Back in the 90s and 00s, Impressions Games made historical citybuilder games. I mainly played two, that being the Egyptian themed Pharaoh and the Greek themed Zeus: Master of Olympus. Zeus is much better. Why, though? The only major difference between the two is their art assets. Other differences are numerous and non-trivial, but converting Pharaoh to Zeus’ mechanics would’ve been more the realm of an expansion pack that a sequel. And yet, these relatively minor mechanical differences add up to Zeus being a much better game, which makes me sad because sometimes I wanna build a cool desert city. So what are the differences that made Zeus better?
The first difference is worker allotment, and this is something that the re-release Pharaoh: A New Age updated to match Zeus. This bugs me, because it’s one of the smallest frustrations of Pharaoh and even leads to some greater verisimilitude in your city-building. In Pharaoh, when you build a building that requires workers (which is nearly all of them), a little recruiter guy spawns and starts walking down the road looking for nearby residential buildings to get employees from. In Zeus, residential buildings add workers into a global pool which other buildings pull from automatically, with no recruiters and thus no need to keep your residential areas anywhere near your buildings. This makes it easier to construct resource outposts on the other side of the map to do things like make some silver mines right next to a silver deposit or build some docks for trade wherever the river’s straight enough to allow for it. But the only thing you need to add when doing that kind of thing in Pharaoh are a few zero-level peasant houses. You can give those guys some food and water if it’s convenient and that’ll cram a few more of them in there, which helps increase your population, which is generally a good thing, but it’s not necessary. You just need residences within range of the worksites.
Pharaoh-style worker allotment means your city has lessened (though by no means eliminated) emphasis on making a great city for your little digital citizens. At most levels of optimization, you’re going to have some shantytowns that exist to house workers in remote or cramped areas where it’s not practical to build all the infrastructure. In Zeus, having any housing below max level is a waste of space – you could be cramming a higher population, and therefore a larger workforce and tax base, into that space if you dropped an extra warehouse nearby with instructions to gather up fleece and olive oil to upgrade the housing. In Pharaoh, if all you need is a gold mine out in the middle of the desert, it’s often more efficient to shrug your shoulders and not bother shipping out pottery and beer.
The Zeus method is definitely better at making the game more satisfying, but the Pharaoh method makes your cities look more like real, imperfect cities. I could be talked into preferring either one depending on my mood.
But definitely the Zeus method is superior if you insist on the Pharaoh campaign structure, because the second difference is that Zeus has a set of eight “adventures” split into 5-8 “episodes” each. Each adventure sees you build a primary city and establish 1-3 colonies. The colonies get a single episode each and you generally only build them up to a population of 1,000-2,000, less than half the size your main city will grow to, and usually ignores certain aspects of citybuilding entirely (sometimes enforced by disabling the mechanics completely, other times strongly encouraged with limited space and access to resources but you can import the missing goods if you really want to). It’s rarely worth bothering to build up a colony’s military infrastructure, for example, and while you might want one or two temples to different gods (building temples is a huge deal in Zeus), the limited scope of a colony encourages you to think more in terms of “how many temples do I need?” while the attitude in the main city is usually more “how many temples can I have?”
Your main city will give you pretty free access to critical goods like olive oil or fleece allowing you to make a mostly self-contained city, but colonies might require you to import them, thus placing a constant strain on your economy that will probably require exports to counterbalance.
In Pharaoh, the game is split up into four different eras, a tutorial Archaic period and then the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom. Each era has 8-12 different episodes, and each episode sees you building a city mostly from scratch. Some of these are similar to Zeus colonies where you have humble goals on a map with tighter constraints, others are similar to Zeus parent cities where you have difficult objectives but a map overflowing with resources to meet them with. Unlike in Zeus, however, you don’t retain the same main city over multiple episodes. You’re starting from scratch every single time.
