So my adventures with Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile come to a close.
I have enjoyed not only playing the game, but writing about it as well. Articles about other city-building games might devolve into discussions about the mathematical benefits of building object A over object B, but CotN is different. It does have the same mathematical basis, but you never see it. You don’t have 200 citizens, you have the Great Pharaoh, noble farmers, ignoble Nobles, Beb the city guard, you have souls.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, today is not over yet. First a quick word on performance. Throughout this week I didn’t have a single crash, until today. I had two in a row. Despite that I still think that this is a very stable game, on maximum settings the FPS does start to suffer once your city grows, but it never reached unplayability.
The trouble I was heading into yesterday passed when I got a second Priest, more soon followed. This along with me placing several more shrines and a hospital seemed to alleviate the majority of peoples problems. The protests got smaller and smaller. Disaster averted. Things soon stabilised, and due to the large amount of farmers food was not a problem, however that could be about to change.
The purpose of this play through was to explore the military aspects of the game, at present I only had three houses of soldiers and a Commander, they were set to city guard and they needed to stay that way. I needed to build more barracks. Before I placed them I noticed that the current guards had worship complaints, they wanted to worship Set, god of conflict and strife.
I haven’t said anything about the gods, that’s because they’re annoying. Unlike Caesar 3 (probably Pharaoh and Zeus as well, but I haven’t played them) the gods don’t play an active role, they might offer some kind of small bonus, but nothing I have noticed. So really, it’s just to keep your people happy, which they never are. There are fourteen in total, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Ra, Hathor, Amun, Ptah, Thoth, Anubis, Bast, Sobek, Ma’at, Set and Hapi. You don’t need a place of worship for each of them, but the more important ones (Osiris, Ra, Hapi) are wanted regularly. One of the gods is also a city Patron, you definitely need this one, whoever it is. In my last game it was Ptah and people were constantly complaining about access to him. Different groups of people also have specific gods they worship, I’ve mentioned Set for guards and soldiers, Isis is particularly popular among the farmers wives, Horus is the god of Elite men, the Nobles particularly like him. The main places of worship you will build are Shrines: These small buildings are great for specific worship requirements as they are easy to fit in between other buildings. The two bigger places, Templesand Cult Temples are much more difficult to place, and unless you start out with a specific plan for them (something I’ve neglected in both games), they often end up too far away. Shrines must be dedicated to a specific god, Temples and Cult Temples can function as a general place of worship, but they can also be dedicated. Shrines are easy, just select the god from the list and it’s setup, Temples and Cult Temples however require a statue to become dedicated.
I hired more soldiers and set some of them to join my new army. You can select any one of three types of soldier for your army:
Spearmen and Archers need to be trained at a training camp, by a Commander. Charioteers are ready as soon as they get their chariot. Chariots are built out of Cedar wood, so your going to need to start importing some if you want Charioteers.
Raiders started appearing on the map soon after. They arrive in a small group, then proceed to steal from various houses. Any houses that are raided start showing that they are having security problems. As if it wasn’t bad enough losing food and Luxury items, your citizens also become unhappy, unsettling the balance of your city. My city guards did a good job of dealing with them, even if it was sometimes when they were leaving. To help them I decided to setup some guard posts. The Raiders were attacking from the edge of the map, and were attacking the left and top of my city. So I put one post on the corner, then two down the sides like this:
This would mean that there would hopefully be a guard in the general vicinity of anymore Raiders. Soldiers will attack Raiders, but they don’t patrol like City Guards, so they only get involved if they happen to be moving through the area at the time. It was time I started fighting back, in the tips tab (included with all scenarios) it mentioned that you could pay the Raiders off so they would stop attacking for a time. I hadn’t known this, and right now my Guards were doing such a good job that I didn’t see any point, even if I had got the gold and gems they wanted. The Raiders camps started appearing on the World Map one by one as outside information slowly flowed in. The tips also mentioned a permanent solution, I thought this would involved attacking the points on the Map, but I couldn’t see the option to. I guess their main camp will appear eventually and I can attack that. To transport your Army around the World Map, you need a Commander allocated to the Navy. Once you have one, providing you have a Shipwright and some Cedar, a Warship will be built. Then you can transport your Army to certain places on the World Map. Yesterday I had started running into problems due to lack of villagers. Villagers are people who don’t belong to your city, they live off the land. When you build new houses they come to fill them up, running out meant that my new buildings weren’t being filled and my cities growth was being stunted. Today the problem built to catastrophic proportions. Here I have selected all the farms: The little gold box above selected buildings shows their contentment, the black ones mean no-one is living there. Less than a third of the houses were filled, that means no farmers to produce food. When I started today, there was so much food that the granary was filled to the top, it was now empty and people were only just making enough food to keep going. What with my newly created soldier contingent, food was becoming a major issue.
I decided that concrete action was required, I had already finished one of the projects outlined in the scenario requirements. I thought if I could complete the other construction that had just appeared on the map I could bring the game to a close before the city imploded. People were becoming more and more dissatisfied, and soon my Commanders all left. This meant that if I was supposed to attack the Raiders, I wasn’t going to be able to send my troops. Things were not looking good.
Remember that Warship from earlier? Well with all my Commanders gone, including the one assigned to Navy, it was just sitting there unused and more importantly unguarded. Time was running out, food was running low, people were getting angry, it was time to make a run for it. My guiding hand was of no use to the starving citizens, new lands of opportunity awaited and a fresh start to get things right lay ahead.
That brings CotN week to a close. Little could have I expected at the start that I would complete my project ahead of schedule, and that my second one would end so badly. I’ve covered a lot, and yet there is still so much more of the game I haven’t mentioned.
If you feel my conclusion was a cop-out, that I cheated you out of an interesting story of grand city-building in Ancient Egyptian times, then you are right. Worry not weary readers, next week the fun continues, right now I need a rest. I’ll be covering several items over the next few days, but the week after promises to be lots of fun, as I shall once again dedicate myself to a single game. I won’t spoil the surprise, but I will just say that I’ll be getting back into one of my favourite games of all time…
Sorry this one was a bit late.
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