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I should qualify the 1-star

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 15
Date: November 10, 2002
Author: Amazon User

The demo version of the game is very good but be forewarned when buying the retail version: I and many other customers have had problems installing and/or playing this game! The Emperor website has a forum where users can share their experiences and many, including myself, have vented about our inability to run the game based on the minimum system requirements. Be warned: if you have the minimum system requirements for Emperor, that may still not be enough. I have more than adequate resources to run the game, but the intro movie is the only thing that will play, then my monitor goes blank and its lights all begin blinking. There do not appear to be any patches in development to address user concerns at this time. I am not the only user who has experienced this frustrating problem. I'm returning my copy of the game and will try something else.

Don't bother

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 24 / 37
Date: February 24, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I've been playing the Sierra City-Builder series since the first Caesar. Change the graphics in Emperor and you have any of the following: Caesar III, Pharaoh, Zeus. The same problems that plague the user in the earlier 3 games are made even worse here ("dumb" walkers that force the user to make unrealistic and repititous road patterns, supplies going exactly where they are needed least [how does Sierra do that?], farms not functioning because cart walkers bypass empty warehouses to use the one furthest away, etc, etc.) The gods in the game are annoying. You have to remember to give gifts every few months, which can be a problem if you're trying to accomplish something and you concentrate on that instead of remembering the gods. And the game doesn't tell you which god you last pleased, so you had better have a good memory. It's not that there's any real point to the gods in terms of playing the game--they're just a distration. And as for the Feng Shui, well, let's just say that if you ever ran out of useable land in the earlier games, you're in for a real treat here. The manual is pretty to look at, but useless for gameplay. If you don't already know what you're doing, don't count on the manual to explain it; and if you do know what you're doing, you've already played this game, so don't waste your money. In spite of the manufacturer's claims to the contrary, this game is not much more than the other city series games with new graphics. After playing a few maps, it is little more than building the same housing grids over and over and over again while trying to look for places to put the buildings you need to reach the map's goals. Instead of fixing the problems with the older games, Sierra has just invented new ones. Bottom line: if you have Caeasar, Zeus, or Pharaoh, you already have Emperor.

Beautiful but Pedantic

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 12
Date: October 13, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I have been a long time fan of the Settler series of games where you build your city and economy to conquer the world and it is perhaps because of my fondness for Settlers that I have reservations about Emporer.
Coming from the Settlers series, I do not find the commands instinctive or easy to learn. There are far more necessary elements to make your city run smoothly and it can get a bit complicated. The tutorial is awful. It loads at the beginning of the tutorial campaign but to continue you must close it and unless you've read far enough into the text, it isn't obvious how to bring the tutorial instructions back up. While it attempts to try to break the necessary learning into managable chunks, the pictures provided on where you are suggested to put houses, mills, warehouses, etc. are small and frustratingly limited. The result is that when you move on to the next section of the tutorial you can find out that you have made some significant design errors in the previous section which will prevent you from easily completing the next section. As there are many sections to the tutorial, the problems can increase greatly as you progress.
The city designs are grid oriented, everything deals with a standard square. I personally prefer the more organic layout of the Settlers series than this enforced grid pattern but that is a matter of personal taste.
There are many beautiful elements to Emporer which is primarily the reason I haven't given up on it entirely. At New Years, if you have the necessary supplies, you can permit your people to have a celebration which is fun to watch! I really enjoyed watching the New Years' dragon parade around the city.
I'd suggest that you download the demo and give the game a try before deciding to purchase it. Some will find it wonderful, others may find it beautiful but pedantic.

Emperor: ROTMK - Good Graphics - Not a War Strategy

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 5
Date: January 19, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I liked the evolvement part of City Building, but after playing for hours, I get bored because the aspect of adventure and war gaming is not there. Can't expect to be a best game, but it will only last one / two round of play.