In Zeus, you go into the last episode of the first adventure with the objective to defeat a number of treacherous former allies in a climactic war that requires you to have the military industry necessary to sustain a long campaign (it’s the first adventure, so it’s not super difficult, but you do need to interact with the military mechanics competently). You do this with the same city you’ve been building since episode 1, so instead of building the whole city from scratch, your focus is immediately on ramping up military production. In Pharaoh, a similar episode will drop you on a map of completely uncultivated Nile farmland and you start by stamping down a basic population block and some farms to feed it. The first 30-45 minutes of every map feels repetitive as you lay down the basics again before you can advance far enough to interact more directly with your objectives. In Zeus, while colony maps have you building a city from scratch (often under resource constraints) and each adventure does have its own city so that you do have to start over from scratch several times, the frequency of the resets is much, much less.
Third, in Zeus your housing is split into two types, common and elite. Common housing is always a 2×2 tile, elite housing is always a 4×4. In Pharaoh, housing begins at 1×1 and gets bigger as you provide more services, and switches from common to elite when it upgrades from 2×2 to 3×3. There are also a total of 20 levels of housing in Pharaoh where Zeus has 11 (12 if you count the abandoned elite housing if you’re unable to sustain their minimum requirements). Each level of housing in Pharaoh has escalating supply requirements in basically the same way as Zeus, but in addition to goods from a market/agora and culture/entertainment, Pharaoh fills in the extra nine levels with access to places of worship for different gods, and access to additional services like the dentist, scribal school, mortuary, physician, courthouse, and library. Higher tiers of Pharaoh housing also require multiple different types of food, whereas in Zeus different food types are harvested differently (i.e. a fishery must be adjacent to water, a farm must be built on arable land, etc.), but once harvested they are interchangeable.
The huge amount of additional buildings required to make a max tier common block in Pharaoh means you’re much more vulnerable to a problem I refer to as “Ancient Egyptian/Greek stupidity.” In these city builder games, goods and services are distributed by walkers who are spawned by certain buildings, walk a certain distance, then return. For example, when you build a physician, the building will spawn a physician who will walk down the road and provide physician services to every house he passes. Where the problem comes in is that walkers select which way to go at intersections randomly. Including choosing randomly whether to go left or right when spawned. If any of the walkers from the dozen or so different buildings you’ve constructed to serve your housing block decide to turn right and walk past all the other service buildings instead of turning left to walk down the housing row, the housing will eventually devolve from lack of services until that building finally spawns a walker who will turn left.
These housing blocks built on a line are basically untenable in Pharaoh, and instead you are basically required to build housing blocks based on loops, with houses on the inside of the loop and services on the outside, so that walkers will walk past the whole loop regardless of which direction you choose and you don’t end up facing food riots because the market peddler keeps trying to deliver groceries to the dentist instead of people’s houses. It’s not like it’s super hard to make a loop-based housing block, but it’s very frustrating to learn this somewhere around the mid-game of Pharaoh when you’ve unlocked enough services that line-blocks become untenable, which you realize only after a housing block collapses from lack of a crucial service while a fully functional building that provides that service is ten yards away, because the walker from that building has been refusing to turn left for nine months. I want to like Pharaoh’s more complex housing requirements necessitating more resource management, but making loop-based blocks is now permanently enshrined in my brain as a necessary reaction to the sheer stupidity of the citizens I’m supposed to be caring for. If walkers alternated routes every time they spawned, it would be a massive improvement.
Relatedly, Pharaoh follows a historical progression which means you slowly unlock more buildings as technology advances through the different scenarios, whereas Zeus orders its adventures purely in terms of difficulty (which is not to say that Pharaoh doesn’t follow a reasonable difficulty curve, just that the Old Kingdom scenarios are all of low-to-moderate difficulty even when you’re facing down the apocalypse, whereas Zeus has a more mythical timeline where the exact order of events doesn’t matter, even though there is a chronological order based on the starting dates). This means you’re constantly being handed one more building to squeeze into a city block. In Zeus, you have basically everything unlocked by the midpoint of the first adventure. Zeus still has an irritating habit of leaving buildings locked until partway through an adventure, but at least it only takes two or three episodes to unlock the full set (minus whatever resources are permanently unavailable on the map, necessitating they be imported instead).
