I first thought was just going to be simcity egypt. After going through the tutorials (good luck if you don't), it's easy enough to get a sizeable city going, but building pyramids requires planning and strategy, which I've found to be challenging and fun.
The depth of gameplay here is really refreshing. Although it can take a while to see results with some of your larger projects, I spend most of my time zooming through the city and figuring out what's happening on the street level--like a huge ant farm. I didn't play Pharoah, but I'm already pretty deep into this one. Graphics are great--not Unreal3 or anything--but perfect for this style of game.

Children of the Nile is a good game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: December 13, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I heard that people were having trouble understanding the recently released game Children of the Nile, so i got it to see what all the fuss was about. Immediately, I noticed the immense complexity of this game, with its almost esoteric understandings of how a real city is maintained: the wide selection of buildings and societies to construct, the connection between economy and the seasons, and the self-sustaining animated people that roam around your city shouting out their likes and gripes about how you're running the place, all make this game seem almost real. Although this makes the game seem frustrating and overwhelming, it can be easily digested by just simplifying it all in your head. I.E.: Don't try building the pyramid as soon as you control a stable civilization, carefully plan ahead: Do I have enough supplies to build it? Do I have enough workers to build it? Will I have enough supplies after the construction is complete? Etc.
I enjoyed this game very much, with no real difficulties in the tutorials and the first campaign. It's true, this is a hard game, but it wouldn't be much if it were easy. It has all the real life components in running a city, which separates itself from other games such as Age of Empires and Commanding Conquerors, which are so concentrated on fighting and destroying other cities that they leave out the key ingredients to a good real time game: the actual city. No doubt most of the readers have played one of the SimCity games. Just apply the skills from that game to this new awesome version of those games set in ancient Egypt. I don't think it can get much simpler.

Expansive and Time-consuming

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: December 14, 2004
Author: Amazon User

i decided to go out and buy Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile because I am a big fan of Pharaoh and Cleopatra. I believed it might have some resemblance to these older games, but it really does not. This game is very time-consuming and very slow. The graphics are excellent and it is really interesting to follow characters around. THere are so many new things to do. You have to build certain buildings to build pyramids and they take a lot of time to build. Also, prestige is very important and how to keep your people happy is different from Pharaoh. Overall, I really enjoy the game but it takes a lot of time. I encourage everyone to try it because it is fun and even educational.

Maximum system requirements are recommended!!!!!!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 12
Date: December 16, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I just got this game so I haven't actually played it much. BUT I wanted to report that it was quite difficult to even get it to play on my P3 system (xp w/ 256ram) & I have read that others have the same problem. It seems that the minimum system requirements are really too low to play the game at it's best. So, if you don't have a P4 2.0 ghz with at least 512 mb of Ram, you may have to tweak your computer a bit (close out all running programs & maximize your performance, minimize appearance) as well as the computer game (drop the music & lower graphic quality), otherwise the game may not run at all or work well.
As it is right now, I am finally able to use the program & I am quite satisfied with the reduced graphics but I am honestly not very interested in those aspects of this game. I am an Impressions fan, interested in the depth of the city-building concepts rather than graphics/3d,etc. So, if you are hoping for awesome graphics & music you will have to have the maximum requirements for this game.
It does appear to be a very fun game, it seems to be quite different from the Impressions city building games though. At first glance it reminds me a lot of the Tropico or Sim series' rather than Pharoah, Caesar & Emperor.

Fun game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 10
Date: December 31, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Game speed is slow its not the computers its just how the game is. If you would build more brick buildings, and bakeries everything runs fine.... i dont like the fact that the maps are smaller then in pharoh and in ceaser. The fact that the game is like "sims" is true. You do not control what they do you have to have respect in the game, if you dont then they dont do things for you. I Like the game alot and i think that if you like ancient egypt then get it. But if you do not like ancient egypt i would not recommend it to you. Awesome graphics on a scale of 1-10 i would give it a 9 and interface is a 7 ( kinda of difficult to figure out the game at first) speed 4 ( slower then other games becuase the "sims" have to have respect for you. Overall i would say a 8.

Good for youngsters, but too slow for most

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 47 / 48
Date: January 07, 2005
Author: Amazon User

In the style of the many city-building games that came before it, Children of the Nile lets you create homes, shops and estates in classic Egypt.

First, I am a huge fan of city building games in general. I have spent countless hours laying out roads, adding in plazas, watching with glee as the homes upgraded and the people became more and more happy.

I do have to say that the graphics in this game are pretty impressive. You can zoom out to an overview level to watch your city's progress, or zoom in to such a level that you can see the individual flowers. Each home, person and land formation is clear and identifiable.