Interesting genre but derivative and repetitive game

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 9 / 9
Date: October 29, 2004
Author: Amazon User

As other reviewers point out, there is plenty that is right about Middle Kingdom. I won't bother repeating what they have said. Instead, I will state why I am not impressed and not addicted. There are two main reasons for this.
Firstly, this game is a rehash of older games with new graphics. This game feels almost exactly like the last member of the series that I played - Caesar III. Since Caesar III, the games Zeus, Poseidon, Pharoah and Cleopatra were all released, yet even after all that, this is almost entirely the same game I purchased in 1998.
Secondly,the game quickly becomes repetitive. I was bored with the same old same old before I even cleared the Shang Dynasty (the first historical one and the first one that is not simply represented as a tutorial in the game). Cities need more or less the same things and so you do more or less the smae things each time. There may be twists - one city might need to import hemp, another might be able to smelt bronze and turn it into bronzeware for export, but that still doesn't add a lot of variety. There is, thankfully, a campaign mode with set missions. This helps. A bit. But since one must mostly just rehash familiar steps to complete the missions, and since what you do in one missions doesn't have much influence on what you do in later missions, this too gets repetitive. Also, you can build armies and send them away to conquer other cities in China, which, again, is a step in an interesting direction. But you don't get to see the battles and you don't get control of enemy cities or resources - the best you can do is to extract some tribute.
The game badly needs to give the gamer some purpose other than just knocking over missions. A very simple optional wargame element would help tremendously. Building an army would be a lot more meaningful if you could take it into the field, position it according to the terrain, and guide it to victory. Fancy graphics and a keen AI are not needed - just something to give you the feeling that you are crushing your enemies instead of just being informed that they got crushed. Another thing that would help tremendously is the ability to control more than one city at once. This would allow for the addition of a strategic element of battling for land and resources as you rise from a lowly village chief to be emperor of all China - you could still build city after city as in the present campaign, but each city would mean something in the long run. Again, the strategic engine would not have to be complicated to add a lot of flavour and interest to the game - the meat of the programming could still lie almost entirely in city-building. Think of how the Total War series benefits from its strategic element, despite the fact that all the serious work went into the battle system.
In short, Emperor has a fascinating engine that could be built on and used as the basis for a great game. But it hasn't been.

Wrong Title .........

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 5
Date: April 25, 2007
Author: Amazon User

As a Native Speaker of Chinese and as a Chinese Myself, I am confident to say
that "-"(Chinese characters meaning China) means Central Kingdom not "Middle Kingdom"

Not as good as Zeus

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: October 19, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is an inferior version of Zeus. Although both games share the same basic principles of agriculture, housing, industry, distribution, religion, and arts, Zeus had a much lighter touch and thus was more entertaining. Emperor does not have as rich a voice acting portfolio as Zeus and instead of humorous voice portrayals like the John Wayne cavalry and New Yorker inspectors in Zeus, you get very tedious, borderline offensive Chinese accents in English. (Additionally, pronunciations of Chinese words are almost always wrong outside of the main intros.)

Like Zeus, combat has many bugs, which sometimes threaten to frustrate the player into giving up. For example, if you launch an invasion, an opponent will sometimes see this as a great opportunity to attack you. Fair enough, but what's stupid is when said invader is the city you are going to attack! And the two armies blithely cross pathes and you get defeated because (ha ha) you have no military. Or worse, the tendency for a defeated city to IMMEDIATELY and repeatedly rebel. Sometimes they will rebel, presumably because you are "weak," when you are returning from conquering them. Just awful and tedious. Also, the computer controlled cannons are like incredibly virtuosos with pinpoint accuracy, but your own cannons seem to be completely ineffectual. Also, sometimes your invasions will fail for no reason, and the program gives you mounds of weapons. I can only imagine that this is because for plot reasons the programmers don't want you to win yet, but they don't want the rigged outcome to damage you too badly.

The same factors that led me to become obsessed with Zeus way back when, the fun challenges of figuring out optimal housing and distribution, etc., are in play here, so all is not lost. However, the distribution system is so dumb sometimes, it boggles the mind. Suggestion for future games: provide different settings for accepting goods from industry and other warehouses, and for distributing to industry and other warehouses.

As a stand-alone game, Emperor would be quite commendable. But as a successor to Zeus, it is a step backwards.

Good Game, May Get Better With Updates

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 28 / 29
Date: September 17, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I downloaded the demo of this game, and thoroughly enjoyed playing it, so I went out and bought the full version. Having played all the games in Sierra's city-building series, this one takes its style after Zeus/Posiedon and raises the bar a bit. The interface is easy and intuitive, so users familiar with the other games will recognize it immediately and total newcomers will quickly adapt.

My only complaint is that I found there was a conflict between this game and Pharaoh/Cleopatra from the Great Empires II collection. Emperor uninstalled Pharaoh/Cleo before it would install, and vice versa when I tried to reinstall Pharoah/Cleo. I checked Sierra's forum, and apparently they are working on this issue now and hopefully it will be fixed with an update.

