|
 Don't ask me why I keep starting up new threads around major holidays - it just sort of works out that way. The Historic Perspectives saga continues with Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom. The last in the line of Impressions city builders is a fine game which I am very grateful to SA for suggesting as part of this series, and the last good game Impressions ever made (Lords of the Realm III wasn't horrible, but it wasn't good and it killed one of my favorite series). Published by Sierra in 2002, this is just old enough to be borderline retro at this point. IMO it's the best of the Impressions citybuilders, the others being Zeus, Pharoah, and Caesar. I sucked at them as a younger version of me; along with the historical focus we'll be looking to rectify that here. Emperor covers thousands of years of Chinese history, from the prehistoric dynastic era to the climactic invasion of the Mongols under Genghis Khan in the 12th century CE. If you want to more about the game, I've found Emperor Heaven to be an invaluable resource. People still make fan-created campaigns for this game almost two decades after the fact. Style VLP with historical asides here and there as I did with Dawn of Man , the first game in the HP project. Schedule Roughly weekly, but we'll be switching back and forth between representing China among the ancient empires here and Egypt in Egypt: Old Kingdom. Settings All of the Historical Campaigns, IIRC 48 scenarios in all. We're going to be here for a while, though only the first couple of dynasties will be in this phase of HP and we'll get to the rest of it later. This will be a challenge run here leaning into the puzzle aspect that I find most entertaining about Emperor. Specifically: ** Very Hard difficulty, the hardest available ** 100% Perfect Feng Shui, with no clearing trees to make that easier ** Going into debt is not allowed ** All appropriate minor quests must be satisfied In the event there is a scenario in which I am unable to satisfy these conditions, those will be given an asterisk (*) Saga The tale of ancient China. As they say about a journey of a thousand miles ... Xia Intro + Shelter and Sustenance (19:15) Seeds of Civilization (10:21) The Good Things (15:34) Trade and Commerce (22:09) Erlitou's Elite (1:05:05) Men of Arms (31:50) Shang Start of a Dynasty (32:17) Along the Wei (40:22) A Temple for Tang (39:44) Walls of Zhengzhou (46:41) A Move To Yin (39:31) Valley of Rice (1:37:04) A Tomb for Lady Hao (50:01) Chaos and Carnage: A Broad Perspective on the 'Late Bronze Age Collapse' (23:20) Zhou Hao & Wei (1:11:32) Salt Mines of Anyi*(1:05:47) Edge of the Ordos (51:49) Spring and Autumn Weather (1:47:59) New Ways (1:04:15) Iron and Earth (1:39:00) King Cuo's Temple (1:04:49) Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Jun 11, 2022 |
#
?
Dec 23, 2020 16:50
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 6, 2024 18:03 |
|
|
 Intro + Shelter and Sustenance (19:15) At the start of the Xia dynasty, we must found the settlement of Banpo - which emphatically was not part of the Xia dynasty, if there even was such a thing. Nonetheless, we learn a few basics about how the game works and how to shelter and feed the common folk. We'll be hanging out in Banpo for the first few tutorial scenarios.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2020 16:52
|
|
|
I’m gonna be following this with interest. The Impressions city builders are fun enough games to play, but they get kind of repetitive later on, so I’m keen to see how you keep things interesting!
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2020 21:17
|
|
|
I'm glad to see this series continuing!
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2020 01:16
|
|
|
I enjoyed this game a lot, though my old computer died with my saves roughly half-way through the campaigns. I look forward to the LP.
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2020 01:34
|
|
|
I actually think Zeus/Poseidon were the best games in the series. There are several aspects I quite like about this game, but it's not as good as Zeus in quite a few ways. I'll still be following you for this, I actually never bothered to do some of the later missions.
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2020 14:41
|
|
|
Torrannor posted:I actually think Zeus/Poseidon were the best games in the series. There are several aspects I quite like about this game, but it's not as good as Zeus in quite a few ways. I'll still be following you for this, I actually never bothered to do some of the later missions. Seconding all of this tbh. I'm pretty terrible at these games which is why I always played them on 2nd lowest to middling difficulty, but I love the gameplay and as a whole what they represent.
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2020 15:04
|
|
|
I never played any of these games but I always wondered what they were like so this seems like a great way to find out!
