Children of the Nile is the more modern version of the old citybuilders like Pharaoh And Zeus, allowing you to build a city in ancient Egypt. Some of the more modern things are, aside from the obvious graphics being different, that you no longer need to worry about intersections sending your supply and maintenance people entirely the wrong direction. You can now actually focus on building a city, rather than having to puzzle out the most efficient way to place buildings without them collapsing, catching fire, and starving because the food vendor doesn't show up there.

Citizens in your city are in a class society. From top to bottom, they are the pharaoh. That is you, and your family. You have a palace, and your family goes out to collect any sort of material, be it luxury goods or a humble pot to store things in. You are the state. All food belonging to the city also belongs to you, but you will always have a nice supply of food stored away in your palace. Pharaoh gets first pick, and a percentage of all food farmed in taxes.
Just below you are the nobles, who live in large houses and get their income from the farmers under them, and in order to support a large farming population, you will need nobles to guide them.
Under the nobles are the educated elite. Priests, scribes, overseers, and commanders of the military. They have similar demands as nobles in terms of luxuries, but they are paid by the government for their services. Only the sons of nobles and luxury shopkeepers qualify for education. These are the doctors, the administration, and the tax collectors. Because nobles will try to dodge paying taxes, a scribe can catalogue how many fields have been sown so that you know exactly how much belongs to Pharaoh.

Under them still, the middle class. Entertainers and shopkeepers. These earn their bread through their services and the goods they sell. Simple, but neccesary for society to function.
Below them, the peasantry. Farmers and servants. The farmers work the land and earn enough food to last until next harvest in doing so, and the servants do the shopping for nobles and collect resources for luxury shopkeepers - So they don't have to mingle with the common folk.
Separate from them all are government workers. They fit somewhere between the middle class and peasantry, and are paid generously by Pharaoh's bread. They are the brickmakers, the construction workers for bigger buildings(Small buildings like a servant's shack are made by the servants themselves), and anything else government wants from a papyrus maker up to the military.

If at any time your system fails and the people are without food, they will leave their jobs to scavenge for it. Dates, pomegranades, fish and so on are plentiful, so you need not fear you'll ruin your city and have a ghost town.

The game starts slow every map, as you have 10 bricks(Enough for one baker, brickmakers huts don't need bricks), and only one educated person in your city at the start. So you will want to build a school and several brickmakers more to ensure you can keep growing. Before you know it, you've spend several hours building. There is no immigration either, from what I can find. You start the map with 200-300 citizens living in huts, scavenging off the land. After that, children will be your main population growth. This becomes an issue when you want a big military, as military men don't get married - They live in their barracks-tent with two other men.

Some things that are bad, there are a lot of shrines out there that will take a bit to figure out which goes where and which are popular - If you even have room for them. Sometimes your citizens or a merchant may get stuck on a corner, and sometimes you may find your labourers can't figure out which limestone block they want to pull, and manage to fail to move any of them.

In the end, it's still a pretty and somewhat relaxing game where you can spend hours getting your city just right, and then decide to change it up again because you have a new idea. Cosmetic things like gardens, plazas and trees are free to place too, so you can make it look good without having to worry about your workers spending ages watering the plants and not farming.

Worth grabbing it if you like citybuilding, it's good at what it does

An absolute gem. I pride myself in digging up golden PC titles that receive little fanfare, and this game is surely one of those. As an ancient Egyptian simulation, this game is a unique city-simulation concept with excellent execution and historical accuracy. The mechanics are distinct, with the three "Seasons" revolving entirely upon the flooding of the Nile. The only currency is the only one that truly mattered in the ancient world; food.

Like Ancient Egypt, religion plays a key role in the game, with a rich and diverse pantheon of true-to-life Egyptian Gods and Goddesses to be honoured by Temples and Shrines. Every person in your settlement is represented in the game and has unique needs, most notably religious needs. Soldiers, shop-keepers, peasants and elites all demand an opportunity to pray to the Gods and Goddesses which best represent their needs, while everyone will want to worship Amun, Osiris and Hathor; the Universal deities whose festivals were paramount to most Egyptian cultures.

Of course, you will be building an awful lot of pyramids, obelisks and steles to immortalize yourself, mighty Pharaoh, and cement the legacy of your lineage. Throw in a flavourful soundtrack and a diverse array of scenarios and missions and you have the best $2 I have ever spent on steam. I must buy for any city-building lover, Egyptophile or classic game collector.

