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More involved economy, game play, and prestige

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 39 / 40
Date: January 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Includes: Campaign with 15 scenarios, several free play “sand box” scenarios, and 3 stand alone (combat heavy) scenarios “Sheshonq’s Redemption”, “The Hyksos Pharaoh” and “Son of Ra”. Also includes a seriously complex editor that can even take geophysical terrain maps (they’re free on the internet) and use them for your scenarios. There is an active community already making new scenarios that you can download over the internet for free.

102 items in your economy that your people can harvest, make and sell. Active night and day cycle as well as the seasons effect the landscape. Different social classes. The most difficult to obtain workers are educated elites (ie people who can read and write, enabling them to work at a distance without supervision), but the most productive.

Very complex World Map. The Hard scenarios trade multiple items per city but if you play only the easy scenarios you’ll only see one item per trade partner.

After you get the farming and goods economy going in your city you start to actively build monuments: Pyramids, Mastabas, Obelisks, Stellas and many statues (Of course Sphinxes. I like the Bast statues best myself) that increase your prestige. For the easy scenarios you can ignore building monuments and still win… but your city will then be boring and you’ll twiddle your thumbs a lot with nothing to do, and never achieve any prestige as a Pharaoh.

You want to build pyraminds and other monuments to make yourself famous, but also because they just look great placed in your city. The graphics at ground level are just gorgeous, and taking a screenshot for the web is just hitting cntl-F9 at any time. There are many, many gorgeous pictures of the Moon rising over Pyramids or the sun setting in a red sky behind tall Obelisks (think building multiple Washington Monuments in a line) on the Tilted Mill web site from players. Your Nobles also want tombs for their eternal rest, so building a creepy sprawling necropolis is part of what keeps your people happy. Egypt without tombs isn’t Egypt.

The battle scenarios are pretty clearly marked, but this is no twitch game requiring a 12 year old’s reflexes. Equipping, training and supporting an army is significantly more expensive than just raising a village of farmers happy to own bed mats. And the new editor allows realistic reasons why you’d want to raise an army: Their success or failure actually changes the world economy. Enemies build forts, raid cities, close trade routes to important goods like gold and turquoise mines. But combat is optional (Absent really form the Easy scenarios) and often the storylines also allow another way to succeed (in “Pi-Ramses” a timely bribe to an enemy army captain keeps you from having to fight) Also the lockstep one battle one city limitations of Pharaoh are gone. Winning a battle can set multiple triggers at once –defeating an enemy can mean a whole new frontier of cities to explore opening up, multiple new trade partners suddenly appearing, or sometimes just multiple new sections of the map appearing that need to be explored by your Envoys. The easy scenario Djedu is silly but still a likeable favorite –your build a fleet of ships in Lebanon to sail out west to the Atlantic, circumnavigate Africa, and eventually return by the Red Sea, At each stop they make they discover new trading partners who then join your economy.

The free demo is helpful for getting used to the yummy 3D view and how to navigate through the game, but it suffers (as all tutorials do) from leading you by the nose in a very business like way of teaching you how to use the controls. The actual game is fun. The demo… is about teaching you how to play the game, and not 10% as fun as the full game.

City Builder: The Next Generation!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 23 / 25
Date: November 07, 2004
Author: Amazon User

There's a kind of game called "city builders" that started with Sim-City years ago, made a big jump in something called Caesar III, and continued on through Zeus and Emperor. You build... well, CITIES... but it's fun and they're historical in cool time periods etc.

Children of the Nile is the inheritor of this tradition but it's made a big jump. It's 3 dimensional, people-oriented, thought-provoking, scenic, engaging, and FUN. Think "Sims3 meets Pharaoh" and you're sort of in the ball park.

If you've never played a city-builder, try this one. If you've played city-builders and have been looking for something new and next-generation, try this one.

Strangely, it seems to unify adults and kids in its fascination and interest. Am currently tussling with my daughter (11) over playing taking turns :-). Make no mistake, it's fun enough for kids and teens but sophisticated (and fun) enough for demanding adults.

surprisingly cool

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 20 / 20
Date: November 15, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Picked this up over the weekend after gamestop ran out of RCT3. I have to admit that I've been surprised by what I first thought was just going to be simcity egypt. After going through the tutorials (good luck if you don't), it's easy enough to get a sizeable city going, but building pyramids requires planning and strategy, which I've found to be challenging and fun.
The depth of gameplay here is really refreshing. Although it can take a while to see results with some of your larger projects, I spend most of my time zooming through the city and figuring out what's happening on the street level--like a huge ant farm. I didn't play Pharoah, but I'm already pretty deep into this one. Graphics are great--not Unreal3 or anything--but perfect for this style of game.

A great game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 18 / 18
Date: November 11, 2004
Author: Amazon User

If you liked the old impression city builders you will love this one too! Amazing graphics of your city now fully in 3D so you can walk with your people on a leisure stroll or look at them while they do every days work. You can here them talk as there are more than a thousand lines in the game!

