A very good city builder game. As a veteran player of Pharaoh, I find this game much better and deeper. Micro management is kept to the minimum and I highly recommend this game to city builder fans.

Love Egypt City Builders I wish there was more of the city builder genre these days :(

I fell in love with Zeus, Master of Olympus as a child and had a problem finding a copy of the game. Then someone told me about Children of the Nile on a message board when I was talking about how much I loved Zeus. This is a worthy successor, a very well done game. Simply amazing! I have wasted countless hours playing this game. I've had it for a while and the game is very well made. It is a city-building game, and one of the few that are great. Children of the Nile and Tilted Mill had definatly rose the bar on quality city-building games, so much that I get disappointed by others and come crawling back.

This game is well worth it. Very well worth it.

Cons: It's old and the graphics certainly give that away. And there's some shenanigans needed to get the game to run properly on certain display resolutions and hz. However, those shenanigans are pretty easy and quick Google search will get you to what you need if you wind up being one of those who has issues. And yes, there is also a large texture overhaul out there as well, but don't expect any miracles. It's still an old game.

Pros: Old school, zero hand holding (both for you or your people), near-zero plopping (only basic things like paths and dumping grounds are plopped), city builder.

This isn't Cities Skylies where buildings magically appear from nothing and your people only exist when they're outside of their homes and even then they don't matter because they're not actually doing anything.

In CotN, your little people exist (and matter) at all times. So, how about an example? A simple one. Say you just had a bit of a building spree and now you have so more government workers to feed, right? Well, this is ancient Egypt and food is currency. So, you need a bakery to produce the bread that you're going to pay your workers with. You find a convenient spot for it and place down the starting plot. Now again, this isn't Skylines or SimCity, this bakery isn't going to magically fall out of the sky prebuilt and staffed and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ out bread on day one. Your people need to build it. And they need to produce and gather the resources to build it. In this case they need bricks.

So, to start with you need the bricks themselves, right? So you have a brickmaker. And this brickmaker needs clay and rushes to make bricks. But, don't worry he'll go out on his own to gather it all and start making bricks. After a while you have a nice stash of bricks, but they're still in storage and they're not in the form of a bakery. Ok, so you need a bricklayer. Easy enough. These hardworking fellas will haul bricks from brickmakers or brickyards to your construction sites and when they've moved them all they'll start building. A bakery isn't too fancy (we wanted a simple example, remember?) so your bricklayers will have that bakery completed within a year (one day/night cycle in game is a year btw).

Alright, so now we have a bakery! Except it's not popping out loafs of bread. Why is that? Well, we need a baker obviously. Now the good thing about bakers is that they don't require any education or training. Baking in ancient Egypt wasn't exactly very complicated after all. So, all we need is a worker from a lower or equal class (or their grown children sitting at home) to move on up in the world and take over the bakery.

In this case let's say one of your overworked farmers has moved in. Alright, so we have a baker. Perfect! We're done, right? Wait... Why isn't he making bread? Well, because, yet again, this isn't a modern city builder where everything is simulated so nothing matters. Your baker is an actual simulated person. And this person, just like you, wants things. Like a bed (a mat in this case), some pottery, and so on. And his new bakery is severely lacking in all of that. So he, (or if you're lucky his wife) will go shopping. And yes, all of those goods need to be produced by your craftsmen/women as well. So, that first pottery store that our baker stopped off at was sold out and now he's going to go check the other pottery story over by the papyrus makers to see if they have any pottery.

And then, finally, he's at the bakery. The wheat and barley from your fields is being baked by him into bread. He's got your lettuce and onions ready to handout alongside the bread to your other workers.

So, I know all of this sounds excessive. How can you possibly keep track of all of this? Well, you don't have to. All you need to do is make sure that you're keeping an eye on stocks and production chains and placing down whatever worker/building is lacking. Your brickmaker will mold and bake bricks on his own. Your bricklayer will haul and build on his own. And your baker is equally just as hands off.