First off, Children of the Nile isn't really a bad game - but it's tough for me not to compare it with other historical city builders, even those a decade older - in particular Pharaoh, Zeus and Caesar III / IV. Graphically, CotN is quite solid - it looks pretty, plenty of resolution choices for an older title. Gameplay-wise, roads, plazas and all decorative items are free, so you can grid and beautify your city from the get-go. Even on the small maps, you have plenty of room to build. Unlike the other city builders, there is no strict road attachment requirement either, and the open-world pathfinding works well.

Where CotN suffers terribly, however, is on challenge factor and pace.

The gameplay is slow. Excruciatingly slow. During play, virtually nothing happens that you need to cope with reactively. While there is trade with other cities, each and every site has all the basic resources to thrive alone. Once you know the build order, there's no need to deviate from it, ever. City guards and walls are utterly useless for the cost in bricks and manpower - luckily, you don't need them on any map, ever.

I've just finished the campaigns, and each and every map boiled down to this; build the basic city of peasant shacks, noble homes and shops, copy-pasted from previous map. Wait for a harvest. Block out into brickworks and basic infrastructure. Wait two harvests. Expand. Wait more harvests. Begin farming the 'special' resource you need to win that map (army, navy, monuments, imports, etc). Wait a huge amount of harvests. Win the map.

I wish I was joking, but my playthrough boiled down to each hour being five minutes of city-building, fifty-five minutes of waiting. I read through several books while I "played" this game at maximum speed; there was no need to pay attention at all, not even the 'disasters' that hit are worth any adjustment - mostly because by the time they happen, or the interface tells you people are unhappy, it's already too late to do anything about it save let it ride itself out, be it disease, hunger or discontent.

Compared to Pharaoh, where each map was distinctly different and had different challenges based on which resources you had available, what you could import/export and what monuments you could build, Children of the Nile repeats the same tedious thing on every map, and at the same time offers no challenge whatsoever save waiting, and waiting some more. Slow pace is all well and good, especially in a city builder - but Children of the Nile is positively glacial compared to all the other city builders Impressions/Tilted Mill ever produced, and that absolutely kills it as a game.

I enjoyed the books I read while the game run. I did not enjoy 'playing' this game. Again, it's not bad or broken - it's just incredibly tedious. For that, I cannot recommend it - save if you want an easy 100% achievements game. All you need is a ton of patience and a few good books. I'd still recommend Pharaoh / Zeus / Casesar III/IV over this one any day, as a game to play and enjoy.

This is a city builder game. But for hardcore Zeus/Pharaoh/Caesar players, this game is vastly different from the previous games. For once, the absence of random walkers brings about a refreshing change to the gameplay.

The gameplay is pretty deep. Although you have to wait awhile for services to be running at their optimum peak, the waiting period is not a game-breaker as some people with negative reviews wrote. Highly recommended for city builder fans and once you complete a mission, it will be a very satisfactory experience.

Sadly this is the last great city builder, as far as I know.
And not great just as a great city but also a great game!

Runs well on Windows 7.

CotN is a beautiful city-building game with a slight twist -- instead of "walkers" who go out and follow roads around town to distrubute their wares, most of your people take time out to run to the market when they need things (you can follow the individuals out, going through their day, and it's kind of entertaining in itself). The game itself is pretty laid back and peaceful feeling, and the music is quite nice, too. My one complaint would be that sometimes, when you select a person roaming around town, they say something utterly anachronistic and stupid, and I find that detracts from the overall mood of the game. Turn that off, and you're golden.

This is an old game and I played it when it first came out. You play in ancient Egypt as a Pharaoh leading his/her people to economic and military supremacy. If you can keep your people well feed, healthy and happy you will be successful. There are some glitches in the game I have had a few problems but nothing serious just annoying. There have been a couple of additions such as the brickyard which are helpful and some new decorations since I first played it.

If you enjoy city building you might want to try this one. You can also do some retexturing of buildings, plazas, costumes. I enjoy doing that and perking up the city a little bit. The game can be played at various speeds to suit your preferences.

This is one of the best casual city builders I've ever played, but I can't recommend it because the Steam version is absolutely busted. Settings do nothing, frames are locked. Previous dx9 dll fixes online don't work anymore, for some reason. I highly doubt anything has been enhanced because it isn't even running as it should on a computer made 5 years ago. Don't buy this on Steam.

Good old City Sim from my Childhood..
Still awesome to play and to relax to, there's no extraordinary challenge or anything nor time pressure, but that's what makes it so precious, if you got time and if you're into detailing everything to its extent like me.. and if you don't mind the old school graphics too much it's probably worth a look, has a lot of content for its more than fair price.
It's definitely not a "challenge game" though.
It's also pretty free of any kind of bugs.. works fine on any resolution and doesn't crash as far as I know.

Just a great game from another decade =)

The game crashes.

The GOG version has no issues whatsoever.