Stone houses will never upgrade within 3 squares of a workshop anyway, which is why I stopped building roads thorugh my industrial area. The entire industrial area in my design has zero roads. Just heavy industry, workshops, forums to collect tax, lots of stone houses and enough fountain coverage for them.

That's probably why I reach 16000+ population. You're forgetting the slums I build between the workshops, which add up considerably. With roughly 6 palaces per forum in the residential area, that's 102 palaces for my 17 forums. And with 30 workshops, that's at least 135 stone houses in my slums.

but then you are forgetting that in us version you have to reach prosperity goals and having even a couple of stone houses tanks it

mission 19 is 79 and even ~10 stone houses per 16000 pop tank that number below the goal

Yeah that's definitely not true at all as the above statistics prove. I don't know what went wrong when you "discovered" that. I won with 135 stone houses and around 16800 population. Tax per head at 6% tax rate was 0.26.

If I destroy all 135 of those stone houses, my population drops only by around 2000. But as a result, the number of jars my workshops produce drops dramatically from 210 to 69. What I did discover is that this results in my unemployment shooting up from 0% to 35%, which indicates that unemployment is tied to the number of jars you can produce.

Anyway, the game just doesn't really make much sense. Everything is too opaque to make sense of.

as i say everything i say is on video and you refuse to make one

unemployment doesn't exist. and money is not an issue once you get positive income. you can always just spam more other building to never have unemployment. i never touched taxes at all because cash is infinite and it goes over limit and resets to 0


it's ancient game, yes, it had limits to how much it can fit inside. even worse it was not an ibm pc game, it's an amiga game. once a powerhouse to surpass ibm clones it became the dead end. it literally was competing against dune 2 and ufo and i finished both games just recently. dune 2 is literally a pick and play game despite creating a new genre. ufo controls kinda suck but you can learn them experimentally fast.

saying that there's a manual doesn't work either because i read it like 10 times and it still explains nothing. in general pharaoh is the first game in the series that actually works*

*provided that you know how to use fake global labour and housing loops

I just watched your video and it's very weird. Glitches left right and centre. I think the problem with your game is you had the game speed on 100% and cycles set way too high. I played on 50% game speed and cycles set to 3000. I only encountered 3 glitches:
1) Certain road squares would change to plaza (roughly once per map)
2) Pipes would sometimes appear on the top row of the map (only late on in later maps)
3) Sometimes my city would rapidly decay for no reason after loading a save (maybe 4 times in total)

I never saw any numerical overflows outside of perhaps the game year?

I'm "refusing" to make a video because it's not something I do. I've never made a video before and have no intention to.

If you want my final save I can provide it.

But anyway, as I said in my first post in this thread: congratulations. You are certainly one of the few people who has finished the game. I was convinced I was the only one when I finished it a few years ago, so it's good to see someone else has beaten it now too!

nope

and if you run it on 3000 cycles it still has all the same problems but also the mouse will be so unresponsive that you will have to click everything multiple times and even then it won't work + it can't scroll

i run it on barely 10000 cycles which is basically a boosted 80386 from 1985

80486 came out in 1989 3 years before the game and run almost on 30000 cycles. but going above 10000 changes nothing the game still have all the problems and no improvements

i think cash overflow is tied to the size of your income because i managed to stop by wasting a ton of money on nothing. when your monthly income is too high and you already have 25000 it zeroes. if you have 24999 or you lower income it will not zeroe


the problem is with the game engine itself. you can finish european version and never encounter the problems. they just never tested how the simulation runs above like 8000 population, the game was not made to be played like this