But, what is impressive here is that all of this actually happens in CotN. It's not simulated. You can watch it all happen. You can watch your brickmaker wander out down by the river in search of rushes and clay. You can watch your scribe checking the fields for taxes. You can watch your priest tend to the shrines and apothecary before heading over the schoolhouse. And that pyramid that you're building? Yeah, you can watch that being built. Block by block. From the quarry, up the ramps, before being placed and then finally shaped. There aren't any "circles of effectiveness" for various service buildings. The people can either fit in a trip to that building today in their schedule or they can't.

It's all there. And it is magnificent. Maybe, one day, we'll get a modern game that follows in these 'unsimulated' footsteps. But, it's been a long time at this point and I don't think any of us can hold our breath any longer. It's just not happening.

Which means that CotN is still, in late 2020, the best city builder to date.

This game is so challenging But in a good way , just have to click the mouse so much you head spins. I love building the Pyramids. So much fun this game entertaining too. !

Hands down one of the best, chill, city building games I've played.

I played this game ALOT when I was younger with my grandfather.

To be honest its one of the main memories I have with him, playing city-builder games like this.

He died a few years back.

I'm not very sad about it since he was a racist ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ who abused his children, but I think this game was alright

This is a game that keeps me coming back, even 10 years later. If you were a fan of Pharaoh, this game is likely to truly enthrall you. One of my favorite city builders of all time, I have actually still not beaten the full campaign, because I typically end up going back to the same scenarios to replay them again and again.

An absolute masterpiece. Still playing after many years. It's one of the most interesting, accurate and immersive city builders ever created. There are few experiences like it, even in 2022. 10/10

This is a game you are meant to spend as much time as possible with, souly on one map, to achieve anything. You need to have several spare tombs for your pharoh as well as he can die suddenyl without warning (I had one pharoh die two years after his father died and didn't have a tomb ready because of it). You need to establish the school, then healthcare, funeral and temple buildings quickly (I do it in this order as the school is basically the first thing you need to get more graduates to power all other buildings that require them). You need a large low class population established by the time you reach a point where no more villagers are on the map to milk people from. I tend to build all 4 types of buildings farms, labourers, soliders and servents for this reason even if I don't need them.

If you don't have more then half your population as low class, you may find slowly over time your Low class population disappears, and as their population works the entire city... You can easily end up with an econimic crisis on your hand as there won't be enough Low guys to fuel the class descent systme from low to high society. So you have to make sure tyour middle class populance never goes above more then half the size of the lower. Likewise, at no point should your high class guys take over more then 1/4 or 1/5 of the population of middle.

Also despite the games advice that you must locate buildings close to the source of raw materials they use, you can really put them anywhere on the map. Only a few will greatly be impacted by this when they can get to a template or healthcare building in time. Some buildings like shops can use the exchange, saving the need to worry where in the city they are placed. For others like perfume makers who gather their sources, honestly, they get their resources from 4 possible sources so they may spent days walking all over the map making careful placement almost impossible.

Other then this... Building as many small tombs as possible keeps the nobles happy as they need tombs as well as pharoh an there are no consquences if a royal family member dies (not pharoh) so you can forget about supply them with tombs (unless they are pharoh). Brick layers and brick makers can more or less be placed anywhere on the map. They are essential tot he city, but by the time you have two dozen of them, most projects are then catered for forever. You don't tend to need more then that because monuments tend to end up require large stones such as stele by the point you have a dozen or so brick makers working.

Collecting taxes are almost not worth the cost of having an overseer... Especially in large cities where they will almost never be able to see every estate. And tariffs are even worst as you can sometimes not get more then chicken feed. So I tend to ignore these. If you have more then ample farms, pulling back some of the nobles food for the sake of the poor is not a worry and honestly? The nobles numbers support the city via farms, loosing them means the city collaspses (it happened to me once). It best they are allowed to keep as much food as possible even if the citixens of the city suffer becase of it.

The current version of the game, however, is buggy. Back in the day I never had any troubles with the game, thus, I can almost 100% put this down to modern OS. The most it lasts for me is 2 hours. As I said, this is an issue as you are meant to spend a day per mapat times...

I recommend it, but bare the bugginess in mind. Its truly unique as games.