Coming from a guy who never heard of Emperor and thinks Zeus is one of the best games ever, I was pretty pleased learn of its existence and see this come to GOG. Thought I might share some of my thoughts with any fans of Caesar/Pharaoh/Zeus that havent jumped in yet.

As I see it this is much closer to Zeus than to any of the other titles. Makes sense as its the next in line but I know a lot of folks prefer the Pharaoh model to Zeus. Full disclosure, I am not one of them so I found this to be a benefit. I certainly like all the titles but Zeus is the clear winner in my book. Anyway, if you are used to Zeus you can jump right in and play Emperor.

The big changes are the residential walls, food production and how the military is handled. There are many other little tweaks, like tax collection requiring wood and farming to a degree with fertility. But again, if you have played any of the series before, its all familiar.

Residential Walls - Two primary functions as I see it. First to block negative appeal and second to create modified gates allowing restrictions on specific roaming walkers. I am torn on this one. The negative appeal seems nice on the surface, allowing you new layouts placing industry and food distribution closer to residential blocks. However, the catch is the wall takes space... Its fine when you have open plains and what not but when space is a premium it seems to present more of a new problem than a solution. And the restrictive gateway, I have yet to see its value. Again, initially it seems great. But my usual layouts already restrict roamers through design and those I have looked at online do the same. So in effect, I am not sure it adds anything to gameplay.

Food production – It’s another population limiter and a requirement for growth. As I am happy with more things to think about in game, this one I found added fun in a clever and believable way. Your people want better and better food requiring various types of produce to create. No more feeding everyone with cheese wheels… the huge thing I felt this brought to the table was trade. It is now a necessity in some cases instead of a luxury. There are many occasions where you simply cannot produce all the food types you need for growth, not just sheer volume, so you must open trade for more than just monetary reasons. This was always the case in Zeus from a population perspective, you might need fleece from here and oil from there, but this is whole new concern on a base commodity like food.

Military – Troops are now created like any other commodity and no longer require the population drain they did in the past. This is a toss-up for me. It’s a legit change and can easily be viewed as an improvement. I cant recall how many times you would see stories of peoples cities crumbling when they called up their army. So its nice that isn’t a concern anymore. That’s the thing though, its not a concern anymore. So long as you knew it was coming, you could compensate for the population loss to call up troops through a variety of things. Turning off industry, manning Triremes, etc, etc. Point being, you couldn’t just go to war if you had the swords, it was a guns or butter question. And frankly, if you were at the point you had to defend yourself in desperation with slings, you had done something wrong anyway. So I get it that it makes people happy in a mechanic sort of way within game, but it removes one of the major plans you had put in place in prior titles.

I realize this post might come of a little negative. That was not at all my intention, anything but. All said and done, buy this now! There are nuances that may rub you the wrong way (or maybe not) but all in all its more of the same and if you are starving for “new” content, this is the way to go!

I don't agree. Zeus was a very "simplified" version of Pharaoh, removing large numbers of mechanics. Emperor basically restored numerous "Pharaoh" style mechanics (multiple food types are now actually necessary to evolve housing, religion is needed for housing to evolve, etc) into Zeus' engine changes.

The main change was a return to a chronological and historical single player campaign. Zeus was just one city built up over the course of each adventure, with a few colonies to supply missing resources: Emperor restored the Pharaoh-style of campaigns, with building large settlements in one go and not repeating the same city over and over again (ie, you were focused more on building capital cities and protecting the countries borders, rather than just self-preservation). The idea behind the wall gates is so you can build the "negative desirability" outside your housing blocks (ie market squares), but still let them into the housing block without affecting housing evolution. I use this extensively to build housing blocks, because it allows for more space in a housing blocks and in limited space maps, you want as much housing as you can into a single block. Most maps are big enough to not need to worry about the space loss from residential walls tbh and early missions dont' really need them, given the housing is limited any case. Same as my first response in the first quote: just a restoration of Pharaoh-style mechanics with a few improvements (removal of the recruiter, with the recruiter idea just built into forts). Plus, in Emperor, you can't just do the cheesy tactic of just bribing every invader away like you can in Zeus: a lot of invasions are based on actually fighting the enemy, and winning well, mainly because you can't just resort to cop-outs.

Pharaoh to Zeus - Sure. I am not making a concrete statement, just my experience. The restoration of various things you mentioned were just different walkers in Zeus vs Pharaoh. Religion replaced with philosophers, etc. Even the amusement factor of the food is just another pop cap mechanic. I dont recall how Pharaoh played that out, did it demand multiple produce types?

