Many of the early reviews breathlessly call this the "best city constructor sim" ever... just wondering what sets this apart from caesar III or zeus and poseidon.

By the way, I'm a huge fan of SC4, and liked (but didnt love) Caesar 3.

For me even the Mythology sets it apart. I just like Egypt better than Greek or modern cities.

But what excited me the most was building a gigantic pyramid all by my self (well with a little help from some petty slaves :P)

Just like your reviews said the best sim there is.

I know it's already been said, but I just want to emphasise that building epic monuments is what sets Pharaoh apart from the other city builders. Seriously, some of those pyramids require every ounce of economic might your city possesses to build (at least in a reasonable time frame).

Aside from that, the gameplay differences between Pharaoh and the others range from quite minor to superficial.

I'd say there's a fairly large gap between Caesar 3/Pharaoh and Zeus/Emperor. When going from Pharaoh to Zeus, they scaled down the complexity considerably. (Not necessarily depth, though I'm not sure I know these games quite well enough say whether that was reduced too.)

Caesar 3/Pharaoh have far more types of resources, stages of housing evolution, etc. They also have some less newbie-friendly features, like elite housing simply being later evolutions of what starts out as pleb/prol housing, potentially leading to unintended evolution into elite housing that doesn't work. (In Zeus/Emperor, you designate it one when you first zone the housing.)

Of those earlier two, Pharaoh is definitely better than Caesar. Caesar 3 hadn't quite come to grips with the walker system and what it would make players want to do, and so it has clunky stuff like having to use military gatehouses to cordon off blocks, and granaries that are road intersections thereby destroying your best-layed walker plans for industrial blocks. Pharaoh resolved those and added some other improvements like more options for automating warehouse/granary management.

If you liked but didn't love Caesar 3, I'm guessing you'd have the same reaction to Pharaoh. While it does have some new twists on farming, and on objectives like monument-building, I think it can largely be described as a much-improved Caesar 3.

How does this compare to Children of the Nile? I remember enjoying that a lot.

The only games I've played are C3, pharaoh, and zeus/posiden.
I've played C3 all of 2 times, could not get a grip on it, but I'm sure if I tried I could have.
Didn't help that I've pharaoh kinda mastered (on easy, working my way up).
Zeus, well I've played it less then pharaoh, since I only got it when GOG released it, and I've still got the CD from pharaoh (which I had to stop playing due to incompatibility with win7 that gog fixed).

in C3, I found that the way I build is incompatible with the way the game wants me to build (and as I'm lazy I stopped playing). the graphics aren't as good, those they are very similar.

Zeus is almost better then pharaoh, but I think they dumbed it down to much, and I don't like how there aren't that many different things for sizes, I liked my 1x1, I don't like everything being 2x2 or bigger (excluding parks and pillars). I do like that I don't have to have my industry connected to by housing, but that makes me create more maintenance buildings, which are 2x2 (vs pharaoh, 1x2 for fire house and architect combined) I don't like that you cannot turn off industries, like you could in pharaoh. I don't like that the army is part of my general population, which would be fine if I could turn off industries, because attacking, or defending yourself, causes mass worker shortages. if I could turn of industries this wouldn't be so bad.

Children of the Nile is an awesome game!

I haven't played Pharaoh in a long time (just installed it today...yay GOG!), but if I remember the two, Children is a bit more complex. The 'walker' system isn't present in CotN, so it feels more like a natural city.

I could be wrong, though....I'll let you know after I play Pharaoh all weekend!

You *can* turn off industries in Zeus: open the detailed view in the Industries tab, and under the worker allocation panel, you can shut down any industries you'd like.