1. PascalG.

   10

   Imho one of the best city-builders on the market...just perfect to relax after a long day of work...which is right now.

   • Helpful?

     2 of 2 users said yes
2. [ANONYMOUS]

   9

   Very nice graphics, Good gameplay, Interesting features and historical notes. Good game!

   • Helpful?

     2 of 2 users said yes
3. RobH.

   2

   There's nothing particularly innovative or exciting about this game. I'm a big fan of city-builders but this does nothing to improve on what's already out there, and in many ways is actually worse. At best, it feels like I’m playing something from the 1990s with marginally better graphics. Building placement is simply about putting squarish building blocks parallel to each other on a perfectly flat green field around an arbitrary grid pattern. Each building type looks identical to every other building of the same type, which is particularly unfortunate as there aren’t all that many unique buildings to start with. Mines are even worse, as they can only be placed against a pre-existing pile of rocks or two like Lego with no flexibility about placement at all. To achieve the pinnacle of annoying arbitrariness, however, we can’t go past aqueducts. Aqueducts are enormous structures that literally tower over every other building on the map. They look ugly and take up huge tracts of what would otherwise be productive building land. Furthermore, aqueducts emerge from enormous fantasy-style medieval towers, usually emerging inexplicably from the dead center of a plain. The water ‘flows’ more like electricity than water, defying gravity and common sense on the way. On arrival to a city the water miraculously teleports to wells often several spaces away. In a bizarrely backwards move, there is no clear disadvantage to building anything anywhere, for example, a mansion will sit comfortably next to a brickworks without a peep from the inhabitants - there is only marginal 'desirability modeling' (is there a statue nearby? If so arbitrarily increase neighborhood desirability... blah). In fact, the only consideration behind building placement is to ensure that workplaces are close enough to houses to ensure that workers don't have to walk too far to get there. Under no circumstances will the inhabitants build anything for themselves, other than to ‘upgrade’ their houses as more goods become available. Whenever you need to build an outpost to ensure that workers are close to a distant resource, virtually every other single piece of infrastructure needs to be built as well to support them, forcing you to create mini-settlements all over the map with temples, schools, taverns, etc. It's all insanely annoying. Slaves are used for only one thing - shifting goods around, and you have no capacity to order them to do anything. Resource collection is particularly basic and unimaginative – collect wood, then bricks, then stone, blah, blah, blah. You have no capacity to innovate production at all, and there are no research trees. This means that every single new scenario starts off exactly the same way almost every single time. The military interface is also insanely tedious, for example, you can't select units by drawing a box around everything and moving the lot, instead, you must select and order each unit separately. I could go on, but suffice to say this game is a throwback, and the marginally positive reviews it has received to date are entirely inexplicable.… Expand

   • Helpful?

     0 of 1 users said yes

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