thepremier's Full Review: Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile for Windows
Children of the Nile
Using the same talent that brought us the city building smash, Caesar III and the even better sequel, Pharaoh, Children of the Nile (CotN) represents a giant step forward in the genre of city building games. CotN continues the pleasing blend of city building and history and makes some drastic and needed improvements to the series.
First and foremost, is the game’s 3D engine and the free camera. Right-click on the screen and grab hold of your world, for it is about to flip, literally. Grab it and rotate it around, tilt it up and get a bird’s eye view, or tilt it down and get street level in your city! Zoom out to the clouds or zoom in so far that you can see every detail on every necklace that is for sale at the jeweler’s shop! The layout of the city has changed as well - rotate all buildings to fit your aesthetic - you can even make things diagonal if you wish.
The second most noticeable improvement is in the overall fundamental concept of the game - the city building. CotN is much more similar to other current games such as Tropico and perhaps even The Sims, because each and every person in your city now has a name, an occupation, and motivation for doing things. They get new jobs, they get married, they have kids, they die. This is a city building game that differs from it’s predecessors. Before, the game was strictly “building-centric”, meaning you build structures that produce “walkers” that interact with other buildings. Now, the game is “unit driven”, meaning that your city is much more realistic in the sense that people interact with people.
These changes have greatly changed in which the game is played.
The goal of the game is still to build a glorious city - each scenario will have certain objectives for you to achieve to consider victory.
It’s the economy, Pharaoh…
Another significant advance is in the game’s economic system. No more stupid market ladies! No walkers. No labor pools. No taxes. No money. Free buildings? Well, sort of.
Food is the foundation of your ancient Egyptian economy. It literally is money, as that is what you use to pay all government workers, and it is the medium of exchange for your citizens. Farmers live in their own houses and work the fields in the flood plain. The annual Nile flood affects fertility. The number of farms you can support depends on your palace and on how many nobles, or elite citizens, you have living in your city. At harvest, everything is taken to a threshing area - you, the government, collect your share, the nobles take theirs, the farmers take what they can hold in their home, and the rest is stored. Government workers take their “salary” from bakeries. Nobody starves in this game - should you be unable to provide food for your citizens, they will forage the land - they’ll live, but become quite unhappy, and more importantly all that foraging is time that they could be doing their real jobs.
Your city’s size is limited by the number of pre-existing “villagers” on the map. These represent humble hunter-gatherers who will join your society when you provide them a job (represented by plopping down a building). These villagers join the ranks of your peasantry, which include farmers; servants that lubricate your economy by assisting other more prosperous citizens; laborers who construct monuments; and soldiers who exert your influence to other lands and defend your city.
Your middle class is made up mostly of craftsmen, and there are a lot of them, making all sorts of goods and providing some services to your city. Also in this class are shop keepers, who harvest raw materials in your city and make common and luxury goods. All households share a few things in common: most live in the building where they work and the female does all the shopping (and in some cases, makes the product as well).
Your upper class besides the nobles consist of, scribes, commanders, overseers, and priests. All of these citizens are educated citizens, and the number of educated citizens that you can have is limited. Scribes assess taxes, and also facilitate trade and tariffs. Commanders lead your city guards, army and navy. Overseers supervise laborers while they either collect raw materials, or while they are building monuments.
Priests represent the most important and the most challenging and sometimes troublesome aspect of the game. They do four essential things - provide religious service, provide healthcare, teach students at school, and provide mortuary service. In addition, priests cannot marry and must do all their own shopping, taking time away from their duties. Juggling all of these needs can be frustrating while your city is starting out.
Food represents one corner of your power triangle. Prestige is the second, a sort of royal currency, a pharaonic barometer, if you will. Prestige represents your influence. It is used to determine the number of educated people that will follow and serve you. After all, if you claim to be a living God-king, you’d better have done something credible with which to back it up. You earn prestige through various ways - building tombs, erecting statues, creating propaganda (obelisks and such), improving your palace, your “exploits” in foreign accomplishments, and finally, events. Events are bad. Pharaoh dies with no tomb built for himself - VERY bad for his heir.
The other corner of your triangular economy - bricks. Plain and simple. All your government buildings and many monuments require copious amounts of bricks. Manage your food, bricks, and prestige and you’ll do well.