Fourth, temples versus monuments. I mentioned that building temples to gods is a big deal in Zeus, but it’s a much smaller deal than building monuments was in Pharaoh. Egypt’s monumental constructions are famous and a lot of Pharaoh missions, especially in the Old Kingodm, revolve around dumping obscene amounts of resources into building a monument. Once you have your economic engine up and running it’s only a matter of time before you win, and often the constraint on the monument’s completion is not your population or your wealth, but how many clay pits you can cram into the available space, which means you can’t really accelerate construction by expanding in all directions. I would expand in all directions anyway, packing the map in with industries whose main purpose was makework for the massive workforce I built up purely because building new housing blocks gave me something to do while waiting for the fucking pyramid to finish, but it didn’t accomplish anything. Rereleases fix this by having pleased gods accelerate the construction of the pyramid by some percentage by pure magic, so keeping the gods happy with festivals now advances monument construction as much or even more than pumping more bricks into the work site.
In Zeus, though, temples are just reasonable construction projects to begin with. Even the temple of Zeus, the largest construction in the game, doesn’t take that much time and resources. It’s hard to make apples-to-apples comparisons between the two games and their slightly different resources, but my recollection is that a temple of Zeus was about as much trouble to construct as a low-tech mud brick pyramid in Pharaoh. It makes sense on paper that you’d want the construction of monuments in Pharaoh to be a huge deal that you have to bend your entire city towards, but it’s not actually possible to bend much of your city towards that effort, because ultimately only a very small chunk of the map has the right terrain for clay pits or limestone quarries. I recall that the Pharaoh mission for the pyramids of Giza took me somewhere between 80 and 100 in-game years, which I remember because it was longer than a human lifetime but not quite a century. Complete Zeus adventures don’t take that long. My city was undoubtedly poorly optimized, and I’m running from memory so I can’t remember how poorly optimized, but I doubt it was significantly worse than what you can expect from an average player (and this was an Old Kingdom mission, so it’s not like it was supposed to be the ultimate test of your logistical skills).
And fifth, though this one is only mentioned for the sake of being thorough, Zeus has a completely different system for how gods and heroes work. In Pharaoh you throw festivals to honor gods in exchange for citywide bonuses, in Zeus you build a temple and the god will actually come live there and come out to wander around your city and bless relevant buildings they happen across. Zeus has monsters to show up and menace your city and heroes you can summon in exchange for a bunch of resources (and other, pokier requirements) to slay them. Zeus is about ancient Greece and Pharaoh is about ancient Egypt and the way they treat their gods is somewhat different. This difference didn’t make Zeus better, but it is a difference, certainly.
So what made Zeus better than Pharaoh? Zeus had 5-8 episodes following a single city, while each of Pharaoh’s 40-50 missions required you to start a city from scratch, which pads out the length of Pharaoh with a lot of stamping down the same basic housing block over and over. Missions that revolve around specific and extreme resource shortages can be one-off colony missions, while those about major military confrontations or building a very large and prosperous city can be part of a chain that all use the same city, so that “build a very large city” will be starting from where you left off in the last mission “build a somewhat large city” instead of starting you from scratch to do the same thing over again.
Zeus’ simpler housing blocks made it easier to power through ancient Greek stupidity, while Pharaoh’s greater complexity in housing requirements meant that you had to be a master of accommodating the Kemitic inability to act on complex commands like “turn left.” Ideally I’d like walkers to cycle through different routes instead of choosing randomly at each intersection thus making the extra housing requirements more about managing supply chains in a tangled nest of city streets and less about making it impossible for your citizens to make any decisions because they will inevitably make stupid ones, but failing that the Zeus method of making it so easy to deal with that it rarely comes up is preferable.
And finally, the temples in Zeus were reasonably quick to build, although in Pharaoh’s defense they did patch in a fix for this one, if a somewhat clunky one.
The mission structure in particular would require an extensive rebuild of the game to solve while also being easily my biggest complaint, which is unfortunate. I like ancient Egypt and I wouldn’t mind a Zeus-style game set there, but Pharaoh doesn’t deliver.
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