Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom

Compared to Zeus separated agriculture fields where you can plant different plants with different harvest time add lot of depth to food management. Also internal walls and gates for dividing city to districts are great addition.

I've played Zeus/Poseidon, Pharaoh/Cleopatra, and one of the early Caesars, and this was the city-builder I liked best. I even prefer it to 3D variants like Children of the Nile. I liked the choice of heroes to summon, which you can tailor to your goals, be they war or peace. Getting perfect feng shui via proper building placement is an interesting challenge once you master the basics (though not possible on every map). The walker gates give much better control than is possible with any of the others, though if you don't construct one of the standard loop configurations, you can run into the classic problem of an inspector going preferentially in one direction and missing some structure that's technically within reach. That, plus the need to placate the heroes periodically, makes it impossible to just let the game run to completion when you get everything set up the way you want. But this was a minor issue for me, since running at high speed and watching the workers build your monuments is often fun enough on its own. As with many strategy games, there is an active user community at heavengames that produces interesting scenarios once you finish the campaign, though most are aimed at the highest level of difficulty.

This is a wonderful city build game! I played it 16 years ago. It helped me to learn the wonderful history of China. I love it. So I bought it again when I see it is in GOG. But the GOG version does not support Chinese language. And my old version have Chinese language. I really want it to have Chinese language support, as it is Emperor: Rise of China :)

My mom bought me this game when I was 10 years old, back around 2004. I've played it on PC and now I have it on my macbook. I love it so much. Teaches you some history, the cities you build can actually look very beautiful. And the campaign creator.... that's quite the beast. You can just completely create new campaigns ground-up, down to the very specifics like which commodities cities can trade and at what rate. I'd recommend this to anyone who loves city builders. Even though it's kinda old, it's still great. I'll probably continue playing this for years!!

This is an excellent builder. i first spent ages on this back in 2005-2008, but rediscovered the affection for it lately. I am not going to elaborate hugely as most of the pros have been said by other reviewers - the art, mechanics and style is absolutely top notch and immersive for anyone looking for an easy relaxing single player strat. The only con I can highlight is the issue with armies control, units sometimes tend to go against the orders and engage the enemy when you don't want them to. But even this is far from enough to make me question the quality of the experience. 4.75/5