Tied.

Emperor took too many cues from Zeus and feels too casual.

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>>2323607
Pharaoh of course!

easy pharaoh win

I dislike the house plot sizes in Pharaoh. Just make them 2x2 or 4x4. What's the point of clustering a bunch of 1x1s?

>>2323607
emperor, nothing beats the walled city feng shui mechanic and great wall is much cooler than pyramids.

I wish Emperor had navy and better trade. I like that you can change how much you can sell for but I'm mixed on the dedicated trade building thing other than for trade ports on the river.
On the other hand the events in Pharaoh are better but I wish there was a way to interact with cities more like Emperor, personally sending your own army in your own time to browbeat a city into opening up trade with you. It also makes me wonder what the multiplayer in Pharaoh would be like.

But I usually pick Emperor for replays simply because some of the challenge in Pharaoh just comes from obtuseness. Managing armies is a nightmare mid-combat, and I dread having to sit through something like Rostja again. It's a shame because last time I managed to beat it until Cleopatra's Alexandria before I got burnt out.

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>>2323607
>barbaren

>>2323705
Pharaoh is a straight upgrade in every way.

Pharaoh had a lot of crap mechanics, I didn't have the patience to put up with them the last time I tried replaying the game. The newer games are just way too convenient to go back. I hear the QoL mod for Caesar III completely eliminates any difficulty in managing your cities, actually.

I like both of them but the right answer is Caesar 3 + the Augustus mod.

>>2323935
If you are a fan of the series you have to give Augustus a try. There are a lot of new settings and features like roadblocks to customize the experience. Also resizable window. The latest updates add new buildings for the late game which look and feel just like the original. Tbh the mod is an impressive work and it preserves its peak '90s aesthetic. If you're interested, the GamerZakh YT channel made several playthroughs.

>>2323932
And yet here we are. Me, bloated and happy, sipping wine your wife poured, eating the bread from the wheat your kids grew and you mumbling something about annual inundation and market alignments before the lions come in. Face it Phara, you had your chance and blew it.

>>2324058
>not julius
Disgusting.

I wish Emperor required you to build more than one housing block to complete levels. I also don't know how to solve the equilibrium of either "drowning in 100,000s of gold once you have a trade eco set up" vs "hemorrhaging money in a death spiral because your neighbor suddenly decided to demand 8 bronzeware before you even have clay pits set up"

>>2323607
Caesar 2 of course
>why not Pharaoh, Emperor or even Caesar 3
because I did not play those

hey hey people

>>2326484
zoomoid scum.

>>2323607
>The Pharaoh is the heart of Egypt my son, the land is its body, and the people are its blood

>>2323607
tough question. Technically, Emperor is a much better game in many ways, but I definitely had more fun playing Pharaoh.

Zeus

Just finished the Shang Campaign. Think I ran into a bug where I had two warehouses full of Bronzeware, Silk, and Ceramics sitting next to the Tumulus wonder, but they weren't getting delivered. I had to delete and replace the wonder three times to finish the fucking thing.

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>>2323607
i prefer emerors looks
also music
also emoeror is the latest right?

>>2323607
Literally coin toss, both are equally good.
Pharaoh has better monuments, but bunch of obtuse, post-C3 mechanics, while Emperor has vastly better gameplay and inferior monuments (still 2nd best in the series, CotN included)

>>2323935
There never was any actual difficulty, it was just a logic puzzle for perfect building placement within pre-defined map. Both Julius and Augustus mods remove any challenge by removing need to deal with extra-dumb employment workers and also adding functional roadblocks (rather than defense gates exploit)

>>2327711
>Pharaoh has better monuments
Fuck. Right. Off.

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>>2327447
>also emoeror is the latest right?
Yeah, though the progression is a bit weird because of how the devs approached it.

Caesar 1, 2, 3 - OG designer (David Lester)
Pharaoh - His successor's (Chris Beatrice) attempt to perfect the formula
Zeus - Beatrice's attempt to do something different
Emperor - A different company building on top of Zeus' mechanics.

