Great Empires Collection 2

by Vivendi Universal

Product Features

• Collection of 5 famous role play games - Caesar III, Cleopatra, Poseidon, Pharaoh, Zeus
• Dozens of episodes and thousands of possibilities
• A compendium of challenge where you attempt to reign to mythical proportions

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00006FXJ4
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: August 27, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,350 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

This one box contains three complete games from Impressions Games' award-winning city-building series. Caesar III challenges you to create, rule, and defend an imperial Roman city of your own design. In Pharaoh, you erect monuments, manage resources, and wage war up and down the Nile. Cleopatra expands the gameplay of Pharaoh with new threats and structures, as well as four new campaigns tracing the careers of Tutankhamen, Ramses II, and Cleopatra herself.

Product Description

Great Empires - Collection II - Live through many great empires that dominated millenia and whose characters remain stars of our historic past. Survive and conquer by wit, strength, politics, strategy -- or die.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

74 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 3 and a half for the price of one, April 14, 2003

By 

Bruce Gray "gurpsgm" (Shenandoah Valley, VA, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Great Empires Collection 2 (CD-ROM)

I've always been a big fan of sim games - the ones where you build an entire civilization from almost the ground up. So when I found this great pack of three games from Sierra, I bought it with great expectations and was only slightly disappointed.

Great Empires II contains full versions of three games - "Caesar III", "Zeus", and "Pharaoh". Even better, the "Cleopatra" expansion to "Pharaoh" is on the "Pharaoh" disk, and the "Poseidon" expansion disc for "Zeus" is included as well.

Although, as many other reviewers have noted, no instruction manual is included, the in-game tutorials are more than enough for anyone wishing to try these games out. The interface in all the games is fairly similar, since they are all based off of the same game engine. The game play is fairly simple, but involving enough to interest those wishing to build their own Rome, or their own Greece, or their own Egypt.

Each game gives you plenty of scenarios to attempt, and also gives you a way to work through an entire empire, from it's virtually tribal beginnings to a huge ancient metropolis.

My personal favorite of the three is "Pharaoh". With the "Cleopatra" expansion that is included, it is easily the most engaging of the three empires. With this disc you can learn what it took to get the Nile River civilization off of the ground - from harvesting the crops produced by the annual flooding of the lands near the river to trading with and/or conquest of neighbors.

The others are also engaging if you don't mind a similar "feel" to your games - and that feel is primarily due to the interface provided by a similar game engine being used for all three games. Caesar III is a "sequel" of sorts to Sierra's earlier "Caesar" and "Caesar II". It allows you to attempt to build the Roman civilization from tribal beginnings to a city that needs such things as a huge Coliseum. The Zeus/Poseidon game is very similar - it allows you to build the Grecian civilization, but includes a nice touch - you now can control the Gods of Ancient Greece and get them to do things like help you wipe out your neighbors with plagues, famines, drought, floods, and other calamities.

If you like sim type games, this is a nice buy for the price. You can't beat three games and two expansions in one box. My only complaint is that they could have included the instruction manual on the disc as a way to help new players understand what they needed to do to win the game. Still recommended for those interested in managing an entire civilization - from its rise to its eventual fall.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hundreds of hours of gaming enjoyment, May 5, 2004

By 

"primewalker" (Springfield, VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Great Empires Collection 2 (CD-ROM)

The City Building Series starts, oddly, with Caesar 3. Caesar and Caesar 2 are sufficiently different that knowing how to play either of those games will not give you a clue as to how to play Caesar 3, Pharaoh, Zeus, or Emperor. The same holds true in reverse.

The best way to view these games, IMHO, is this:

Caesar 3 is the progenitor of the City Building Series proper. It featured the introduction of basic concepts such as labor walkers, warehouses, foreign trade, sea trade, and so on.

Notably, when compared to the rest of the series, it lacked roadblocks. Given that roadblocks were put in the subsequent games due primarily to fan demand, their absence in C3 is easily understood and forgiven (particularly since you can, with only a minor amount of effort, make city gates confer the exact same benefit to your city as roadblocks provide to the other games). And since it's still possible to build functioning housing blocks without either gates or roadblocks, the lack of them isn't a problem, and is more of a challenge to your designing skills.

Pharoah and Cleopatra took the basic C3 engine and added a vatload of complexity. It was still the same basic engine, but with many more features: Monument construction, seasonal farming, industries requiring more than one type of raw material, and riverborne combat with boats, to name just a few. The numbers were also adjusted to make the game more challenging than C3: each level of housing holds less people than housing of comparable level in C3. Thus, keeping your industries filled with employees became much more of a challenge.

Pharaoh (and Cleopatra) is considered by many die-hard fans of the entire series to be the most challenging of the 4 games.

With Zeus, the game engine was given a major revamp. Gone were the labor walkers, who needed to pass by occupied housing in order to acquire employees for a given industry. Instead, any industry on the map would find employees as long as it was connected via road to any occupied housing.

Also gone were the forts. If your city was invaded, your citizens poured out of their houses to defend the town from invasion -- with a concommitant effect on your industry. (When all your employees are out fighting the bad guys, there aren't many left to make olive oil.)

Elite housing was made in a new way. In C3 and Pharaoh, if you wanted elite, high-tax housing, you had to grow it from small tents and shacks. In Zeus, you were given elite housing plots, which you could simply plop down anywhere you wanted (assuming they would fit, and you could support them, and the desirability of the area was sufficient).

Zeus also introduced the episodic format of the series (something that I, personally, consider a bit of a step backwards). Instead of starting at the dawn of time and going through the game city by city until the final mission, you are given a series of episodes. Each episode may have you developing multiple cities, and returning to one or more of them at various points of the game. You might start off building Athens for a few missions, then switch to building a colony city (which will provide goods to Athens when you're done), and then switch back to Athens (which will be exactly as you left it).

There were many other adjustments made to the basic City Building game engine that made it almost (but not quite) a new game. However, you could still see the skeleton of the C3 game engine underneath the hood.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth the price even if you don't play everything, June 12, 2003

By 

J. Garlen "coolcatjuniper" (HUNTSVILLE, AL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Great Empires Collection 2 (CD-ROM)

A friend and I are both playing the games in this collection right now. She prefers the Egyptian themed games, Pharoah and Cleopatra, but I like the Greek games, Zeus and Poseidon, much better than the earlier installments. Our differing opinions show how other potential buyers might find some of the games in this set more entertaining than others, but with five games for twenty dollars, you are bound to get your money's worth out of the package even if you only like one game/expansion set.

I have played a lot of sims, especially "quiet" games that don't focus on combat (Zoo Tycoon, Roller Coaster Tycoon, The Sims, Dungeon Keeper, etc.), and I have to say that I find the Zeus/Poseidon games especially engaging. The agricultural and mercantile elements of city building are fascinating! I find that the AI in the Greek games is much improved over the earlier games, particularly in the way that building safety and maintenance are handled. In Egypt the buildings are much more fire-prone!

One minor quibble about Poseidon is that it lacks map variety, since most of the games are set in Atlantis. That round map with the water channels is very difficult to build on! I don't mind the challenge, but greater variety in the open-ended campaigns would be nice.

Overall, this is a lovely set and is well worth the price. If you like sims and city building games, this is a great buy. I particularly recommend it for women gamers like myself, who enjoy non-violent PC games.