Improved from Caesar 3 and still way above Zeus and Empire. This game will make you go through the building of the Egyptian empire, going through some of the best challenges in the history of the city builders. With the extention, you will be able to spend more than a 100 hours finishing all the missions. There is still an active community, if you like city builders, this game is a must-play.
This game has great inspiration from Banished. If you played it, you will recognize, the resource gathering and structure building system. On the other hand, even if it is also a city builder/survival game, the atmosphere is way darker. You will have to face some of the challenges by managing Hope and Discontent by fulfilling citizens requests or by applying law. The law system is the greatest feature of this game. Indeed, you will have to choose laws and rules, that are sometimes helpful and often controversial. This will influence greatly your gameplay and how you will manage the needs of the citizens. There are, for the moment, 3 scenarios. Even in medium, you will have to replay them at least a second time. This game is not easy and you can get entangled way to your defeat due to bad management. The issue is that there is no randomness in the scenarios, meaning that the first time, it is hard. The second time, you will normally succeed. The 3rd and 4th time, will just be a re-do without any changed. (the weather, the events are scripted and happened always in the same order at the same time). To pump up the life of the game, you could play the first scenario by altering the way of the Faith or of the Order. Even if there are few differences, the impact on the gameplay is fairly similar. Also, the maps are alway the same (resources and layout is the same, again no random). I would love to see in an update where the resources and the weather modification occurs differently even if the doomsday is fixed. Where if you survive the deadlines of each scenario, a score can be attributed to you depending on your descisions, left resources, difficulty and helps provided to other colonies. This could come with new scenarios. For the price and the potential of this game I would totally recommend if to city builder and survival sim lovers.
I finished the game in titan mode the equivalent of hard from Caesar 3 and Pharaoh. I have to admit that I am a bit disappointed. This game was more a puzzle game rather than a city builder. Because the comparison is inevitable with C3 and Pharaoh, here it is: In Pharaoh, your city could collapse from its size or mismanagement of the resources, the fact that some of the missions are so long, you also have to manage your population scheme and trend to avoid birth rate issue. Here in Zeus, eventhough the improvement such as the military and the delivery system is a nice change, the trading system is just complex for no reason, having to build 1 building per partner is just eating space, which is sparse on some maps. This comes to my final comment, where this game is more a puzzle than a city builder. You have to imagine not having enough space and carefully planning your buildings because at one point, you will be forced to build a gigantic temple. Building the cities is nowhere near difficult, it is massively easy even in hard mode but the lack of space makes it just scratch your head on where to place what. My cities never collapsed, I had no issue with population birth schemes and money wise it was a peace of cake. I lack the difficulty from Pharaoh, it is too bad that they do not combine the features but I still recommend to do the game if you plan on doing the sierra series but for me Pharaoh still is the best.
I played this game when I was young and then forgot about it. Then it was advertised to me that it was ported on modern machines. I did not blink an eye before buying this title. If you like city-builders this game is a must have. Some AI decisions are irrational at best but are due to designs and well-known by the community (e.g. market traders). Once you understand those mechanics, you are all set to build your own great roman city. The game has its challenge in its story mode where you go through assignments on managing and growing different roman cities throughout the empire. The in-game wiki let you have a glimpse on roman history as well. I spent 50 hours playing by selecting only military assignment in the campaign. Indeed, at a certain point you have to choose between peaceful or military missions. This means that I could re-do a career and select only the peaceful part raising up the playing time to nearly 80 hours (I guess I'll be quicker on specific mechanics). To conclude, with only the mechanics and the game atmosphere, you should try this game.
