Dunqul Oasis is filtering me even though I beat it before and it's because the game is moronic and refuses to give me Seth's big blessing. Not even my horde of policemen can stop the nubian kang army. City builder thread i guess.
Dunqul Oasis is filtering me even though I beat it before and it's because the game is retarded and refuses to give me Seth's big blessing.
>cool a steampunk impressionesque city builder
>it's a disappointment
Rightfully forgotten
What was with the weird robots? It felt fetish-y.
I gave it a look and found the fairy booze more disturbing. And these guys are remaking Pharaoh now, huh.
Even the devs were unhappy about how the game turned out and want to give Lethis 2 a shot in the future.
>impressionesque
Found your problem
That game had "failure" written on it the second they've made first pitch.
I love Lethis. I do feel like it does get a bit to much hate. It was on the easy side and it had some underused mechanics but they where the only devs trying to bring the impression games style back and it had a lot of charm and wonderful details. For a first time low budget indie team it was pretty good.
It's not bad, just somewhat bland. The artwork in it is pretty nice though.
>that unholy french revolutionary calendar
There was a decent game somewhere in Lethis but it definitely had that indie thing where it felt like they'd lost interest in the idea early on. Also had some of the most insane load times I've ever seen in a game and especially for what it was.
Lethis had the skeleton of a decent game. It messed up in two ways though.
For one it didn't really do much with it's whole steampunk setting. It felt like a generic city builder with a couple of steam related buildings rather then something that affected everything.
Secondly and worst of all was that cities felt really generic and soulless, especially as they grew larger. Your city would have some charm early on but your max level buildings would just clump together in large blocks that would even cover up roads.
Having cities look dull is one of the worst things a city builder can do.
I'm starting Children of the Nile, yet again, after many years but I don't remember how to play this game.
Unironically by clicking uninstall.exe
CotN was a fricking disaster. I get their ambitions, and I get their plans, but the execution was just painfully bad
>Unironically by clicking uninstall.exe
Maybe you're right, this game still feels like nonsense.
i love this game! it's been awhile but build farmers. build more noble houses to build more farmers. Add the different shopkeepers. I forget if you have to right click them or what, but there's different kinds. Make sure you got your bakery, and just keep adding shit from there.
Fun egyptian city builder. Don't forget to build yourself a pyramid
Emperor is the better game
That's debatable. In emperor there's no naval aspect, the trade stations are are not necessarily better than the previous trading mechanics, the catapults are kind of fricked, and the scenarios are don't feel better. In Pharaoh ignoring requests for goods or failing military naval/land military requests could get trade routes permanently shut down and trigger entire event chains of invasions. Throughout the entire campaign of emperor I don't remember that something like that happening. Emperor is good but it needs a few tweaks.
The best impressions city builder is the open-source Julius/Augustus Caesar 3 anyway, they added monument building, better military, and all the options to customize the game to the way you want.
>The best impressions city builder is the open-source Julius/Augustus Caesar 3 anyway
Adding to this, Julius is closer to being just the open source engine for C3 and Augustus is a fork of it that adds all that fun stuff like monuments.
Augustus does make the game trivial, no? C3 was never balanced with roadblocks and global worker pool in mind,
Play using the infinite walker glitch, managing a single loop with both common and elite housing is a different sort of challenge. Or just don't shit out the same copypasted block design for every mission.
I just found out I can build my industry outside the houses by 1 tile, any more tips?
Irrigation does not have to touch farms.
Apothecaries only matter on maps with reeds.
Infinite walkers
Block predators with small statues
Policemen army
1 reed gather can support 4 papyrus makers,
Tax people extra if you throw a lot of festivals.
If you see walkers bugging out and randomly appearing where they're not supposed to like delivery men on some random desert tile on the other side of the map then your savegame is fricked and it's why your game is freezing, I've not seen people talk about this bug for some reason but I've seen it happen several times.
>I've not seen people talk about this bug for some reason but I've seen it happen several times.
Yes. But isn't that related to one of the early bugs that supposedly got fixed by the patches?
>fans will lap it up anyway
Looks horrendeus, what the frick did they do to the forts? Why the frick do remasters have to shit all over the games look? Same thing happened with aoe2.
meant for
they addressed it awhile back when first demo came around.
answer was "artistic vision" which I call bullshit.
see https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1351080/view/3137326328684283908?l=english
>As for the painting and the 2D style, it is, for me, the real spirit of the game. I wanted to respect it as much as possible for the players.
Actual reason would be: "we don't have actual pipeline and skills, nor original 3D assets to make it the game as it was, so deal with literal 2D redraws cause that's all we have, and hiring 3D artist cost too much money - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrRHMmRc2sM , and shitty animations cause we said so, and we are proud of it, and if you disagree you are just a hater."
you might also add "we also jealous that our steampunk whatever bootleg failed to get any traction across Impression fans games, so we force them to play it anyway as official reskin of Pharaoh via acquiring rights"
Their new UI was shit before and still looks pretty bad too.