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2020 16:04
|
|
|
DoubleNegative posted:The Impressions city builders are fun enough games to play, but they get kind of repetitive later on, so I’m keen to see how you keep things interesting! There are some new abilities pretty much all the way through the game, but that's also part of why I'm going with the perfect feng shui approach - that keeps me from just using the same exact housing block over and over again, small tweaks at least are needed from map to map. Torranor posted:I actually think Zeus/Poseidon were the best games in the series. There are several aspects I quite like about this game, but it's not as good as Zeus in quite a few ways. I'll be curious to know what those are as we go along. I know a number of people are partial to Caesar, but I didn't know there were still big Zeus fans out there. mydad posted:my old computer died with my saves roughly half-way through the campaigns.  . That's a lot of lost progress.
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2020 17:54
|
|
|
Torrannor posted:I actually think Zeus/Poseidon were the best games in the series. There are several aspects I quite like about this game, but it's not as good as Zeus in quite a few ways. I'll still be following you for this, I actually never bothered to do some of the later missions. I would have agreed if Zeus/Poseidon had included something even remotely like the Feng Shui mechanic. Being forced to improvise and do strange things with building placement rather than copy/pasting your favourite Good Blocks map after map is really what the Impressions games needed. I know it's mostly flavour and optional and you can more or less ignore the mechanic ; but honestly if your city isn't 100% Feng Shui at all times do you even Celestial Mandate bro ?
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2020 17:54
|
|
|
Strategic Sage posted:
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2020 19:42
|
|
|
This is pretty neat, I had Zeus back in the day and knew of Caesar, never realized there was a game in this mold for Chinese history.
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2020 21:59
|
|
|
Ah sweet! I loved all the Impressions series although I was absolutely terrible st them. Caeser was my jam, though. I must have dumped dozens of hours into that.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2020 07:40
|
|
|
I loved Caesar and Pharaoh back in the day - and I must have sunk a lot of time in the latter. For some reason, I couldn't get into Zeus or RotMK as much. Caesar is a bit of a frustrating experience: houses evolve whenever their needs are met (and my working class gets replaced by a lazy class, and a whole city shouting "more workers needed"), and those employment-seeking walkers just go out everywhere. Pharaoh had some options to finetune it, at least. Going to RotMK and Zeus, I missed the progression from small tents into luxury housing - plopping down luxury residences outright felt like cheating.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2020 11:06
|
|
|
Agricola Frigidus posted:I loved Caesar and Pharaoh back in the day - and I must have sunk a lot of time in the latter. For some reason, I couldn't get into Zeus or RotMK as much. Caesar is a bit of a frustrating experience: houses evolve whenever their needs are met (and my working class gets replaced by a lazy class, and a whole city shouting "more workers needed"), and those employment-seeking walkers just go out everywhere. Pharaoh had some options to finetune it, at least. Going to RotMK and Zeus, I missed the progression from small tents into luxury housing - plopping down luxury residences outright felt like cheating. There's actually an active modding community for Caesar 3 - there's a mod, Augustus, that introduces a lot of later games' quality of life improvements into the game and fixes some bugs and limitations (like the map object limit). And they're all togleable, so you don't *have* to use them if you don't want to.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2020 11:16
|
|
|
Agricola Frigidus posted:Going to RotMK and Zeus, I missed the progression from small tents into luxury housing - plopping down luxury residences outright felt like cheating. Huh. We'll get to that in a few scenarios, but the requirements for elite housing, the support you need to give them, the much lower population density - they're expensive enough that I don't know why I would ever build more of them than I need. They just serve a much different purpose than common housing. Seems like a pretty balanced system to me. Deadmeat5150 posted:I loved all the Impressions series although I was absolutely terrible st them. Caeser was my jam, though. I must have dumped dozens of hours into that. This was me also. I wanted to be good at Caesar because it interested me, but it was too different from other games I'd played so I just botched it repeatedly and eventually gave up.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2020 15:25
|
|
|
Agricola Frigidus posted:I loved Caesar and Pharaoh back in the day - and I must have sunk a lot of time in the latter. For some reason, I couldn't get into Zeus or RotMK as much. Caesar is a bit of a frustrating experience: houses evolve whenever their needs are met (and my working class gets replaced by a lazy class, and a whole city shouting "more workers needed"), and those employment-seeking walkers just go out everywhere. Pharaoh had some options to finetune it, at least. Going to RotMK and Zeus, I missed the progression from small tents into luxury housing - plopping down luxury residences outright felt like cheating. It was pretty easy to control which houses turned into noble houses though. And yeah, being absolutely unable to control the flow of walkers was pretty drat infuriating (and led to some absurd optimized blocks)
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2020 16:06
|
|
|
