Zeus + Poseidon (Acropolis)

I had an old CD version of this classic game that I loved as a teenager, but I just couldn't get it to open successfully in Windows 10. This version does work perfectly though :)

Has replayability value after more than 15 years for me. It's slightly easier than Pharaoh, but the gameplay, graphics and the overall user experience here is much better. The RTS part is very simple, almost not mention-worthy, but the city building and economics part is yet to be bested. It can even teach you something about old greek legends!

I have played a lot of city builders in my time: Caesar Series, Pharaoh+Cleopatra, Tropico Series, Sim City Series, Banished, etc. However, I always find myself coming back to Zeus even in 2015. The reason being is you rarely feel that you just need to sit and wait for whatever to finish building, resources to stock pile to whatever goal, or just for your town to get populated to build the next building. Path finding is excellent especially when pathing is used in conjunction with road blocks to keep walkers were they need to be and those who need to pass through do. The plot is entertaining no matter what story you choose to play. If you are looking for a great city builder with excellent models this is it, it blows things like Children of the Nile and Banished out of the water in terms of graphics even though is is quite a dated game. I cannot speak for the gameplay variance of Children of the Nile vs. Zeus as I have not played it, but I have seen it's garbage for graphics and would pick Zeus any day to look at something prettier. I hope this helps you make your choice.

I was extremely pleased to find this gem has been resurrected from the dust of games past! I can't even begin to tell you the number of hours I've spent playing this game! It's reminiscent to your classic SimCity game, in that the objective of the game is to build up a city that people want to live and prosper in. The gameplay is made more robust by a series of adventures which you play through, each adventure consisting of several episode goals. These goals may range from relatively simple things (e.g. get a thousand people to live in your city, produce a certain quantity of olive oil), to more complicated quests (e.g. defeat Medusa by coaxing Perseus to your city). Some episodes allow you to expand the influence of your "home" city by establishing a colony somewhere else in the known world (naturally limited to the Mediterranean area). Throughout the gameplay, the denizens of Olympus aid (or interfere) with the development of your city. By building temples to certain gods, you are afforded preferential treatment from those deities, offering you aid in time of war (Ares) or blessing your wineries so that they produce more wine for the city's consumption or for trade (Dionysus). You&'ll soon discover, though, that gods make fickle friends. An angry Poseidon will unleash his kraken upon your fisheries, or a scorned Aphrodite will waltz down the streets of your city, enticing your workers to leave their droll tasks behind and form a congo line behind her (toga, toga, toga!) as she convinces them to leave your city. I've played and replayed this game many times over the years, and I still find it to be quite entertaining. The program does crash now and then, but really, what software doesn't crash now and then? The nice thing is that there is an autosave feature built into the game, so even in the event of a crash, you're usually only out about five minutes of gameplay. Annoying, perhaps, but not a catastrophe. There's also an adventure editor that comes along with the game, which allows you to build your own adventure (create episodes, episode goals, allies, rivals, you name it) and share it with your friends. I've not used the editor much, though, since I'd be the only one playing them. The times I've messed with it though, it was a little tedious to work with. But then again, when you have complete control over building an adventure, the process would be tedious anyway. It's hard to rate graphics on a game like this; typically your run-of-the-mill sim game relies more on gameplay than eyecandy to drive it along. That being said, the graphics amuse me. Each building has it's own slight animation that gives it character (the frat-house aire of the College makes me chuckle). The game won't wow you with graphics, but again, keep in mind that this game has been out for several years, and the industry has definitely changed. I would rate the graphics as average, overall. The ambient sounds of the city also amuse me. Each street-wanderer of the city has one or two quips if you click on them as they walk about. The various buildings of your city will add ambient sounds to the city when they're on-screen (my wife particularly likes the "I have come down from Mount Olympus" cry whenever a Theatre is on-screen). All in all, the sounds are fun, and while it would be completely possible to play the game without sound turned on at all, there would definitely be something lost in the gameplay without it. So if you're looking for a SimCity-esque game and you don't mind the occasional angry deity showing up and unleashing their two-headed dog on you, then this is definitely a game for you!

i've been trying to get my disc of this to work for years now, looked around steam earlier for this and it led me here. This was my favorite game from my childhood and i am looking forward to playing many more hours on it