There's plenty of other great reviews that go into the great and not-so-great things about this game, so I'll try to keep this short: -Great things: • Highly variable party design & skill choices • Intuitive, yet deep turn-based combat system • Slick UI and nicely crafted graphic elements / art style • Meaningful inventory and item system • Non-linear exploration is rewarded, worldbuilding and regions well designed • Just-right amount of difficulty -Not-so-great things: • The game heavily rewards min/maxing, and can feel like this is required at times, especially on higher difficulties • Skill, stat and party system is not intuitive, highly recommended to read some guides beforehand or you can screw your party over in the late game without realizing it • Game adds ~20-30 hours of tedium to grind and clear monster areas for that oh-so-precious XP • The "Chance to hit" percentage indiciator does lie to you unless the enemy is stunned. The RNG isn't as terrible as say, Mordheim, but expect to watch 5 characters with 85% to hit all miss in a row on a regular basis (0.0076%) probability yeah right) Despite the faults, I'm having a blast playing this, and is a wonderul "updated" old-school RPG.
This is definitely my favorite of all the Sierra City-Builder Series (2nd fav would be Pharaoh). One of the biggest changes from the previous installments comes in the form of residential neighborhood walls and pass-through gates, so now you can actually design a city without having to resort to cheesy snake neighborhoods or roadblock mazes to reach those highest of residential house types. The classic city-builder gameplay is all here: gather food, set up markets, produce base resources to use for higher level resources to sell, trade away surplus and import needs depending on each scenario type, build great wonders, build friendships and alliances with neighboring towns, worship different deities and get their avatars to show up in your town and bless structures. Scenario missions start small and gradually work their way up to complex city building missions, many times you'll revisit past cities you've made and have to improve them further. The music is excellent, quotes from the populace are spot-on and occasionally hilarious and you do get a pretty decent education in Chinese history at the same time. The only weak point of this game is one that it shares with all the other Sierra City-Builders: the combat sucks. But who plays these games for the combat? I highly recommend this game to anyone looking for some excellent city-building and management gameplay. I might buy this just to have a digital copy... I've still been using my original CD (which still works on Windows 10, so I imagine this version should be just fine).