So really it's basically:
Caesar 1, 2, 3, Pharaoh, Cleopatra
Zeus, Poseidon, Emperor

Meanwhile Beatrice leaves after Poseidon to again reinvent the formula and do the Egyptian setting justice (as Pharaoh is really a Caesar reskin), this line is:
Children of the Nile, Caesar 4, Sim City Societies

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>>2327714

I think the series clearly peaked with Pharaoh for several reasons, chief of which that the Egyptians built better and more interesting monuments. I won't dismiss the mechanical improvements of Emperor, but building the Great Wall of China just ain't the same as building the tallest structure on Earth for several thousand years.

>>2327823
>Reducing the majesty of pyramids to their height
Terrible bait, as if OP wasn't bad already

>>2327833
I'm not reducing anything, Pyramids were simply the pinnacle of human achievement until the gothic cathedrals. It was you who interpreted that as bait.

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>>2323607
I like both

>>2327833
Fun fact, Mt. McKinley is taller than Mt. Everest. Everest is just higher because it sits on the Himalayan plateau.

>>2327868
>[bait intensifies]
Consult >>2327817

>>2323607
They are equally good. If anything, Emperor was a nice send-off to the series, being good all across the board, while Pharaoh took good IDEAS of Caesar 3 and turned them into good GAME, reinventing the wheel in the process

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>>2327817
While Pharaoh has better monuments it doesn't have the best monument in the series which is the grand canal.
Most monuments are just huge paperweights that take up space and you'll end up sitting at 100% speed waiting for it to finish even when you start building it early especially if they handicap you by forcing you to buy some bullshit stone with a max 10 per year cap from another city. The Grand Canal is nice to look at, doesn't take too long if you start it early, and is actually interesting to play around as it splits the map in half and basically acts a bit of terrain to build your city around.

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>>2323607

I should do a replay of these, as a kid I always fucked up my cities by not understanding the walker system and putting crossroads everywhere then wondered why all my housing devolved randomly for lack of pottery or whatever.

What other civilisations could be good in an impressions type game? I think medieval times in England, France, or Poland. You have a good range of history to choose from with a lot of different challenges that could be interesting for city building setting. Mesoamerica and Mesopotamia could be good but recent games in those settings have been disappointing. Maybe renaissance Italy?

>>2331203
Medieval Europe would fit, you could even use different saints in place of pagan gods. Only problem would be the wonders would get boring only really having some cathedrals to build.

>>2331204
The saints idea does sound cool. As for monuments you could do castle as well but you could also make stuff like walls require stonemason's guilds. You want to wall your city in? That takes time and can be an achievement by itself. Other than that I imagine the military will take up most of the players time. Depending on the european kingdom you play you can have different units like England having good archers and Germany having good infantry.

One of the things I would be interested in seeing how well it works would be controlling the invasions of other places. Like in Emperor you could send an army to conquer a city but what if you had control that army? Another thing I would like to see would be to have tribute other than money, like every year instead sending 500 money away you had to give 500 pottery because that's what's expected of your city. Or in case of Medieval times what if you had a monastery on your land you had to sort of compete with/support. It could make demands and take land but it return you would have much higher kingdom ratings and other bonuses. If your city is friendly with other cities because of trade or gifts the invasion forces are reduced because other nobles don't want to attack you but you're hated foreign nobles will dogpile you. It's a shame we'll never get a proper impressions Medieval city builder.

>>2323607
>not including Zeus
pleb opinion

>Bumping dead thread from the bottom of the catalog, where discussion naturally ended over a week ago, using a weak bait at that
You were saying something about plebs?

>>2327875
What an utterly retarded statement.

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Alright, I admit the Pharaoh monument building sucks and it's entirely the fault of the level design or philosophy. I was on Heh and was sitting on my hands for years because of the monument. Everything else was good to go but I couldn't build the monument because the trade route to import sandstone doesn't open until later and then it's 1 trade route with a max of 40 sandstone per year and you need about 400 to complete the monument. Retarded.

>>2336744
Yeah, the monuments just take way too long. Even if you start laying the groundwork (literally) as soon as you get into the map. Building it will take much more time than achieving all other objectives and building a hands-off city. A lot of the missions I spent just at max speed, reading something on other monitor.
Also the stages aren't very interesting and don't require that much infrastructure to support. It just takes gorrilion stone/bricks, not even some complex production chain.