Campaigns - Not seeing a huge difference in the two (or three if you throw in Pharaoh). Admittedly i have only done the first two campaigns in Emperor as yet but I havent noticed a marked change. I have personally never had a concern with the construction of the campaigns for any of the series so maybe something i just not thinking about.

Res Walls - Perhaps its a much larger neg/appeal range in theory than in practice and I am just not seeing it. It also irks me the wall works just the same if its complete or not. Goofy. Also, I am playing in Normal so that may be a difference as well.

Military - I prefer the Zeus mechanic forcing the decision of economy or military. Emperor seems far to easy to recruit in a "fire and forget" method. Just keep building forts and never think of them again. No food, tax, supply, unrest, etc etc to consider. Regarding the bribes, we will agree to disagree on it being cheesy, but more to the point I am able to do the same in Emperor with reckless abandon. I am not following why you see a difference here, does this change with future campaigns?

Yes, for most later missions, multiple food types were needed to reach prosperity targets (as some prosperity targets required housing above Common Residence, which needs two food types). As for religion, no it was replaced by Mythology, which was just a very dumbed down monument building mechanic (the monument idea was semi-restored with Poseidon's pyramids): Philosophers are more like Jugglers from Pharaoh. Zeus campaigns are entirely different to every other campaign series. Pharaoh had you building unique cities in different places most of the time, Emperor pretty much has the same thing, with the inclusion of capital cities, where you will return to them at a later point to build something else or expand them after building numerous other settlements.

Zeus adventures are just "parent city" and "colony", which gets very predictable as well, and the final mission of a parent city is like one single mission of Pharaoh: think of each mission in Zeus (for an adventure) as being the slower and more spread out development of a large city. The colonies are just shanty towns (most of the time) to provide a resource your parent city doesn't have, or to build a military base to conquer some distant cities for your parent city. Play at Hard, the game is more interesting and decisions are more important: at Normal, there's very little challenge and it's so easy to recover from. In every mission of Zeus, you can bribe if you have money. But in Emperor, quite a few missions disallow bribing and a number of them prevent you having more than one fort: this is different from Zeus, because it means you can't just have huge military forces every single time, it means that playing those adventures capped to one fort are much tougher because you have to prevent people getting upset to avoid defeat.

If you've only played the early tutorial campaigns, you won't see this yet, but as you progress through Zhou and Qin, all the way up to Song-Jin, you will see how much different Emperor is from Zeus and that it's much closer to Pharaoh.

As for unrest in Emperor, it happened quite a bit for me and I always ended up placing watch towers, because it became much easier to happen. Early tutorial campaigns are nerfed somewhat, so when you get to Zhou Dynasty, that's when the real campaigns begin for Emperor. In Zeus, I never bothered with it, because it never happened, but it did happen quite a bit to me in Emperor, but that might just be because I always play on Hard. But in Zeus, even at Hard (Titan), I very rarely got unrest.

I have to say, now that I have advanced another campaign, I dont like the single build, single scenario progression. I much prefer the campaign returning to the same city you build on. But hey, just a personal preference and certainly not a negative on the game overall.

If anyone is interested, picked up Hearthlands on the summer sale. Essentially the sierra model with a medieval theme and modern code. I have put in a few hours and like it so far. Havent found any game breaking bugs or whatnot.

I was going to snag that but I heard there was an aspect of urgency in it. I don't mind defense but I like to be able to take my time, build my city, not have to worry about being invaded every ten minutes. I love RTS and base builders but one of the reasons I gave up Dark Reign is because it starts pushing you to defend from the second the game starts making almost everything a siege level.

I havent hit that yet, but again only a few hours in. Will update when I find out! I mean the mechanics are essentially identical otherwise. Housing blocks, industry to storage to peddler economy, trade. I will check to see if anythign is configurable in sandbox.

Thanks. :D Looks great but I'm getting too old to run sprints when I play a game. :P

So the settings make it appear in the sand box that you can manage that kind of stuff at least to some degree. General difficulty setting claims to address the frequency and strength of enemies and a few have specific on/offs like thieves and robbers. You can also manage the number and neutrality of NPC players.

Starting the campaign and will have further reports! Also will move to the Heathlands forum as I know Shukakus face is melting reading this in his (her?) beloved Empire forum!

Moved the Hearthlands talk over here...

https://www.gog.com/forum/hearthlands/general_thoughts