#mg-emperor

[mossquillgames]

04-05 - Emperor - First and Second Erlitou Missions

I think this is the last time you stay on the same map for successive missions...

youtube 04 and 05

This is a transitional tutorial. It starts with a lot of information and even a suggested map of how to plan the city which you’ll see me completely ignore, haha. I definitely tried it their way the very first time I played this map and found it difficult to manage actually. I should try it again sometime now I know things better but I find that it’s hard to build a good Elite Housing block on that hill. I have better luck using it for farms.

Things are pretty straightforward with these missions. I start out planning the space, they are right about the fishing, LOL. I otherwise I focus on making on making sure I can fit my common and elite housing on the main area and fit other things like farms and industry around that. Then it’s just a matter of getting everything up and running.

Since this map only gives me two sources of food, I know I’ll need to import food for the elites. They also need hemp, pottery, and silk. Modest siheyuan’s don not count as elite housing really. If you place an elite house and someone moves in it will become a modest siheyuan no matter what, in order for it to count toward the mission goals or for military matters, it has to evolve into a lavish siheyuan. No one is going to take a noble seriously until they have silk, at least.

Once you have nobles though...you’re gonna end up at war, haha.

we’ve made it so far as a civilization we now have armed conflict! I then have to set up the industries of war, and of course, the bureaucracy of war.

and that brings us through most of the early gameplay stuff. As time progresses there will be technological and cultural developments that build on all of this but this concludes the basic set up of the game.

[mossquillgames]

Emperor 03

this get a wee bit more interesting in this one! like the introduction of city walls which don’t turn up in other games.

The walls help with desirability a lot and make for nice neat planning. and they’re pretty. I do think they were a little annoying the first time I encountered them because they can limit how you expand and where you put things but I am not very used to them and actually really love them.

they also come with gates. Gates can be set to control some kinds of walkers but essentially keep goods and services confined to where you need them. So in a way it’s the gates more than the walls that really make the nice little neighborhoods.

In addition to the walls and gates, this map introduces pottery which as always requires clay from clay pits and kilns.

and then there’s the first interaction with the ancestral heroes. Instead of throwing the festivals, one pays homage to them. And instead of them then blessing your city with goods or protection or whatever, they...actually turn up.

as in this mission, sometimes one of the requires will be paying respect to the ancestors enough that they will walk in your city for a certain number of months. This requires surplus resources, especially of a valuable nature, to offer to the ancestors. The heroes themselves can be useful, especially when a map requires exotic animals but we’ll get to that later...

[mossquillgames]

Emperor 02

and here is the next tutorial mission for Bampo! it’s...still particularly unexciting but we do introduce how farming works.

youtube

farms! I am absolutely not gonna go off on a tangent about the domestication of millet, which, you are probably grateful for. but anyway, Farms in Emperor involve not just a building but also field squares that have to be placed around the farm. You can also build them more or less anywhere on most maps but the grassy places have better fertility so you’ll see me avoid the less green places as we go on.

in addition to millet for food, there’s hemp for textiles. The hemp is what is actually going to make the houses evolve in this case, though different housing in Emperor requires more variety of food. Bland food, for example, is food from only one source. A granary has to have the required number of sources for the food quality when the market buyer goes there for the houses to have access to the right variety of food.

to have hemp access, in addition to growing and storing the hemp, there needs to be a hemp shop on the market square.

that’s basically it for this map, there’s the gardens which help with desirability but this is another quick mission.

[mossquillgames]

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom Overview

this is the final of the three ancient city builders I played back in the day. Emperor came out on 2002 and I diffidently did get it until after 2003 so this one I played in college. It’s my favorite and the one I’ve played the most.

This one is the most visually different and also has a number of changes in gameplay. I also really enjoyed the cultural/history since ancient China wasn’t covered as well in school.

In terms of gameplay, a there are some major differences. The graphics are also a little different. The requirement for buildings to gain access to the labor pool by having walkers pass houses is removed and there’s even more control over resource storage. Another major difference is the city walls and two types of housing. In the previous games, there was ultimately pressure from ratings to have more homogeneous housing than really makes sense for how stratified society was. With Emperor even when your ‘poor’ housing is at it’s fanciest, your nobles have their own housing with it’s own levels. There are separate requirements for them and you aren’t required to supply everyone with the same goods and services.

It’s also exciting to move through the different metal technologies. I think that there’s more of this moving through the ages in Pharaoh that I just never got through, but the Roman empire is on a much smaller time scale than Egypt or China.

The city planning is further influenced by feng shui, one doesn’t have to understand the principles at all, merely accept that you want more of your buildings to be placed in spaces where they’re green than yellow. This doesn’t make much difference really as it’s easy to do this enough that the feng shui is acceptable, I have never ever had be a problem. But it does influence some decisions I make because getting a good grade in placing buildings is both reasonable to want and possible to achieve in this game.

I have actually won this game more than once!...only on very easy and maybe easy though so eventually I’ll bump up the difficulty and it may be more of an issue.

[mossquillgames]

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom 01

I skipped the ‘just build some houses and roads” tutorials for Caesar and Pharaoh but with Emperor it’s a little bit more complicated because you revisit the same map for three tutorials in a row. As such I’m just starting at the beginning and this first go at Bampo is....very not exciting. That said, Emperor is the most different of the three of these I’ll be playing so let’s get into that...

youtube here

One big difference in Emperor is for the market works. In Caesar and Pharaoh, the market is a single building that buys and supplies food and various goods. In Emperor it’s an area upon which shops for specific things can be placed. It’s also where entertainment is centered.

It has two entrances/exits but I only make use of one, placing it at the end of a row of houses like above. The reason for that is that I found using both was trickier to plan around correctly. I may try to revisit that some time now I have played more, but for now I’ll be sticking to these sort of corridors of housing.

Another big difference, arguably the biggest difference, is that in Emperor labor isn’t accessed by every building sending out a walker to see if there’s houses nearby. Housing is ultimately walled off though that comes up later on. This makes city design very different. And to me, more fun. In some ways it’s more realistic, and in others less so, but in terms of the game itself, it’s a feature I quite like. If you’re not familiar with Caesar and/or Pharaoh this will not make much sense nor matter in the slightest.

As usual, the first three things people want are water, food, and religion though they also need building maintenance. Above you can see a well from which water is carried along the road giving the houses clean water, an inspector’s tower that keeps buildings from catching fire or collapsing, and an ancestral shrine. Eventually there’s multiple religions to juggle but not for centuries yet.

Housing evolves and holds more people depending on what goods and services are available to it. Buildings that provide these, like the well, the shrine, or the shops in the market square, all have send out walkers that have to follow the road past the houses for them to have access.

here’s a food shop and granary with some meat in it. Once the food shop keeper goes to collect the meat, the houses have food. One interesting thing though is that if you click the market square it will tell you what food is being served, both in terms of the overall quality and even specific dishes. A neat little detail.

a quick little mission!