Kobal2 posted:It was pretty easy to control which houses turned into noble houses though. And yeah, being absolutely unable to control the flow of walkers was pretty drat infuriating (and led to some absurd optimized blocks) I've seen people jokingly refer to wine in Caesar 3 as uranium, because it turbocharges your economy if you use it right, and leaves your city looking like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion if you don't know exactly what you're doing with it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2020 17:02
|
|
|
Strategic Sage posted:Huh. We'll get to that in a few scenarios, but the requirements for elite housing, the support you need to give them, the much lower population density - they're expensive enough that I don't know why I would ever build more of them than I need. They just serve a much different purpose than common housing. Seems like a pretty balanced system to me.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2020 17:03
|
|
|
You absolutely do get tons of money from them. The most basic noble housing taxes 5 times as much as luxury apartments, and 10 times as much as elegant dwellings which consume an identical amount of non-food resources per year. However, on most maps, you don't really need them beyond their intended purpose. Fun fact: The common populace economy actually scales better in some aspects on the hardest difficulties. Because you get less workers per house, but the same amount of taxable population, raising both wages and taxes to max of what you can get away with will actually net you a very generous profit marging on very hard, and a noticeable loss on very easy. On lower difficulties, making noble housing for income is necessary if your trade income can't compensate this loss, while on higher difficulties, they end up being redundant, in addition to being generally harder to keep supplied.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2020 17:18
|
|
|
Oh man I remember playing this as a kid - I think it was the first city builder I'd ever played and I definitely appreciated it more than Zeus & Poseidon. I think it was to do with the Feng Shui mechanics and upgradable wells & towers that make me like it more than the other games, no idea why though.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2020 22:58
|
|
|
my dad posted:I've seen people jokingly refer to wine in Caesar 3 as uranium, because it turbocharges your economy if you use it right, and leaves your city looking like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion if you don't know exactly what you're doing with it. Pretty true to life, too. Makes u think.
|
|
#
?
Dec 26, 2020 01:50
|
|
|
Nice timing. I caught up to your Dawn of Man series recently (thank you youtube x2 speed). I'm looking forward to this.
|
|
#
?
Dec 28, 2020 23:28
|
|
|
Glad it worked out for you, though hopefully next time it doesn't take me over two months in between to give you a chance to catch up  . my dad posted:You absolutely do get tons of money from them. The most basic noble housing taxes 5 times as much as luxury apartments, and 10 times as much as elegant dwellings which consume an identical amount of non-food resources per year. However, on most maps, you don't really need them beyond their intended purpose. Poil posted:give you a lot of tax income. I haven't done looked up the math so I don't know if the money you get from taxing them is more than what you'd get from trading away the consumed resources however. Perhaps it'll change later, but so far I've found that by the time I'm ready to tax, I'm already making a profit with trade. So really it just serves to let me finish up the mission sooner or throw money in the treasury I'll never need at that point. .
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2020 03:45
|
|
|
Strategic Sage posted:Perhaps it'll change later, but so far I've found that by the time I'm ready to tax, I'm already making a profit with trade. So really it just serves to let me finish up the mission sooner or throw money in the treasury I'll never need at that point. . It's more of a freeplay thing. In scenarios, "get X useless, hard to please nobles" is treated as a challenge ; whereas when you're doing open sandbox you approach the problem from a more "OK, I'm selling everything I can possibly sell and nobody can buy anything more from me. I still need more cash to break even, how do ?" angle. There's usually no need to even touch patricians/mandarins/zeus rich fucks if you can still milk out more from trade, conquest, or conquering to force trade. Taxing the cocks off large quantities of social parasites is the next logical step once you've done that as far as you could.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2020 19:30
|
|
|
The trick with nobles is to plan them out ahead of time, and plop down some basic estates on the cheap when you start taxing your people (which is usually about the time your regular dudes start needing the same stuff the basic nobles are asking for)
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2020 20:43
|
|
|
I've always found the nobles really easy to please in this game. But I've never played above hard difficulty so I don't know if they get a lot crankier.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2020 20:58
|
|
|
The only solution to nobles is to put them in a room attached to a magma chamber. Wait... wrong game. Principle still applies.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2020 23:31
|
|
|
Poil posted:I've always found the nobles really easy to please in this game. But I've never played above hard difficulty so I don't know if they get a lot crankier. They're just as easy/hard to please in every game - all they need is a list of foods, goods and distractions in a particular order. The trick is that usually maps and scenarios are structured so that each new need in the list is a headache in itself ("alright, now, furniture. Hmmm don't seem to have the artisan building unlocked yet so who sells it ? Ah, only those guys who hate me, perfect. So, how many armies do I need, how much metal, horses, horse feed, how many smiths TO BUY FURNITURE ?")
