Plant Tycoon

Plant Tycoon, my old nemesis. And yet another game induced headache underway. I spotted the demo to this menace in Steam and neatly fell into it's trap yet again. I played the demo when the game was new some five years ago, got snatched again some time later and this is the third time it's driving me insane.

The story is simple. There are magic plants, here's a bunch of seeds, get the magic plants by crossbreeding them. Then you get to the pruning, watering, pollinating and the little lemmings that won't buy your plants. Making money on easy settings is like squeezing blood from stone. New potting dirt costs a mint and your seed inventory will soon be full of seeds you can't plant because they'll die on the cheap soil.

Once you grown a plant, you pollinate it with whatever and wait for it to seed. Once it's all dried up, you slap a price sticker on it and wait for some lemming to buy it. To get the customers inside you'll have to accessorise your marketplace with rocks and pieces of metal...

This time around it's going marginally better. I've got one magic sparkly plant, only half a dozen died on me and I almost have money. The thing is, the plant grow in 'real time'. Meaning on normal settings that's about 1hr. Yeah. I chose super fast it's stil so sloooow. And of course if I forget to stop time when I want to stop playing, I'll find only dead plants as the time will move on even if the game isn't on.

There is mircromamagement and then there is waiting for trees to grow. This is the latter. I'm tossing this as soon as I can kick the one more plant urge.

Emperor

So the interface was hugely different. And as I played the game I started to wonder why haven't I played it more. And soon I found out why. In Caesar and Pharaoh, you have everything neatly in one place, gods, stats, wages, labour etc. Here it's scattered all over and not all of it is logical or obvious. I kept getting messages that the ancestors were angry and couldn't find where to bribe them. In the end, I had to start and restart some eight times before I got the hang of it. Oh, and the ancestors were found under religion and then clicking the title on the panel.... Yeah.

Good news, they solved the workforce access issues and gave you control over allocation. Bad news, they porked several other things. When you have a game where even after patching, your open play player options don't work, you can say the game has bugs. I turned disasters off and what do I get? Flooding. Oh the gods get miffed and send a drought, or in severe cases, an earthquake, but natural flooding is a pain. It just wipes everything out.

We get the monuments of Pharaoh and there is no set farming land unlike the other two previous games so I can put them where they fit. The chinese are really big on aesthetics. Had to tear down buildings to get statues in. Which is a change from having to tear buildings down to get services in. Each city you trade with, has to have a trading station built for it. It saves in storage space but when you have ten trading partners, the sheer space requirements are a pain. At the least money isn't an issue in open play. It gives you a cubic ton to begin with.

Pharaoh

Second in the series of themed city building games is Pharaoh, with the Cleopatra expansion. No crocodiles so far but the monuments are still challenging.  Could be that the crocodiles are in Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile. I'll get back to that after Emperor.

So Rome, Egypt, China and then Egypt again. The first three games were developed by Impression Games over a four year period and published by Sierra so they pretty much follow the same lines and share the same graphics engine and interface. From the same makers are a few other games in the same lines, like Zeus, but I don't either have them or don't like them. (Zeus, didn't like it for some reason)

Compared to Caesar 3, I've had an esier time playing it. Yes, the gods are still annoying and only get more so the more years you play, but they aren't as much a of a pain than in Caesar. And as the gods get harder to keep happy over the years, it really limits the timeframe overall. There is also more trade partners, the money just keeps rolling in when you get your industry to turn a profit. But still the same problems with labour allocation and access than in Caesar, just a tad bit less so. Add to that the downright scramble to get your food distributed when your city grows big. Tweak, tweak, tweak like the neurotic micro manager than I am.

Differences in the game make each one interesting in it's own way. For example food production in Pharaoh fluctuates as some, or in some cases all, of it is dependant on the inundation. Or in plain speak, the river needs to flood. This is also a historical tidbit that I like as the Nile floods were an actual thing that the farmers needed. There is also a need for irrigation systems as most regions are arid.

Now, monuments.

 

Yes, that is a pyramid. And guess what, it's only like 70% done. Building something like this takes time, work and materials. You get to watch them clear the land, lay some really strange foundations and haul tons of rocks.  They build the chambers in inside, build it up to the tip, then layer on the limestone coverings, and to finish it off, you have to have the offerings and furnishings for the pharaoh to take with him to the other side.

Compared to this, the two 200 ton apiece granite obelisks were easy.

All in all, I enjoy Pharaoh a bit more than Caesar.

Caesar III

Good old Caesar 3. Even on a peaceful map you'll get stomped on by barbarians because the gods hate you. I mean that literally. Forget to build a few temples and they will hate your guts and do terrible things to you.

This classic old builder comes with a Roman Empire theme, about accurate pantheon, too few trading partners and very demanding citizens. To build a perfect neighbourhood, you need to demolish half of the neighbourhood to add stuff they demand. City planning at it's weirdest. And don't get me started on workforce allocation and access issues. I don't know how this one sucks me in time after time, but I spend hours toiling over a city always heading for a disaster.

For such an old game, it has some complexity to it. Balancing the city workforce demands often your attention. Trading isn't a brainer but add Rome's demands on top of it and you get quite a headache figuring out your warehouse and granary management. Micromanagement at it's finest.

The good thing is, it doesn't have any alligators as far as I can remember. Pharaoh has, Pharaoh also has monument building which adds more interest to the game. If I can find my Pharaoh disc, I'll write about that one next.

Tropico 4

Tropico 4 was on sale on Steam recently. I tried the demo a week before the sale, and I've played one of the previous version so I decided to get it. -75% is nothing to sneeze at.

The graphics aren't anything amazing even when I cranked them up for screenshots, but the details and the sheer liveliness of the island is good. At any given time you have you people living their lives, going to their jobs, trees swishing about in the wind, waves lapping at your sand beaches, hot air balloons flying in the sky etc.

After playing a full career in sandbox, with a lot of quesswork involved as the tutorial was what it was. I'd rate this game 'I'll probably play this game again, someday'

As the island is gridless, you can pretty much build as you wish, limited only by the elevation of the ground. Which is silly. Hillside building is an old thing. When you've got a dirt hill that's preventing you from building, you get to play carousel building as you sping it and try to find an angle that works. Luckily the lowest bumps just slow down the construction speed. Which is still annoying.

The most annoying feature I can name is the road. It's a finicky auto system where you get to try several times before you get the road to go where you want it. Or you don't. I had several dirt crossroads as the AI decided that crossroads were unnecessary.

Despite almost all the DLC's that came with the complete pack, Tropico 4 is just another building game. Yeah, you get a pretty island, you're a dictator and all your friends are communists, but just another building game. And why almost all? They published another DLC a couple of days after the sale. *sigh*

Played Lineage for a while...

until I got killed by a random player and remembered why I loathe the game.

This is where we started our gaming together.

On some of the private Lineage II servers we last played on. We enjoyed playing tourist in wedding clothes.