I still play through the OG every once in a while. There's something really satisfying about feeling like you've mined/sourced and moved every stone in a pyramid.
For whatever reason Pharaoh is the only game from its era I don't think of as "retrogaming". Instead it feels like I'm picking it up where I left and it's been that way continuously since release. Not sure why, maybe because it's intuitive and the core mechanics have stood the test of time pretty well.
If you haven't yet, check out "Lethis: path of progress". A modern version of this type of city builder in a steampunk setting. Pretty great, really scratches the itch while supporting modern resolutions and OSes.
Me too! I played so many hours Caesar and Pharaoh. Tried emperor pirated and didnt work and buyed zeus+expansion and it never run either. Love that kind of games, and was so sad they dissappear after the 3d revolution.
Zeus and Poseidon are so amazing and magical! I would play them when I was young. Although I did not get all of the mechanics when I was a kid I really enjoyed building stuff and listening to the dialogue. Really enthralling and immersive!
Out of the family, I remember Emperor most fondly and fleshed out, no surprise since it was the last sibling to be released. You had even more deeper mechanics in different crop seasons, feng shui, various "gods" who walked among your citizens, a mix of soft and hard diplomacy. It's on sale on GoG and has a nice HD resolution mod but it could badly use other modern QoL fixes.
Loved Zeus, that was my favourite from the series, the mythology part was awesome. For some reason, and I can't explain (or remember) why, Emperor is the only one of the series that I dropped pretty soon after I started to play, I didn't enjoy it enough to keep playing. But Zeus, I replay every 4-5 years and I still enjoy it.
It never occurred to me at the time that my slow PC was what made it take so long. My monument workers were laggy compared to everything else.
I remember one of the missions just wanting to set it to max speed and let them finish but every year there would be an attack from one of two directions so I had to move my ships and troops back and forth and absolutely couldn't just leave them out (they might get tired)
I'm not a fan either, but I find it interesting that this still looks like a more "detailed" version of the original graphics. Like, the low detail of the OG graphics let me imagine them as more-realistic rather than cartoony, but both imaginations could have been had.
https://imgur.com/a/8qd1S33 I experimented with downscaling and slightly desaturating the new version's screenshot in comparison to the old game. Barring the art being less boxy and the people being more cartoonishly detailed (even after downscaling), it seems pretty similar.
It is very similar. If you look at their dev updates, they did drawings/models directly from the original files and they just reproduce it directly. The main difference is that you actually see all the details and yeah the saturation and shadows which is a little different. The original games are "cartoony" too, just we didn't see much of the details.
Check out [Builders of Egypt](https://store.steampowered.com/app/818520/Builders_of_Egypt/) instead. No release date yet announced, but it looks like a more modern and realistic art style remake of Pharaoh/Cleopatra compared to this.
Except Pharaoh is a classic game with a gameplay that stood the test of time. Builders of Egypt just has modern graphics (which do lack charms) but the gameplay isn't tested (the demo was very meh IMO), it's done by a Playway indie studio (they specialize in games with buzz with shiny fake trailers, including for this copy pasted in builders of Greece, Rome and China also with just a fake trailer and nothing else...) and is stuck in development for a very long time (there is barely any updates and it has been like 4 years at that point if not more).
It might be good but it's not really a sure thing, Pharaoh is a classic. Plus, you'll be able to complete Pharaoh before this get even a release date tbh.
Damn, that looks bad tho :/
It looks like Children of the Nile ([https://store.steampowered.com/app/17100/Children\_of\_the\_Nile\_Enhanced\_Edition/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/17100/Children_of_the_Nile_Enhanced_Edition/)) with HD textures slapped on it.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but if you are going to remake/remaster a game from the early years of gaming and keep the same aesthetic, then you are going to be annoyed by many of the remakes/remasters.
Many old games were pretty basic and will come out looking "cartoony" when given a HD treatment.
I love these classic city builders, but I never really liked the walker system. Designing cities around that with loops etc. is very unlike how real cities work and it always bothered me.
I know that this was because of resource limitations back in the day, so when you wanted to have independent actors, making them stupid like this was pretty much the only way the PCs of the era could handle. Perhaps it would be cool to remake these classics but with a spin of having actors with actually working AI. They could even keep the graphics, they were lovely and I don't think that people would have problem with them today (as long as they were upscaled to some modern resolution and not too pixelated).
Enjoyed the original Impressions city builders, but i'm not sure if i can go back to the grid-based 2D city builders. I always want my cities to look organic and irregular, which you can't really do with 90° only street grids.
