I was someone who played this game as a kid and really loved it, however, upon replaying it, its flaws really do show. Whilst the art style, voices and mechanics are promising, the game is really dragged down by how honestly stupid the pathfinding ai of pretty much all major areas are. If you try and build a city like you would build a normal city, with blocks, residential areas, industrial areas etc you will fail time and time again and everything will be clogged. Dockyards in particular are notoriously bad and clog up all the time. If a house runs out of pottery for two seconds because the bazaar ai forgets to pick some up-Whole regions become slums. Military is mindnumbingly stupid with 3 enemies often beating entire companies of experienced soldiers. Whilst there are lots of ways of dealing with these problems, as demonstrated by the anorak pharaoh pros, my key issue with this is they invole making OCD inducing rigid squares, making the city building experience incredibly tedious, formulaic and repetitive. More importantly, you are now being forced to build the city in a way to offset the horrific shortcomings of the game. I've played this game loads of times, had fun, but enough is enough. If you like playing a game with one of the worst ais in history-Go ahead.
