Zeus: Master of Olympus is a city builder set in Greek mythology (and occasionally actual ancient Greek history). It has an expansion, Poseidon: Master of Atlantis, which introduces something strange but effective for a city-builder game: A second playable faction. Atlantean citizens have slightly different needs from Greeks, although in most cases it’s just a palette-swap. This also moves the action from Greek mythology to a blend of Greek mythology and Atlantean conspiracy theories. Atlantis is a pyramid-building civilization on a giant island in the Atlantic Ocean, and sail westward to the Mayans and eastward to the Egyptians, where their pyramid-building ways would influence both of these two civilizations to build pyramids of their own (because a lost trans-Atlantic civilization is required to explain how two completely different civilizations could’ve independently decided to tidy up the corners on a pile of stuff). Then twenty years later they released Hades, an isometric roguelike action game, which was a weird direction to take the series.
Poseidon is an expansion pack to an existing game, so its scope is pretty limited. It swaps out olive oil for orange juice, swaps out Greek culture buildings like theaters and philosopher podiums for Atlantean super-science buildings like observatories and laboratories, and it replaces the Greek stadium for the Olympic games with a hippodrome for chariot racing. The main draws of the expansion are filling in some holes in Greek mythology (in the original game’s twelve deities, for example, Olympian Hera is swapped out for Chthonic Hades – the expansion adds in Hera and Atlas, the latter mainly because a god of carrying things real good is actually very relevant to the game’s mechanics) and six new playable “adventures,” the game’s story campaign. The original game only had seven adventures, so six is a lot, and those are the main draw of Poseidon: There’s more Zeus. It’s an expansion pack, that’s what they were selling.
But the concept got me thinking about using Atlantis as the frame for a city builder game that spanned multiple different ancient civilizations. Sort of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate but for the Impressions city-builder series instead of Nintendo. The city-builder series also included Pharaoh, Caesar, and Emperor (the latter was for ancient and medieval China, which is casting a Hell of a wide net). Those three focused on history over mythology and I think they were weaker for it, so partly I’m just daydreaming about versions of those games that had mythology-based scenarios instead of sticking to a linear historical narrative and which are also accessible from the same menu. China and to a lesser extent Rome would be a bit out of place with the Atlantean frame story, but, you could have Mayan, Celtic, Norse, and Persian factions and it wouldn’t be any more anachronistic than the Athens adventure from Zeus setting the Persian Wars in the 9th century BC. You could rope in the Chinese (and the Indians, while we’re at it) if you went full Conan with it, having a world made of fictional expies for various civilizations that weren’t coterminous, because hey, who’s to say where the Po Dynasty and the Telleroi city-states are in relation to each other, I just made those up, I can put them wherever I want.
Mechanically, all these factions won’t be hard to design. Everyone’s food supply and resource extraction is going to be nearly identical, it’s only cultural buildings and exactly what goods people demand that will change the fundamental citybuilding. You also want some very different endgame projects with very different mechanics for each faction to help really set them apart from one another, even if it’s not super important for simulationist reasons if a Temple of Artemis and a Sphinx are basically the same. Making them have significantly different effects when built will make playing Greeks and Egyptians feel different, though.
There’s also some more fundamental resource differences, for example, Egyptians have more different types of farms and other things that are built on riverlands like clay pits, tying them very directly to the Nile, which means their cities tend to be packed around a narrow but continuous strip of useful land, while Greek maps have mountain meadows, ore deposits, and shorelines for piers to ship goods in and out all in different locations, and thus tend to focus more on connecting all these different resource nodes together – you need to ship food to your mines and trade piers to feed the workers living there, and ship bronze and silver from your mines to the trade piers to trade for whatever goods you can’t produce locally, and then ship those goods out to the meadows and mines to supply the workers, and then find some way to defend it all from enemy raiding parties.
Whereas an Egyptian city is surrounded by empty space that’s hard to find use for, which means both that you shove all your military buildings out there because they have way fewer continuous needs (you need to ship weapons and armor out there, but those aren’t consumed at a steady rate, so it’s fine if it takes a while), and that empty space also provides a defense: you have plenty of time to muster an army and meet an enemy in the field when they spawn at the edge of the map, Greek maps are full of sprawl and are more likely to build near the edges, so you need actual walls to slow an enemy down while your troops muster, especially since the least valuable space where you cram your military buildings in might be in the geographic heart of your city, a midpoint between the mountains, meadows, and piers.
But since that’s almost entirely in map design, we don’t need to build fundamental mechanics into the Greek and Egyptian factions to reflect that. We don’t need to ban Greeks from using clay pits and making pottery, just design maps where the clay deposits are usually made wet by seawater, so it’s not arable anyway, so of course you put your clay pits there, the land isn’t useful for anything else. If you put a Greek city on a Nile map, they would play much more similarly to the Egyptians, just with different endgame monuments and also it would be one of those maps where you have to import all your olive oil, but that happens even in Greece.
But while the mechanics for a game like this are quite manageable, the number of art assets would potentially be a much greater challenge. The Greek agora and the Egyptian market have basically the same mechanics, but you would still expect them to look different. The mechanics of Greek theaters and philosophy podiums might be basically identical to Egyptian jugglers and musicians, but that means it’s entirely on the appearance and sound of the buildings and walkers to distinguish the culture of the two. A lot of buildings are mechanically fully identical to one another, like a wheat farm or a maintenance post (used to prevent buildings from collapsing or catching fire), but the building still needs to look like it was built by Egyptians/Greeks and the people working it to show that it’s operational (as opposed to lacking resoruces, workers, etc. etc.) need to be dressed like Egyptians/Greeks.
Part of the reason why I wish I could go back in time and tell Impressions to make this game in 2002 is because they had a bunch of assets right in front of them: Pharaoh, Zeus, Emperor, and Caesar III all look pretty similar to each other, and it’s not jarring to go from one to another. A couple of assets might need a redesign to look good next to others, but even that shouldn’t be too common, because you don’t build two different cities of two different factions on the same map, so the only units from a civilization that will be seen in context of another are military units.
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