The campaign editor works like the one in Zeus/Posiedon, but seems a bit buggy on my screen. (Maximizing it helped, but it still ran pretty slow.)

The online campaigns are what sets this game apart, and I was able to play online without any problems. I'd say this game is worth buying, just keep your eye out for updates from Sierra.

Intoxicating and Rich - Like a Chinese Sunset

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 19 / 20
Date: March 22, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Like Pharoah? Caesar 3? I have played most of the historical sims, and Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom competes well. The graphics are even better than Pharoah, as are the food types and interplay between your citizens and yourself. If you enjoy Impressions' other City Building Series games, you will be able to drink deeply of this exotic elixir. I find it fascinating to sit back and watch the mulberry tree farmers raise silk worms, harvest them, and then send them to a weaver to be turned into beautiful, exotic fabrics for trade. (A great way to put $ in your treasury!)

Remember: These City Building Series games are not high on military play; the real action comes in developing an efficient, thriving city via excellent planning and strategic trade pacts. The military forces you create in E:ROTMK are primarily used for defensive purposes, so if you are a war gamer, instead you might want to spend your $ on Shogun Total War: Warlord Edition (historical Japan).

One problem: Unlike Pharoah, I have been unable to find a way to control allocation of labor via a central screen. In Pharoah and C3 you can prioritize your labor, but not so in E:ROTMK. Other than this slight oversight on the part of the Impressions team, this is a fun and engaging addition to the excellent City Building Series.

The Best Of The Series - But Nothing New

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: November 13, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Ive been an avid fan of sierra's city building series since ceasar 2 - and each game keeps getting better (as it should be). The question is - better enough?
Here's the low down on the Sierra city building series games: Caesar, Caesar 2, Caesar 3, Pharaoh + Cleopatra expansion pack, Zeus + Poseidon expansion pack, Acropolis (which is Zeus and Poseidon in the same game), and now Emporer: Rise Of The Middle Kingdom.
Many of the micro management problems that plagued the series up until Zeus have been ironed out. The wagons still take the long route around, but there seems to be a lot more control with the warehouse/mill options and roadblocks than before.
The Gods/Goddesses system has changed, as it has in every game since Caesar 3. Now you have only a few religious buildings that can cover several "heros", and Seirra sure came up with a good solution to getting rid of all that excess produce - you can now give it away to the heros (everything but cash) to improve your rating with them (increasing the likely hood they will appear in your city). There is a pleasant improvement of the system in Zeus here - now you can actually control the heros. You can choose which buildings they should bless, animals they should capture etc.
The capturing animals for your menagerie is a nice little touch, but nothing more. It is yet another means to get you to be forced to interact deeply with other cities - whether through military means (conquering them) or peaceful (showering them with gifts). Aside from capturing animals on your own land, this is the only way to get animals. The cities have to like you a whole bunch. Some scenarios you have to have like 10 different animals, and its get tiring. Also, it would have been nice if you could have bred the animals or something and given them away as pets. But you seem to be limited to 1 type of animal only.
The production system is pretty unchanged from Zeus - aside from the types. You can now harvest laquer, silk from silkworms, hemp (woohoo), soybeans, rice and a bunch of other Chinese themed things you can think of.
The graphics are not much improved, unfortunatley. Sure they are cute little characters, but they aren't different enough to the ones before them. Just based on the graphics, this could have been an expansion pack to Zeus. In fact, it seemed to be that some of the cute little touches of the people moving around on the buildings had lost its cuteness. Not as much effort seemed to go into the little things, graphically.
Gone is the laborious building of temple after temple in Zeus - here you at least get some variety with the great wall of china, canals, temples, burial chambers (tumulus), and underground vaults (to name a few) on various missions. But its a bit irritating - you can only see what materials are needed to complete a phase in a project, not all the materials. You can kind of figure it out logically, but sometimes you get shocked by "8 pieces of carved jade, 4 weapons" demends, especially with the burial things.
The battle system is still pretty basic, but now you can choose between some different chinese fighting styles and some new units are introduced. Gone is the tedious rabble vs high class troops, now the number of forts you can place just goes by population like before. But its not exactly an improvement, more of a deprovement or something.
Overall, Emperor is fun and money well spent if you've always loved games like this. But it breaks no new ground for the city building genre. It is basically a continuation of the same thing.

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