>>2331203
Japanese. I know Emperor is pretty much the same but I feel like if they pushed it further and brought back the gods being much more involved and real like in Zeus it would be cool.

>>2331203
I think Egypt is the best, and every single other one is "you need to focus extra hard on making their monuments as impressive building the Pyramids".
Like let's say you set it in Medieval Europe. Okay, focus really hard on making Cathedrals and castles a muli-stage epic undertaking, emphasize the awe of the monument and the labor that it took to build it.
A lot of games with monuments, Impression Games included, cannot match Pharaoh. It's about presentation, and the Pyramids just have it easier because it's an artificial mountain made out of limestone using only bronze age tools and mass human labor.

>>2323682
Unlike Zeus or china, they had 3x3 houses as well, and a 1x1 will grow into 2x2, 3x3 and then 4x4.

>>2338131
I just prefer how Emperor does it. Maybe things like gates and whatnot made it too easy to "program" ideal housing and distribution blocks, but it felt easier to control.

Holy shit I hate how tedious monuments are. There has to be a better way to make monument goals in these types of games. It's easy to get a good city up and running and you still have to wait like an hour for the dumb mounds of dirt to get dumped off and compacted.

>>2323614
exactly

>>2323682
Because Pharaoh has a completely different fucking system for housing?
Plus, as anon pointed out, you've got 3x3, too
If anything, Zeus shat the bed with 2x2 housing plots. Emperor would be much better if it had 1-4 plots, discarding Zeus' elite housing
>inb4 elite housing from Zeus is good

>>2331203
>Medieval Europe city builders
Patrician already exists
>Mesoamerica
What's the name of that game that started as one-man project freeware and is now a game on Steam? About Aztecs?
Pretty solid things
>Mesopotamia
Nebuchadnezzar came out years ago

>>2341848
Brigand: Oaxaca

>>2341848
Patrician is not a impressions style game though. It's a seafearing trader thing that's almost exclusive to ascaron/kalypso.

>>2341869
If you must have games to the single template, you might be retarded

>>2341848
>Nebuchadnezzar came out years ago
Huh I'd forgotten I own that will have to give it a go again some time

>>2327869
based take

I sat to finally play Zeus properly and even though I hate how simplistic it is and some of the level design choices are stupid basically requiring foreknowledge I love the citizen army concept and appreciate the temples mechanic in that certain wonders should be way more interactable. Sure a pyramid is static but something like an Egyptian mausoleum should have a huge impact on appeal around for 200+ squares, having the Grand canal should make it so you get some trade bonus. If you finish the Grand Pagoda everyone gets Buddhism access in the city. Hell maybe even having a big pyramid gives you a boost to kingdom rating/outsider opinion because they're impressed.

>>2335162
Emperor is Zeus but better, Pharaoh is Caesar but better. Emperor is admittedly much less of a straight upgrade than Pharaoh is over Caesar though. Zeus+Poseidon also had better missions all things considered.

>>2345723
>. Zeus+Poseidon also had better missions all things considered
Zeus had one of the worst missions in the whole series since C2 (which was just random map gen)

Gotta ask about this question here despite it not being all that much relevant.
Anyone knows if there was once a game alot like Pharaoh/Caesar/Zeus, but having you rule over some Mesoamerican empire like Aztecs or Mayans?
No idea what it might have been exactly but I am somewhat certain that it wasn't Theocracy from 2000 by Ubisoft due to it being too much of a regular RTS game with more emphasis on regular gookclick macro spam than Caesar-esque building zoning autism.

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>>2355248
>Anyone knows if there was once a game alot like Pharaoh/Caesar/Zeus, but having you rule over some Mesoamerican empire like Aztecs or Mayans?
Back in the day, no.
Nowadays, an Irish anon got a publishing deal on Tlatoani, which is that for the Aztecs.
>https://store.steampowered.com/app/3161270/Tlatoani_Aztec_Cities/

As far as genuinely old games go, pretty much no one copied them verbatim. There were some Maya here and there in different city builders, though. Like the ones in Settlers 4.
Of course that's an entirely different beast altogether.