Should you fail to provide your citizens with the things they need, they will protest, then the disillusioned will simply leave your city. If things worsen, you will be deposed. The game is not so much as making everyone happy - that’s not realistically possible in the real world. But keeping them satisfied, or preventing them from becoming unhappy - there’s something believable.
Points of Interest.
You can follow people around and watch their routines as they do their jobs and receive services. Pretty cool. You can automatically have the camera center and follow on any individual, and see the city from their perspective.
You will be building LOTS of monuments. Whereas in the previous Pharaoh monuments were laborious, time consuming, and limited to just 3 per city, this time, the labor and economic system make building these things easier - but a grand pyramid will still take you a very long time compared to a simple mastaba tomb. Tombs range in size and scale from humble mastaba tombs, more than enough for your nobles to be happy with, and then on to very small pyramids, and they get bigger and bigger from there. Provided you have the raw materials, you can build obelisks, stelae, and statues to your heart’s content. Building a steady stream of monuments is the easiest way to steady prestige.
"I want to believe."
Gods no longer take out their wrath (or bestow their benevolence) on your city as if they exist - but your people will exact their wrath if they cannot worship properly. The gods, a dozen of them, while some not as important as others, each have their patrons. Isis, for example, is the patron of women of all classes, so not having at least a shrine for her will anger half your population. Shrines are the simplest, temples are more elaborate, and cult temples are massive and are necessary should your city have a patron god.
The Nile river floods as in the previous game (and can be fickle), but farming has been improved and simplified a bit. Each farmer household is represented by one field on the flood plain. At harvest, food is harvested and sent to one area. Pharaoh receives his share of taxes (which is greatly increased with the presence of scribes, the nobles take theirs, and the farmers take as much as their households can store, the rest is left in the threshing area. Granaries store all you extra food (taxes) in an environment that greatly slows spoilage (yes, food does spoil in CotN). Granaries release food to your bakeries, which is the source of food for your government workers. Everyone else gets food directly from “selling” their product.
Priests are a pain. Unless you really preplan your city (which is made easy because roads do not cost anything!) and group all your priest buildings together, you will not have enough temples, and healthcare operating, on top of a school and a mortuary.
Your economy and your prestige, and much of the storyline of your city, depend on the outside world. You will need to establish trade routes, set up quarries, send emissaries to other cities, quell raiding camps, and assault enemy fortresses to gain access to the luxury goods, resources, and prestige that you need.
Battle is still present in the game. Your armed forces consist of your army, your navy, and your city guards. You can designate which segment each of your commanders can take charge of. Your navy and your army can only be used abroad to conquer cities and camps (apparently your standing army is too proud to defend the city from mere dessert thugs). That job belongs to your city guards and you cannot control them. You place towers where they patrol on the outskirts of your city - and pray that there’s someone on duty when raiders arrive. Walls are available, but gates are not, and walls take too long to build to be used to encircle your city save some gaps for ingress and egress. If you try to do that, your bricklayers will be overwhelmed and more important things will take forever to be built.
Technical
As your city grows, it puts more of a strain on your system, thankfully you can adjust almost all of the sound and graphic settings. As you change the camera views, your city and the terrain truly are breathtaking - especially if you bring it to almost ground level, and look at your city from the other side of the Nile. The soundtrack is also noteworthy for very beautiful music. While the music I feel is a bit more tame that of Pharaoh’s incredible soundtrack, the pieces are of good length and have a lot of thought and effort put into them, using native instruments for a subtle and alluring environmental setting.
The game also has a remarkable feeling of sucking you in with it’s intoxicating rhythm of the day-to-night-to-day lighting cycle and with the changing of the seasons, all executed very well.
There are over a dozen pre-loaded scenarios (cities) for you to play, as well as the ability for you to create your own with the game’s editor.
There is a patch which fixes some pretty minor yet extremely annoying niggles with many units.
In Closing
CotN is a beautiful game. It is quite easy to play but far easier to screw up. Gamers with patience and a love of planning and order will be thrilled. Fans of games like Sim City or The Sims will get a kick out of the exotic locale of ancient Egypt, compared with the relative sterility of Sim City.
Children of the Nile is less a traditional city builder and more of a management challenge. Each scenario is essentially a puzzle, but the pieces don’t necessarily have to fit the same way each time. The game breaks longstanding traditions of its genre which bring a new level of strategy and game play. Everything about the game, its design, its look, its music, it draws you in - your entire day off will disappear as you try to mold Egypt into your image. This game is definitely the most realistic of the so called historical city building games.
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