You can do so many great things like building pyramids with a totally new infrastructure system that doesn't need roads. In the older games you only had the walkers to upkeep the infrastructure but now you got famalies with three people in each and a lot of them and all these people will struggel every day for food and goods they need.

At first this gameplay seems a bit strange but if you play it a bit you will easy attach and will see that it is very interesting to layout a city that doen't depend on roads like in the old games but on a more flutend structure this time.

You can build fantastic monuments and wage war aggainst opponents on the world map and by this achieve great your place in egyptian history!

I do very like this game and play it every day as it offers me every time something new.

Children of the Nile is a good game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: December 13, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I heard that people were having trouble understanding the recently released game Children of the Nile, so i got it to see what all the fuss was about. Immediately, I noticed the immense complexity of this game, with its almost esoteric understandings of how a real city is maintained: the wide selection of buildings and societies to construct, the connection between economy and the seasons, and the self-sustaining animated people that roam around your city shouting out their likes and gripes about how you're running the place, all make this game seem almost real. Although this makes the game seem frustrating and overwhelming, it can be easily digested by just simplifying it all in your head. I.E.: Don't try building the pyramid as soon as you control a stable civilization, carefully plan ahead: Do I have enough supplies to build it? Do I have enough workers to build it? Will I have enough supplies after the construction is complete? Etc.
I enjoyed this game very much, with no real difficulties in the tutorials and the first campaign. It's true, this is a hard game, but it wouldn't be much if it were easy. It has all the real life components in running a city, which separates itself from other games such as Age of Empires and Commanding Conquerors, which are so concentrated on fighting and destroying other cities that they leave out the key ingredients to a good real time game: the actual city. No doubt most of the readers have played one of the SimCity games. Just apply the skills from that game to this new awesome version of those games set in ancient Egypt. I don't think it can get much simpler.

Best fun since I started playing games

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: February 19, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I hadn't really tried city building games much before this came out (I never seemed to get on with SimCity and gave up), but this is my favourite game after the Stronghold series. I love watching the city develop over time and, although I like a good battle now and again (which is why I like Stronghold), it's nice not to have combat as the main purpose of the game. At last someone has realised that no all of us want to spend all our gaming time bashing someone's brains out!
I enjoyed playing this so much I actually purchased a gold edition of Pharaoh, but boy do I wish I hadn't! I've gotten so frustrated with it that I've taken it off my machine. If you play Children of the Nile you should never want to go back to ramdon (irritating) walkers and roadblocks.
I've had no problems running the game on an Acer Aspire computer that's two and a half years old and I found the manual and tutorial gave me a good grounding to get on with the game. I do agree that the scenario editor is formidable; I suppose it's because of the 3D side of things, but I've looked at it once or twice and couldn't make head nor tail of it. As for moans that women only shop, well quite a few of them actually work as well (common craftshops, entertainers, farmers and servants).
I have had a few people occasionally getting stuck, mostly incoming traders, but that's a minor problem. I just wish the scenario editor was easier to get along with because I want more, more, MORE!
Thank goodness, Tilted Mill are tackling Caesar next. With this package it should be a winner.

An awesome game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: August 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game about a year ago [ironically, I got it through a school "book week" thing]. The first time I played it, I played the first tutorial, and then the second, and so on. I quickly learned how to play. I would reccomend that this game be played by ages 12 and up [even though the "E" rating is appropriate for ages 6 and up] because the game is fairly hard. The way you place homes and facilities greatly affects the way people act. For instance, you should place Brick Makers near a plentiful supply of clay, Brick Layers halfway between the work site and the Brick Makers, etc. Overall I give this game a good review.

Good Sim

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: December 22, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I've played many sim programs, and Children of the Nile is a good example of a well designed and implemented sim game.
There are many different goals involved in the campaigns, each requiring a different approach to your civilization building to attain them. Scenario goals can involve prestige, trade, politics, religion, conquest, etc... either alone or in some combination. COTN does not run itself, it's a hands on, micro management type of sim where the player has to constantly evaluate and adjust all aspects of the game to keep everything on an even keel.

I disabled some of the "gee-whiz" graphics (my vid/sound card is just 256MB) and got good gameplay speed, without sacrificing the visuals... even running at max game speed.

The AI and logic behind the game is excellent. As you try different strategies, you can see the results... good or bad. The more you play, the more successful you are at controlling the game and meeting the goals.
I reccommend COTN highly, for a good test of strategy development, plenty of "civ" managemnt, and... hours of fun.

Very Good!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 6
Date: April 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

3D is sooo much nicer than 2! This game was great1 Of course it takes longer to do things- it's more realistic. Buy it-it's worth it!

I love it lots

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 3
Date: August 26, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Holy #@%& this game is cool! I love how it is cool, interesting, fun, challenging, informative, and really awesome. It is very different from Pharaoh in that in Pharaoh, the people are mindless drones, you have a solid mission, and it is not as detailed as CotN. In CotN, you can do what ever you want, your people are intelligent, you can make a more realistic city, and you die. My only complaints would be there is now instruction manual on the Editor (where you create scenarios), you never fight battles in your city, and the World Map is not as detailed. Otherwise, this is a totally great game.

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