Kobal2 posted:

That's kind of an issue with Pharaoh and to some extent Emperor as well : the games are really bad at making the average player understand the full scale and span of time.
In Pharaoh, you'd come back to the same city some generations down the line - in that sort of timeframe it was really not out of the ordinary for small villages to be swallowed by the sands or abandoned because the houses were turning to poo poo or the soil was getting poor. But it's OK because this was before landlords so you'd just pick up sticks and build a whole new village from scratch a few kilometers up or downriver - take about a summer to do so, while nobody's working too hard.
In Emperor you sometimes pop back into your old cities and outposts entire *dynasties* down the line... and nothing has changed, everything's still there. The architecture of whatever New Stuff you've unlocked since fits right in with the Old Stuff that's literally centuries old at that point.

My point is : history is very, very long and humans (or at least their fashions) change very, very fast in comparison. But you couldn't really tell playing those games. That's one thing Ancestors does better - between your starting hunter-gatherers in leather tents & lean-tos and your bronze age fortified farmers armed to the teeth, it's night and day both visually and in terms of gameplay/strategy/primary concerns.

Although IIRC there is one pair of missions in Emperor that does convey Time better. The Great Wall saga. Your first effort is to build a giant ditch & wall of rammed earth. By the time you come back, this time to build a section of the Great Wall proper, all that remains of your original effort (and it was a monument that took ages to build !) is a few sections of vaguely elevated mud.