I got Pharaohs from GOG , a game I have nostalgia for . While the gameplay is fun , I decided to quit on the game. Here are my reasons and I hope some one tells me that I am wrong.

1) Buildings get destroyed for no reason. You spend money and then your building collapses . No matter if you build an architect or houses close by , it still collapses .

2) The palace and tax office will always get robbed no matter how many police stations your build or court houses

3)Disease and Malaria will spread no matter how many Apothecary or physicians I build, no matter how many different food varieties I have, no matter how many water supplies I build.

4) housings are either too far or too close to working areas, both which ruins your progress in the game.

5) Fire will spread no matter how many fire houses I build. Sometimes destroying expensive or very important buildings.

6) Yesterday I tried to build a Mutaba or whatever its called (A pyramid) and even though I import 24000 bricks to complete it and I have like 50k+ in money , bricks hardly arrive. I have many storage areas. I had to play 4 hours just for this thing to be built.

7) Finally I am in a place where I have to improve my housing to complete the level , but no matter how many statues , gardens,, music booths, scroll schools , plazas or shrines I build houses will not be improved so i am kind of stuck.

These are the issues I am facing with the game, I am either doing something wrong or this game does not work well.

Can you help with advice? Should I quit on it,, I really dont want to spend 7 hours on each level

All the problems you have are not problems in the game, it's how you are playing it. Basically, your doing things wrongly. What kind of buildings are collapsing ? Some missions have scripted events to destroy particular buildings regardless of Architect Posts you have. Examples include Clay Pits and Gold Mines. Police Stations and Courthouses do not stop crime completely. If your unemployment rate is constantly above 15% and you have lots of slum housing, crime will happen. You could spam 100 police stations everywhere and it would still make no difference. On higher difficulties and in some missions, disease and malaria are much higher. Missions in the Nile Delta and those that contain marshes are very prone to malaria. Disease occurs when you have too few health buildings covering a large area. It can also occur if you neglect to worship Bast in the mission as one of her curses is to send a plague to stalk the city. Industrial areas should contain a few slum housing. Pharaoh works by channelling all the available workers through a house tile. Many people tend to build their proper housing away from these areas in special designs known as housing blocks. I highly recommend you try to use them as well as check out other people's maps and by watching YouTube videos. Building firehouses does nothing if they are not staffed. Are the firehouses staffed to full capacity and do you have enough of them covering all areas ? Use the Fire overlay to see areas which are not being covered by a Fire House. Cities will trade a maximum number of goods in a year, which you can see on the Kingdom Map by clicking the city name and looking at the bottom of the screen. In the Archaic Period, cities will trade up to 4000 bricks in a year so you should have no problems in building mastaba's. It's highly recommended that you create a dedicated storage yard for just bricks by using the SY orders panel. Which level is this ? Have you checked what the houses are requesting to evolve ? A word of warning: many of the levels will make you stay a very long time to complete them (one particular mission makes you stay at least 60 game years) so you will have to spend a considerable time playing them rather than just saying "I'll play a mission for 7 hours and then give up" >_>

Guessing you're having some fundamental misunderstandings of how buildings work and spread their effects; you have to build your road layouts very carefully as loops with no crossroads to get predictable coverage of building effects, which are spread by the walkers that come out of them (architects, policemen, fireman, doctors, etc.).

To see how it's the walkers and not the buildings themselves spreading the effect, go to the Overlay views (e.g., crime) and you'll see crime risk suppressed by the policemen and judges as they walk around, it has nothing to do with the buildings themselves.

Properly set up, none of the things you're listing occur, except for some of the rare exceptions mentioned above (e.g., clay pits periodically collapse just because).

I suggest you go to Youtube and watch some of the gameplay/tutorial videos, it's a very fun game if you understand how it works.

thanks for your replies
I read the manual , Ill watch some youtube videos and give it another go.

vossiewulf

what do you mean loops not crossroads?

Make a road that follows a rectangular path that connects to itself - a loop. Make it 6 squares wide inside. Fill the center two rows with gardens/statues. Fill the remaining rows with houses. Around the outside of the loop put firehouse, architect, policeman, water supply, bazaar, temple. Have roadblocked connecting roads out to the granaries with your food and other supplies. Its gets more complicated than that but that's the idea.

Watch some videos you'll see what I mean.

thanks for the advice... I am implementing a lot of it and seeing good progress

Great. Once you understand it, you'll see that these games (including Caesar 3 and Zeus, which are also great) are all about traffic control of the walkers, and control of flow of supplies by using the accept/empty/get settings of storage yards and granaries.

Buildings emit two kinds of walkers: the guys in the white skirts and hats who must walk by occupied dwellings for the building to have employees, and the building-specific walkers who spread the effects of the building (god/food/crime reduction/fire prevention/etc.).

You build your central city housing with some interconnected rectangular loops as I described above, 8 rows wide with the outer four rows inside the loop being houses (with some booths/bandstands/pavilions at intersections) and the inner two rows gardens/statues.

You surround those loops with the buildings that keep the people safe and fed and happy.

You then connect them using roadlblocked roads (so your city walkers stay in the city loops) to auxiliary areas that produce food and goods and then store those foods and goods. Those are best constructed along linear roads with roadblocks at each end, with a small block of four houses in the middle somewhere so the job-seeker walkers always walk by them. The houses in these "industrial" areas will never grow much beyond huts but that's fine.

You then control the flow of the goods to storage areas near to your city loops by positioning (simply placing them close enough) or by using multiple storage yards (one near the goods producers set to accept the goods, one near your city set to GET the goods... they'll go to the other storage yard and bring the goods back to the city storage yard).

Once you get those basics then it's just a game of how elegantly you can build all that so it functions very smoothly.