What is it?
Pharaoh was the first City Builder game that got an expansion pack: Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile. It is not only an add-on, but also a sort of patch.
New Features
- Cliffs
- Funny that nobody ever mentioned that. They are used for some of the new monuments, but apart from that a nice addition to the landscape.
- New monuments
- Tombs to build into the cliffs, in four sizes; the colossi of Abu Simbel; three special monuments for Alexandria.
- New industries
- connected with the new monuments. You can farm henna and process it to paint, used by the artisan's guild; you can make lamps out of oil and pottery. Strange enough, oil can only be imported.
- Zoo
- Basically a nice idea, not much was made out of it. It needs game meat and straw to function, provides additional diversion and nobody wants to live too near. I would have liked to acquire the animals somehow, as implemented later in Emperor.
- Catastrophes
- Locusts, hailstorms, frogs, or rivers turning to blood might plague your city, because the gods are angry or because the game designers wrote them into the mission scenario. On the whole I could do well without them, but I know lots of gamers love this kind of thing.
And now for the additions and changes in gameplay:
- Four new campaigns with fifteen missions in total. Monuments, money, and troops sometimes carry over between these new missions. Some have to be finished within a time limit, some are "survival" missions that require you to last a certain time even if the goals are completed earlier.
- You have access to all the missions individually from the beginning, including those from original Pharaoh.
It is a matter of preference if you want to play the campaigns or go for free play and custom missions. I do recommend the last campaign, Cleopatra's Capital. Here, you can have five monuments in one city, and most of them really become part of it. It is not possible to carry over monuments between custom missions, or have more than three different ones.
| The City Builder Series | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Caesar |  |
 |
 |
VGA |  |
92 |  |
||
| Caesar II | |
 |
SVGA | |
95 | |
|||
| Caesar III | |
|
98 |  |
|||||
| Pharaoh | |
99 | |
Expansion Pack: Cleopatra | |||||
| Zeus | |
00 | |
Expansion Pack: Poseidon | |||||
| Emperor | |
02 | |
multiplayer support | |||||
Reviews
- Cleopatra Review by Gary C. "Mo" Morgan. Detailed description and lots of screenshots.