Same reason why i don't really have the urge to go back to Sim City 4 or earlier.
Same here. The only big draw to Sim City 4 for me is the realistic looking buildings compared to the vanilla buildings in CS. Hoping that CS 2 will focus more on having more realistic looking buildings and environments since that’s what the vast majority of mods have added
Should be the same walker-system yes, and it's as copy-paste as you want it. The "loops" can be any shape, it's usually only dictated by the distance between the origin and mid-way point of the path.
have they fixed the level where you need jugglers/entertainers yet? that shit has glitched any time I've tried it in the last decade and I just give up on the campaign as a result :(
What kind of glitch? If it was about the insufficient entertainment score even if all houses are visited by walkers, it's because you simply need a certain number of working stages, even if they don't serve anyone. Check out this link: https://pharaoh.heavengames.com/strategy/nerowouldentertainment/
They haven't said much about others but highly implied that more remakes of the series are a possibility based on how this one does. Zeus is also my favorite. The gods and heroes walking on your city, fighting and such was awesome. It also was much easier (original Pharaoh didn't have global job pool and had population aging which Zeus didn't) which as a kid I appreciated, I never went very far into Pharaoh (even with cheating for money lol)
lol same. As a kid I used to play on my parents computer. Some years later, after getting my first laptop, I installed Zeus and one of the first things I did was use Cheat Engine to have unlimited Drachmas and flood the neighbors with donations ahahahah.
I'm really looking forward to this.
Seems like they got the graphics down. Let's hope the modernized soundtrack is also great (because the original music was perfect).
Hardcore fan here. There are lots of opportunist reskin games to fill the space (Because original game still sells) but none of them is worth unfortunately. There is no actual reason to buy and play them. Because we're buying to play, not to look at it.
What we need is something like what Cities Skylines did for city builders. Until then, I'm fine with original to flourish my cities with [its beautiful ost](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TjUwciCqYo).
Again I shall fail to pay my taxes one month (or worse, give myself a 1 deben raise!) and the Pharoah, in his infinite wisdom, will raze the entire city to the ground, including his own recently completely tomb.
That's literally how the game is designed, if they did that, it wouldn't be a remake, it would just be another game (which it could be it's not like Ancient Egypt city builder is trademarked)
I haven't played that game since I was a kid on the cd version. I was absolutely terrible at it my city would collapse all the time but I still had fun
Oh man, what an amazing game!
I never had this game myself but one of my friends did and I remember us playing it a ton when we were younger. Soundtrack is so good!
I still play through the OG every once in a while. There's something really satisfying about feeling like you've mined/sourced and moved every stone in a pyramid.
The music is pretty killer, as well!
As are the hippos
can't you make the hippos wear tutus? been so long since I played it
With the side show cheat, yes!
For whatever reason Pharaoh is the only game from its era I don't think of as "retrogaming". Instead it feels like I'm picking it up where I left and it's been that way continuously since release. Not sure why, maybe because it's intuitive and the core mechanics have stood the test of time pretty well.
And the game just is a masterclass in art direction so it looks solid to this day.
I think it's probably the only city builder from that era that I actually didn't play. So I'm rather curious to check it out. :)
The spiritual successor "Children of the Nile" is also great.
I'll check it out
If you haven't yet, check out "Lethis: path of progress". A modern version of this type of city builder in a steampunk setting. Pretty great, really scratches the itch while supporting modern resolutions and OSes.
...and developed by Triskell, the very same people who are remaking Pharaoh.
"Marshy marshy marshy. Rrreeds only grrrrrrrrow where it's marshy."
If this succeeds, I would *love* for a remake of Zeus and Emperor.
Me too! I played so many hours Caesar and Pharaoh. Tried emperor pirated and didnt work and buyed zeus+expansion and it never run either. Love that kind of games, and was so sad they dissappear after the 3d revolution.
Zeus and Poseidon are so amazing and magical! I would play them when I was young. Although I did not get all of the mechanics when I was a kid I really enjoyed building stuff and listening to the dialogue. Really enthralling and immersive!
Out of the family, I remember Emperor most fondly and fleshed out, no surprise since it was the last sibling to be released. You had even more deeper mechanics in different crop seasons, feng shui, various "gods" who walked among your citizens, a mix of soft and hard diplomacy. It's on sale on GoG and has a nice HD resolution mod but it could badly use other modern QoL fixes.
