Customer Reviews

Great Empires Collection 2

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

They finally got it right with Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom. But, these games, the precursors, are still great fun if you're into city building. They just require a bit more micromanagement. This facet annoys me a little, but I'm so drawn to the Egyptian and Greek and Roman themes that I keep going back and trying to overlook that.

Unlike erroneous reports previous, this collection DOES include manuals in PDF format on the CDs. In fact, once you install the games, there are shortcuts installed in your start menu to take you right to the manuals. No software company is stupid enough to rerelease a game, even a budget title, without some sort of manual.

So, do not fear! All the instructions are here. Set yourself up for a long night of city building!

I haven't bought this set and these reviews haven't been really helpful, so i did a little research. As suspected this title inculdes Caeser III, Pharoah, Cleopatra (expansion to Pharoah), Zeus, and Poseidon (expansion to Zeus). I've played all these titles seperatly and I absolutely love the series. This set is a FAR better deal than buying the titles individually. This is a real bargain if you ask me ;-)

"Caesar III" is a best-selling, top-rated historical city building game that established the genre seven years ago. It lets you run a city in ancient Rome. It was so popular that "Zeus"/"Poseidon" for cities in ancient Greece and "Pharaoh"/"Cleopatra" for cities in ancient Egypt soon followed.

This collection is an excellent deal to get the three Caesar III, Zeus, Pharaoh games and the two Poseidon, Cleopatra expansions. Each culture has a different theme treatment for landscapes, buildings, characters, goods, interactions with other cities etc.

Game play ranges from easy to difficult depending on what scenarios and difficulty levels you choose to play. Game help is available in the player menus. Even better help is available free from online fan sites offering strategy guides, walkthroughs, and faqs.

If you like these games, check out also the modern game treatment ("Sims2"-like zooming 3D landscapes and characters) now available for ancient Egypt in "Children of the Nile" (reviewed separately) and ancient Rome in "Caesar IV" (due Fall 2006).

A gamer from USA is correct that there are no instruction manuals, however, I called Sierra Technical Customer Service and the Cleopatra expansion is on the same disk as Pharaoh. Upon further inspection I found this to be true.
These are some of the best City Building type games available and instruction manuals and game guides can be found on-line. Don't let their absence deter you from purchasing this excellent collection!

I love this package of games. If you like civilization you'll l love this game. It has most of the same features but with a more user friendly interface that makes it easy to figure out what to do, so you're not spending so much time trying to figure out how to play and more time accually playing. I found it to be quite addicting and I would loose track of time while playing these games.

All three of the games Pharoah, Caesar III, and Zeus are basiclly the same game just different cultures. And the expansion packs Cleopatra and Poseidon didn't add much to the game.
The editor that came with the expansions really suck, they are too hard to understand and way too many things to mess with except the things I want to mess with. All in all it's just to difficult for me to be having fun. Now the game itself is pretty fun but there is NO good sandbox play. If I could do it over I would NOT have spent the $25.00 on this.

I love the collection of games. loved them when i ran win2k... With vista the cleopatra expansion does not work, not even in older modes availiable. thank you not microsoft and you unwillingnes to support older software fully.