After finishing off my latest Paradox Interactive binge (Hearts of Iron 2 this time), I sat down for some quality time this evening with a game that I hadn't played in years-Titled Mill's Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile citybuilder. They recently reacquired the rights to this game, pushed out a huge free patch, and slapped up a fully patched up game on Steam for 20 USD last week.
I did the quickie tutorial to refresh myself with the game mechanics and jumped right into a scenario. I had forgotten just how brilliant and evolutionary the design of the game is-unlike most games of the citybuilder genre, it has a strongly holistic approach where the game revolves around your citizenry and their desire to want something more in life than living in hovels and foraging for food every day.
Your cities start out modest-a small abode for your pharoah, peasant farmers to plant fields that your pharoah personally oversees, and simple middle-class shopkeepers to sell goods to the farmers. The farmers come from the aforementioned hovels, coming to your city in the hopes of a better lot in life. The shopkeepers come from the ranks of former farmers, not content with a life of simply toiling in the fields until they die. The food that the farmers harvests acts as currency in the game-the farmer will give some to his pharoah, and keep some to both feed his family until the next year, and use some as barter with the common merchants to get their crafted goods. Later on, you'll need to establish a landed nobility to help you manage the larger farmland, attract intellecuals to provide clerical and public services, and so on.
What makes the game so compelling is the way that the citizenry goes about its business in a logical way. For example, in the common shopkeeper house, the man and child of the house gather the raw materials from the surroundings, and the woman crafts the materials into goods and tends the shop-in addition to doing all of the shopping for the household (which is the same structure as the house). Now, if the goods in the shop don't sell enough for some reason (say, too many shops or not enough inflow of raw materials to keep up with her capacity to work), then the household has no food. When this happens, the man and kid in the house go foraging, and if that keeps up for long enough they abandon their business, since it's a better lot in life to be a well-fed farmer than a bankrupt, hungry shopkeeper.
Bidirectional class mobility in your game? talk about BONERTOWN.
Similarly, a very successful business will hire servants (paying the food they get from barter) to do the gathering chores, and then send their kid to school so he can have a better life as a scribe, military commander, or priest. One of the coolest things though, is the nobles. You need them to manage the farms since your pharoah can only oversee so much personally. They will try to cheat taxes and are decadent fucks-they will hire "entertainers for banquets", a PC-correct way of saying they are holding huge orgies-constantly adding new shit to their estates like MAF buys DVDs and needing ever-increasing income to feed their decadent capitalist lifestyles. Eventually their house of cards can collapse if not taken care of, and when this happens usually a well-off merchant from the middle-class in your community will rise to the nobility. Again, class migration-how cool is that in a video game?
I don't want to sound like the game is just some interesting Maxis-style simulator with lots of interesting stuff going on and no payoff,becuase there are solid victory conditions and challenges that help place a solid, targetable victory point for the player.
I can't help but strongly recommend this game to someone who likes something like SimCity, Anno/Settlers, or the old Impressions Citybuilder games (Caesar 3, Zeus, Pharoah), or to anyone who really appreciates a holistic touch to game design and just wants to see a great example of it in action in lovingly crafted detail.
