Hi all,

Just thought I'd share some thoughts here, as much for myself (for future reference) as for whoever else might be interested.

Like many, I played Pharaoh as a teenager way back, and of course seeing it bundled together with Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile here meant I could get back into it.

I have to confess that as a teenager, I had more fun with the sandbox mode because I couldn't get far in the story mode: that first mastaba was too much for me! As an adult, I've been able to figure out the subtleties of the trading and stockpiling mechanics and understood why I had got stuck previously. Of note: I always play on the Normal difficulty setting.

Thereafter, I embarked on an epic quest to first complete the Archaic Period campaign (finally! funny mainly because it's still mostly a tutorial at this stage) and then, of course, to build the mighty monuments of the Old Kingdom!

And I always knew that most of what Pharaoh promised would be found in the Old Kingdom campaign, and it met my expectations: holy crap, did I indeed get a feeling for how epic an undertaking building those pyramids must have been! And yeah, it could take AGES: one mission (Meidum) took me 11 hours. Just - damn! Of note: I did not make use of that new expansion-specific mechanic that can accelerate the pyramid construction process (I wanted the vanilla experience). The average mission - past Saqqara - took 7-8 hours to complete! And mind you that I was absolutely playing with the in-game speed setting a lot (slowing it down when problems needed to be dealt with or when expanding the city, and speeding it up when mostly waiting for a monument to be finished). And there are many missions in this campaign (a greater number than the sum of what came before, and longer and harder on average). And the last mission - while not the longest - still managed to be memorable despite the lack of massive monument by being arguably the hardest one yet: for the first time when given the choice, I chose the combat-centric scenario as I felt that fit the period of decline better than building the best city yet, and it wiped me out a few times before I was able to overcome it (by implementing a strategy taken from a walkthrough - yeah for the first time when playing this game I looked up a walkthrough). I am happy to report that the cinematic transition between the Old Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom was definitely worth the effort!

In theory, I can now look forward to the Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom campaigns.

But here's the thing: the Old Kingdom is enough. Seriously, it provides the quintessential Pharaoh experience, you get to build all these famous monuments (the Great Pyramid along with the Great Sphinx being the climax), and seeing as combat isn't the best part of this game, no further missions will be able to surpass the best moments of the Old Kingdom campaign (further missions may simply get more tricky due to more severe constraints).

I feel like I'm done. It's a very good game. To rate it more highly would require less repetition. I actually noticed that some missions (so far never those I choose) make you start with some stuff already built up. I wish the game would have done that more, because evidently starting from scratch on almost every mission (potentially on EVERY mission depending on which missions you choose when given the choice) leads to massive repetition and player fatigue after half a dozen or so extremely lengthy missions.

And I haven't even touched the Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile campaigns yet. Frankly, if they're even harder, I think I don't like the game enough to bother playing through them. And that's despite the objective improvements the expansion brings to the base game.

That said, I may yet take advantage of the fact that this expansion-augmented version of Pharaoh gives us the possibility to just play any mission in any order. After all, I would still like to see the transition cinematic between the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom as well as the final cinematic in-game! (no-cheating)

But hey, I played through the Old Kingdom, and got what I was mainly looking for in this game :)

I know what you mean. I've gone through the rest a couple times, but the monuments are what makes Egypt Egypt. If you aren't building the monuments, you are just playing a city builder that uses the Pharaoh tileset. I'd have been OK with just the Old Kingdom, too.

Cleo adds a couple interesting twists (and is the reason that one of the missions in Archaic has to be finished in Hard instead of Very Hard) and some tombs, but it didn't catch my interest like the Old Kingdom did.

It is true that there are several missions where you can use a standard housing block, but each has some variation in the best way to go about filling that block. And there are good reasons in most for not using that standard block, but doing something custom designed for the space anyway. And I kind of like trying to use some of the, um, unintended features like long walkers, overland SYs, extra-strength industry restocking, and similar. I'd call them "bugs", but since they were not fixed in the updates, and others were, I suspect they left them in intentionally, kind of like Terraria left "hoiks" intact intentionally.

Could never get into Cleopatra
But what I liked about the end game of Pharaohs was your ripping apart of the empire by civil war.

What I disliked in it was how poorly balanced a number of missions were. One mission, I needed 10 dance studios to sop up the excess population. Another gem mines operating for no reason other than population.

But by the time I finished all the missions, it felt like a complete cycle of building and then seeing its destruction. The cycle of every empire

The building of the first true pyramid is a great mission though.