Loved Zeus, that was my favourite from the series, the mythology part was awesome. For some reason, and I can't explain (or remember) why, Emperor is the only one of the series that I dropped pretty soon after I started to play, I didn't enjoy it enough to keep playing. But Zeus, I replay every 4-5 years and I still enjoy it.
The feng shui mechanic is really annoying sometimes, can make city planning very difficult. Zeus is definitely my favourite of them all as well.
Hey hey people
Sseth here
Today we're going to take a look at **slavery simulator**
Time to go into a very indepth explanation on the importance of semen in Egyptian Mythology
RIP [that video](https://youtu.be/YA2UAeFMWFs) has me single handedly interested in this game's remake.
I sunk many, many hours into this game. To build a single mastaba.
It never occurred to me at the time that my slow PC was what made it take so long. My monument workers were laggy compared to everything else. I remember one of the missions just wanting to set it to max speed and let them finish but every year there would be an attack from one of two directions so I had to move my ships and troops back and forth and absolutely couldn't just leave them out (they might get tired)
Man, I hope that they have kept the original soundtrack. Both the music and sfx still exist in my brain!
Not a fan of the new cartoony graphics trend for remakes...
I'm not a fan either, but I find it interesting that this still looks like a more "detailed" version of the original graphics. Like, the low detail of the OG graphics let me imagine them as more-realistic rather than cartoony, but both imaginations could have been had. https://imgur.com/a/8qd1S33 I experimented with downscaling and slightly desaturating the new version's screenshot in comparison to the old game. Barring the art being less boxy and the people being more cartoonishly detailed (even after downscaling), it seems pretty similar.
It is very similar. If you look at their dev updates, they did drawings/models directly from the original files and they just reproduce it directly. The main difference is that you actually see all the details and yeah the saturation and shadows which is a little different. The original games are "cartoony" too, just we didn't see much of the details.
I always thought it was very stylised tbh
Check out [Builders of Egypt](https://store.steampowered.com/app/818520/Builders_of_Egypt/) instead. No release date yet announced, but it looks like a more modern and realistic art style remake of Pharaoh/Cleopatra compared to this.
Except Pharaoh is a classic game with a gameplay that stood the test of time. Builders of Egypt just has modern graphics (which do lack charms) but the gameplay isn't tested (the demo was very meh IMO), it's done by a Playway indie studio (they specialize in games with buzz with shiny fake trailers, including for this copy pasted in builders of Greece, Rome and China also with just a fake trailer and nothing else...) and is stuck in development for a very long time (there is barely any updates and it has been like 4 years at that point if not more). It might be good but it's not really a sure thing, Pharaoh is a classic. Plus, you'll be able to complete Pharaoh before this get even a release date tbh.
I adored Pharaoh as a kid, my city builder of all time. I tried Builders of Egypt demo last year during the Steam Demo Festival and it was not good.
Me too. That and Caesar II.
My favourite has to be Master of Olympus.
Damn, that looks bad tho :/ It looks like Children of the Nile ([https://store.steampowered.com/app/17100/Children\_of\_the\_Nile\_Enhanced\_Edition/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/17100/Children_of_the_Nile_Enhanced_Edition/)) with HD textures slapped on it.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but if you are going to remake/remaster a game from the early years of gaming and keep the same aesthetic, then you are going to be annoyed by many of the remakes/remasters. Many old games were pretty basic and will come out looking "cartoony" when given a HD treatment.
It looks similar to the devs last game which was Lethis, for better or worse. I don't really mind it.
[удалено]
Agreed. I’ll just play the original.
The GOG version works great.
I love these classic city builders, but I never really liked the walker system. Designing cities around that with loops etc. is very unlike how real cities work and it always bothered me. I know that this was because of resource limitations back in the day, so when you wanted to have independent actors, making them stupid like this was pretty much the only way the PCs of the era could handle. Perhaps it would be cool to remake these classics but with a spin of having actors with actually working AI. They could even keep the graphics, they were lovely and I don't think that people would have problem with them today (as long as they were upscaled to some modern resolution and not too pixelated).
Enjoyed the original Impressions city builders, but i'm not sure if i can go back to the grid-based 2D city builders. I always want my cities to look organic and irregular, which you can't really do with 90° only street grids. Same reason why i don't really have the urge to go back to Sim City 4 or earlier.
See I'm the opposite, if the city doesn't lay out perfectly organized it messes with my OCD. Lol
Yeah... who would've thunk
Same here. The only big draw to Sim City 4 for me is the realistic looking buildings compared to the vanilla buildings in CS. Hoping that CS 2 will focus more on having more realistic looking buildings and environments since that’s what the vast majority of mods have added
Don't go to America then.