|
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2020 00:33
|
|
|
Kobal2 posted:They're just as easy/hard to please in every game - all they need is a list of foods, goods and distractions in a particular order. The trick is that usually maps and scenarios are structured so that each new need in the list is a headache in itself ("alright, now, furniture. Hmmm don't seem to have the artisan building unlocked yet so who sells it ? Ah, only those guys who hate me, perfect. So, how many armies do I need, how much metal, horses, horse feed, how many smiths TO BUY FURNITURE ?") 
|
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2020 01:45
|
|
|
Poil posted:The lack of ability to control walkers as well in other games makes it harder, and if it requires upgrading regular housing all the way to palaces. So it is easier. In the earlier games that have houses evolving all the way from poo poo shacks to McMansions (as opposed to being two separate housing types) you can strictly control upgrades with statues. A row of statues and gardens and poo poo between lines of 4x4 houses will make it impossible for them to randomly glom up into mansions.
|
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2020 04:45
|
|
|
I had so much fun with Caeser 3 back in the day as a kid, but I was also objectively bad at it. I ended up having Pharaoh somewhat later but didn't really get into it. I look forward to seeing the ultimate implementation of the series as well as seeing you steamroll it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2020 04:49
|
|
|
This is one of my favourite series and I'm always stoked to see new LPs of it.Strategic Sage posted:I'll be curious to know what those are as we go along. I know a number of people are partial to Caesar, but I didn't know there were still big Zeus fans out there. From what I've seen, Pharaoh tends to be the favourite of a lot of die-hard fans, but I'm another one whose favourite is Zeus. Its goofy narrations and voicelines, tranquil soundtrack, bright and cartoon-y visuals, and relatively easy gameplay compared to the rest of the series make it an incredibly chill and comfy experience. There's something so satisfying about finding the perfect sancutary spot where it will both turbocharage your industries and look cool. Plus Poseidon's aesthetic options are ace. Funnily enough, Emperor is maybe my least favourite of the classic line-up (i.e. Caesar 3 - Emperor). The game polished the mechanics to a shine, but IMHO the scenario/map design is at its weakest here, and that ends up having an arguably bigger impact. I've always meant to check out custom campaigns for the game, since I'm sure there's a lot they could do.
|
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2020 15:03
|
|
|
Seeds of Civilization (10:21) Banpo adds agriculture to it's former hunting and foraging ways, pushing us into Neolithic times. Both of our starting crops were not only quite important historically, but are very much so in the modern world as well.
|
|
#
?
Dec 31, 2020 19:45
|
|
|
That was really, really quick. I appreciate the historical context you gave for those crops.
|
|
#
?
Dec 31, 2020 23:15
|
|
|
Thanks - I'm sure there'll be plenty of longer scenarios in the future, esp. once we get to the megaprojects.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2021 12:42
|
|
|
Wow Im glad I found this, I played the poo poo out of this game when I was little but sadly I was also like...10 and completely garbage at it
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2021 13:38
|
|
|
I don't think I've ever used the watertable view myself. As long as it's grass and green it's fine, right? The briefing talked nicely about millet and then just went oh and there is hemp too I guess.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2021 15:44
|
|
|
A nice thing about the way agriculture works in the game is that you have a sort of an organic transition between low and high intensity farming. Early on, when you have the entirety of the map to use, but labor is precious, you place down farms with max arable land assigned to each, getting the highest amount of crops per worker. As you start to run out of usable land, you can start doing more intensive farming, replacing some cropland with extra farm buildings and using more workers to increase your yields per tile until you eventually reach a point where you're squeezing out everything you can out of your available arable land.
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2021 01:24
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 6, 2024 18:03 |
|
|
I have an unabashed love of Pharaoh; I cut my teeth on Caesar III, but Pharaoh with its Nile farming model and Monuments really attracted me like nothing else. Some day I'll play the fan remake of Caesar III, which is called Augustus. It requires the original Caesar III assets for reasons of copyright, but I still have the original CD in my bedroom! Also: I do love how it carries your city over between missions in the same place. That was an issue with Pharaoh's Cleopatra DLC, even if it did keep the monuments. Quackles fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Jan 3, 2021 |
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2021 09:13
|
|