However, the gameplay itself is extremely slow. I have very high end systems here so it's not that my system was "slow". It's just that the gameplay *is* slow. You request something, and then sit around for quite a while waiting for it to happen.

Adding to the sense of time going slowly is the game clock. It isn't even ticking by day after day. It ticks by *minute by minute* which makes little sense for a game that spans years. You have three seasons, and a certain number of days per season. The minutes going by make it seem sim-like, but of course the actual timeline doesn't quite make sense.

As far as the AI goes, this game goes for the family approach. Each household has a male, female and child. The male tends to do whatever the "job" of the household is (farming, making bricks, etc). The woman has to go out from shop to shop, buying household necessities. In some homes she also has to do the crafts. The child either helps with work, or runs off to school.

The game is pretty straightforward in its chain of commerce. You put the brick maker near the clay. You put the brick layer partway between the brick maker and where the brick homes will be built. You build shops nearby so the wives don't have to go far to shop.

I realize that the game has to be slow for beginners, but even the fastest speed still trudges along at a crawl. If you really set it on the slowest setting, you could go eat lunch before anything began to happen! Zooming in and out of every part of your town only keeps you occupied for so long.

Recommended for younger players who are fine with a very slow pace, but for most players this is just going to be too tedious. Small maps, few campaigns, and long, long waits between action.

More involved economy, game play, and prestige

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 39 / 40
Date: January 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Includes: Campaign with 15 scenarios, several free play “sand box” scenarios, and 3 stand alone (combat heavy) scenarios “Sheshonq’s Redemption”, “The Hyksos Pharaoh” and “Son of Ra”. Also includes a seriously complex editor that can even take geophysical terrain maps (they’re free on the internet) and use them for your scenarios. There is an active community already making new scenarios that you can download over the internet for free.

102 items in your economy that your people can harvest, make and sell. Active night and day cycle as well as the seasons effect the landscape. Different social classes. The most difficult to obtain workers are educated elites (ie people who can read and write, enabling them to work at a distance without supervision), but the most productive.

Very complex World Map. The Hard scenarios trade multiple items per city but if you play only the easy scenarios you’ll only see one item per trade partner.

After you get the farming and goods economy going in your city you start to actively build monuments: Pyramids, Mastabas, Obelisks, Stellas and many statues (Of course Sphinxes. I like the Bast statues best myself) that increase your prestige. For the easy scenarios you can ignore building monuments and still win… but your city will then be boring and you’ll twiddle your thumbs a lot with nothing to do, and never achieve any prestige as a Pharaoh.

You want to build pyraminds and other monuments to make yourself famous, but also because they just look great placed in your city. The graphics at ground level are just gorgeous, and taking a screenshot for the web is just hitting cntl-F9 at any time. There are many, many gorgeous pictures of the Moon rising over Pyramids or the sun setting in a red sky behind tall Obelisks (think building multiple Washington Monuments in a line) on the Tilted Mill web site from players. Your Nobles also want tombs for their eternal rest, so building a creepy sprawling necropolis is part of what keeps your people happy. Egypt without tombs isn’t Egypt.

The battle scenarios are pretty clearly marked, but this is no twitch game requiring a 12 year old’s reflexes. Equipping, training and supporting an army is significantly more expensive than just raising a village of farmers happy to own bed mats. And the new editor allows realistic reasons why you’d want to raise an army: Their success or failure actually changes the world economy. Enemies build forts, raid cities, close trade routes to important goods like gold and turquoise mines. But combat is optional (Absent really form the Easy scenarios) and often the storylines also allow another way to succeed (in “Pi-Ramses” a timely bribe to an enemy army captain keeps you from having to fight) Also the lockstep one battle one city limitations of Pharaoh are gone. Winning a battle can set multiple triggers at once –defeating an enemy can mean a whole new frontier of cities to explore opening up, multiple new trade partners suddenly appearing, or sometimes just multiple new sections of the map appearing that need to be explored by your Envoys. The easy scenario Djedu is silly but still a likeable favorite –your build a fleet of ships in Lebanon to sail out west to the Atlantic, circumnavigate Africa, and eventually return by the Red Sea, At each stop they make they discover new trading partners who then join your economy.

The free demo is helpful for getting used to the yummy 3D view and how to navigate through the game, but it suffers (as all tutorials do) from leading you by the nose in a very business like way of teaching you how to use the controls. The actual game is fun. The demo… is about teaching you how to play the game, and not 10% as fun as the full game.

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