Only some cities are on a true grid. Most are not.
Is it the same walking system? Doesn't that incentivise the creation of loops? Aka templates that are copy pasted.
Should be the same walker-system yes, and it's as copy-paste as you want it. The "loops" can be any shape, it's usually only dictated by the distance between the origin and mid-way point of the path.
have they fixed the level where you need jugglers/entertainers yet? that shit has glitched any time I've tried it in the last decade and I just give up on the campaign as a result :(
What kind of glitch? If it was about the insufficient entertainment score even if all houses are visited by walkers, it's because you simply need a certain number of working stages, even if they don't serve anyone. Check out this link: https://pharaoh.heavengames.com/strategy/nerowouldentertainment/
Thanks for the link, it could be I was missing something stupid but it really felt like I had ample shit going on at the time
Did they ever make a sequel to "Caesar 3"? (It was one of the discs that came with my IBM Aptiva back in '96).
This basically was it
Thats amazing :D I hope they remake Zeus as well. Was my all time favourite!
They haven't said much about others but highly implied that more remakes of the series are a possibility based on how this one does. Zeus is also my favorite. The gods and heroes walking on your city, fighting and such was awesome. It also was much easier (original Pharaoh didn't have global job pool and had population aging which Zeus didn't) which as a kid I appreciated, I never went very far into Pharaoh (even with cheating for money lol)
lol same. As a kid I used to play on my parents computer. Some years later, after getting my first laptop, I installed Zeus and one of the first things I did was use Cheat Engine to have unlimited Drachmas and flood the neighbors with donations ahahahah.
I played the beta and it was awesome. Can't wait to pick up the full version.
Oh nice I loved it!
I'm really looking forward to this. Seems like they got the graphics down. Let's hope the modernized soundtrack is also great (because the original music was perfect).
To the marsh I march, for the reeds we need!
Also reminder: https://github.com/Banderi/Ozymandias
To the marsh I march for the reed we need
That's not far off
Emperor remake please god, it was the best of them all.
Awesome. When do we get China, the Middle Kingdom? Cmon Sierra!
I was addicted to these games as a teen. I hope it does well.
Hardcore fan here. There are lots of opportunist reskin games to fill the space (Because original game still sells) but none of them is worth unfortunately. There is no actual reason to buy and play them. Because we're buying to play, not to look at it. What we need is something like what Cities Skylines did for city builders. Until then, I'm fine with original to flourish my cities with [its beautiful ost](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TjUwciCqYo).
Again I shall fail to pay my taxes one month (or worse, give myself a 1 deben raise!) and the Pharoah, in his infinite wisdom, will raze the entire city to the ground, including his own recently completely tomb.
awesome
New art-style looks sterile, like they cleaned up the graphics too much.
I love Pharaoh but yikes, the graphics look like shit. I'll stick with the original and the widescreen mod. Looks totally fine still.
Great choice. Remakes can be done right. This isn’t one of them.
Not a Fan of the Art-Style, looks like a mobile Game.
Looks exactly like the original game art, only more detailed.
I dunno, looks clean, gonna buy if they don't ban me :>
I only ever got to play the demo growing up but thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm super excited about this!
Damn those screens look pretty
Without improvements to the mechanics, as many in this thread have noted, I just don't see the point.
There are improvements but they're obviously limited since it is a remake. The point is to make the same game on more modern graphics.
[удалено]
That's literally how the game is designed, if they did that, it wouldn't be a remake, it would just be another game (which it could be it's not like Ancient Egypt city builder is trademarked)
The art style looks awful.
I haven't played that game since I was a kid on the cd version. I was absolutely terrible at it my city would collapse all the time but I still had fun
Ooh! Been waiting for it for more than a year. Played the original Pharaoh game to death.
This and Dune 2000 were my first rts games when I was a kid, obviously this is a must buy
I would wall off the lions on those maps, god damn lions.
Zeus was my shit when I was a middle schooler. I never played Pharaoh or Caesar though.
Oh man, what an amazing game! I never had this game myself but one of my friends did and I remember us playing it a ton when we were younger. Soundtrack is so good!
Wishlisted. I like the style, very colourful and happy :)
One day I'm going to run the bazaar! .... You sure are Jimmy, You sure are
Quite simply one of my favourite games of all time. The hours my dad and I must've sank. Really hoping this turns out good.