Nebuchadnezzar is a classic isometric city builder game inviting players to experience the mysterious history and culture of ancient Mesopotamia. In the campaign, players get to rule over influential historical cities filled with magnificent monuments.GameplayFrom plowing fields to creating products...
Nebuchadnezzar is a classic isometric city builder game inviting players to experience the mysterious history and culture of ancient Mesopotamia. In the campaign, players get to rule over influential historical cities filled with magnificent monuments.
Gameplay
From plowing fields to creating products, players must oversee the manufacturing of agriculture and goods for the city population. Players have an arsenal of tools to optimize their objectives. In addition, a maximum overview of their city helps players to solve problems and prevent population loss. Nebuchadnezzar’s gameplay is geared towards all types of players: from beginners of the genre to experienced strategists.
Campaign
Nebuchadnezzar’s main campaign contains 16 historical missions covering the colonization of ancient lands to the conquest of Babylon by Persians in 6th Century BC. Each mission summons a different time period in Ancient Mesopotamian history. Players must carry out tasks important to the specific time and place of each mission, including the construction of historical monuments.
Monuments
During the campaign players will not only build complex ancient monuments, but design them too. Nebuchadnezzar features an in-game “monument editor” giving players complete control over their buildings. From structural design to color scheme to final details: it’s in the hands of the player. Will you recreate history or make history? It’s up to you.
Mods & Localization
Nebuchadnezzar was created with mods and localization in mind. Modders will be able to create their own buildings, goods, and monuments. And in addition, they can invent new missions and campaigns. All definition files are written in the easy to read Lua language. Localizing mods will not be a problem. You can create mods in multiple languages and/or add languages to existing ones. This applies to the base game as well.
Not an easy game, you cant just plop your building and let everything run.
I'm up to about level 6 of the game, March 2021, version 1.015 Currently played around 30 hours.
There is limited building area, limited resources and you have to get the production chains set in order.
Grow a peasant population, which builds a professional workforce whom support further growth of the peasants - and then get aristocracy (who are jewellers etc.).
Similar to Ceasar, but much better on modern computers. Similar to Banished in the tight logistics action.
Historical setting, but with light story elements and the models of course - but far from a university course in the ancients.
Monument building is light, but fun, not taxing but with some variation.
I think its really great, but you have to like logistics and non-combat. The challenge is in the micro-management.
I loved the Impressions games as much as anyone, and I came into this fairly optimistic. There are actually a few robust systems here that iron out some of the annoying kinks from those, but the entire game is let down by the fact that it's almost impossible to lose.
There's no regular cash outflow outside of import costs, so there's no pressure to build early surplus production and scramble around for trade routes. You can't overinvest in military spending partly because you don't pay any wages and partly because there's no military. You can't overcommit to a specific trade good because there isn't a financial cost to producing untradeable surplus, it just sits in your warehouses while someone else pays your workers to pick their noses.
In general, things only go up in this game. Your treasury only ever grows, your population will always hit a steady state at a certain level of investment and quietly hand you money until you can invest more, and there's no unforseen even that will wipe out a chunk of your city. Your prestige rating can go down if you reduce trade volume, but since things only ever go up there's rarely any reason to. This isn't a good thing - it means there's no puzzle to solve in each mission, so you end up building the same city over and over. It's fun enough to figure out, but once you know the mechanics there's no requirement to actually use them.
Now this is a very basic city builder, and every round feels the same, just one new thing added on top,
if you played anno 1604 on the Commodore 64...you would have found more developed gameplay.
Your city is not able to develop without trade, some stuff will only be available if you buy it. You need that stuff to reach the map requirements. Since it's all about reaching the stage were you can trade for the final goods, you will have longer rounds, all you do is repeat the basic work leading to the "end game"
Since there is nothing happening in the meantime, the game can get pretty boring. You pretty much look at the map, have an idea how the finished city would look like, start building your first basic ressource production and housing, and just build those monuments to gain the prestige needed to get trade ready. This part is entertaining enough for the first three rounds, after that it gets tedious
There are so many things I find ridiculous and show just how little thought was put into this:
Your peasents tier1 upgrades need milk and bread, tier2 needs water...yeah, that just seems wrong.
You need to connect your buildings to the street, don't worry, aside from the houses that need a connections to the edge of the map, everything else is fine as long as there is any road fragment connected to the building, it doesn't need to be connected with anything else to satisfy the game, have some isolated farm, connect is with an isolated storage, and who knows how your workers ever got there.
Workers have to carry any ressource from production to a storage and from there to the workshop or the sales station, and their really tiny range is the thing that's really limiting you all the time.
The only way to get money is through trade, no taxes in a city like this. So you need to get your trade started at some point or you run out of money.
Overall, there isn't much going on here, it just feels like burning time.
There is a passion here in wanting to replicate what was done in the old impressions games, a old school city buildig games where you build houses streets and creat lines of productions to make the houses evolve into big elite houses, good, but at same time you can feel the lack of polishing the lack of the features that made impression games so good to play.
Nebuchadnezzar is not a bad game, but clearly need more polishing and features, right now is enough to make me play the main short story campaign (serious its short and only have one campaign while in the other games we had many campaigns) but once finish i will just go back to the old impression games.
