What is it?
Compared to Pharaoh, the game is more stable, buildings devolve less quickly. Housing is now "common" or "elite" from the beginning, and houses do not grow in size. This system was actually introduced in Zeus. A nice addition are the residential walls, which cut off unfavorable influences from structures on the other side. The gates in these walls serve as more sophisticated roadblocks, letting you choose which walkers to block. Unfortunately, they are a bit buggy; if such a wall is immidiately next to a building, the game declares that the building does not have road access, in spite of the gate.
The Feng Shui system is a bit irritating. In the previous games, when you wanted to place a building it showed either red or green: red, you couldn't place it, green, you could. In Emperor it might also show up yellow: you can place it, but it's bad for the harmony. A city with bad Feng Shui has a higher probability of diseases.
The farming system is improved, one farm can now have different kinds of crops. Many other things didn't make it into the demo, you find them documented on the Breakaway Games page. As a bottom line, the game is certainly worth buying if you are into this kind of stuff, but there's nothing breathtakingly new about it, apart from the multiplayer.
- Sierra's Emperor Page
- Breakaway Games' Emperor Page is better, but slower to load.
- The Great Wall
- Emperor Heaven
| 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 | |||||
System Requirements
A Pentium II 400MHz, 64 MB RAM, Windows 98+, 800 MB HD space and a 4 MB video card (capable of displaying 16-bit color at 800 x 600). I'm not sure about the last point. 16 bit at this resolution are less than one megabyte, and I remember that the 2MB card that came with my first Pentium II had no problems displaying 1024 x 768 high color. But maybe the animations eat up so much. Anyway, it's hardly going to be a problem.
The Demo
Downloading the demo is a bit irritating. You have to give an email adress, than download a special manager. The manager might not even be such a bad idea, after all the demo has 127 MB, and it is quite impressive, it managed to get a download speed of 250,000+bps out of my cable connection, usually I have to settle for one tenth of this.
In a way, the demo is a lot better than that of Pharaoh. It does have a save function, and the help system isn't disabled either. The Pharaoh demo gave you two ridiculously simple beginner missions, and than a rather difficult one that spanned eleven game years. The Emperor demo leads you step by step into the game, being neither too hard nor too trivial.
On the other hand, the Pharaoh demo did give you a real taste of the full game, you had most of the buildings and got to build a monument. The Emperor demo does not. It is a rather watered-down version, giving you only a fraction of the buildings of the full version and no monument. Still, it's worth about twelve hours of gameplay, and you might want to replay it one or two times.
The Patch
First, a word of warning: Upon installation, Emperor writes to the Windows registry. These registry entries are not needed for the game to work, but the patch will not install if it does not find them. So, if you reinstalled Windows or moved the game to another drive in the meantime, you will have to go through the installation routine again if you want to apply the patch.
Predictably, scenarios created from the unpatched version will work under the patch, but not the other way round. A good part of the patch is mere bug fixes, but there are some enhancements, too.
The best new feature is that you can build monuments (except for the Great Wall, the Grand Canal, and the Underground Vault) in open play, just like you could in Pharaoh. And just like in Pharaoh, you are limited to three per map.
A minor enhancement is that you can include illustrations and custom music in user-created campaigns. User-created campaigns are now listed seperately in the menu.
In general, the patch is not a big deal.
The Flash Movie
On the Sierra page, there is a tutorial in form of a flash movie. It was obviously finished long before the game and differs in several details:
- Crops can be five tiles from a farmhouse, not three.
- There are different shops, but no market squares.
- The mill is four by four tiles, not five by five.