They're literally just tracing it but worse. How does this hack project have any support?
>deal with literal 2D redraws cause that's all we have, and hiring 3D artist cost too much money
Black person, it's 2023, not 2003. Hiring a 2D guy is more expensive than a 3D one.
I'm aware of that too.
But being able to properly make prerendered sprites is mostly lost skill. So 3D artist needs to be either skilled or eager to learn via experimentation.
And no one going to fire already employed 2D artist from established studio, so 3D will be added expense. As well as building all new pipeline from art side of things for "outdated" method.
Why bother when they can just badly redraw it and call it a day? It's "good enough" after all.
connections and such. Indie scene is all about it.
Railroad Tycoon 2's sprites were done by photographing real miniature models. So if 3D artists are expensive, hire carpenters.
Good luck finding someone who can into miniatures of buildings without 3D printing and 3D modeling.
Then you need someone who can photograph it all correctly, probably in studio to ensure same look. It'll cost way more than 3D artist, or even 2D ones.
2d sprites of 3d models are being used in mobile or browser games all the time
i actually found a guy, while looking for examples, who already has the perfect fit in his portfolio: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/N5WYr5
and there are plenty of people who could do the same
its just they went with the cheapest option, probably spent most of the budget on the license
100%. This was nothing more than a quick cash grab, and yet it's still going to be praised because Pharoah was perfection in 1999 and this is just slightly worse perfection.
>and yet it's still going to be praised
Black person, the game is pretty much uniformly considered to be exactly that: a cheap cash-grab that's also bugged and has dreadful UI (not just ugly, but pointlessly convoluted, which unlike the art style you can't easily ignore)
>nothing more than a quick cash grab
For a quick cahsgrab, they sure took their fricking time
That makes sense, I'm a bit out of loop when it comes to mobage stuff.
after all they stole all middle ground talent which usually was working on proper games. if not more.
Cause usually working for mobile stuff is better working conditions and pay than for some game studios.
Pic you shown also is 2D only by looks of it. So yea, if to give time, people can make beatiful 2D assets in hi res. Not just quickly redraw prerendered sprites but worse
>2D only
they use baked 3d in this game, maybe some sprites are 3d models painted over with photo textures, others are full 3d
the point is there are plenty of skilled 3d modelers specializing in this kind of stuff up there
lol indeed, 3 years since the announce
Fricking hell... THATS what a new Pharaoh game should have looked like! Impressive stuff.
>you might also add "we also jealous that our steampunk whatever bootleg failed to get any traction across Impression fans games, so we force them to play it anyway as official reskin of Pharaoh via acquiring rights"
whats funnier is that the game was a sucsses, but instead of making an expansion, fixing some stuff up, or just making 2 they made that spin off game that was so horribly programed that it was more cost effective to just take shit out than to try and fix it.
Oh it was? Huh, I really never seen it mentioned, but I don't lurk as much anymore.
Seen the weird spinoff tho. Scratched my head why it was needed.
Despite what vst says Lethis is a good game. Well, average game. The fact is it's clear there was an attempt but the devs where just a bit to unfocused, ambitiouse and to new to really flesh out the core gameplay ideas. Same thing goes with the spin off game as well. It has a lot of high concept ideas that frankly are fun and show a lot of promise that needs more refining, but making a spin off game when you only have one other game under your belt.... I mean christ all mighty what the frick where they thinking?
I have it since forever sitting in library but never played it in the end. Prolly should give it a fair shot.
Tho I think main modern game problem is abundance of "average" games. When there is nothing really bad about games being released.
But there is also nothing really special about them, nor something stand out. Maybe it's just saturation making them look that way, dunno.
THe problem is that a lot of modern games, specially stratagy games never flesh out their mechanics. Even if they are copy older games they'll take what made them unque and interesting and boil it down to the absolute most basic and boring concept ever. RTS really is a perfect example of this cause so many new RTS games love to advertise how heavily inspired they are by Starcraft, yet the most complex mechanic the game will have is a tank that also turns in to a long ranged artillery platform. Name another RTS game that has a mechanic like zerg creep or protoss power pylons. What other RTS game has units that need to morph in to another unit or units that need to build ammo?
When it comes to Lethis it introduces the steam pipes and advertises itself that these steam pipes are going to be a huge part of the game and it's very reminisant of the aquaduct system of Ceaser which was fun and intersting. Instead only 1-2 buildings need to be connected to the steam pipes and the other small handful of buildings that need steam use a moronic and nonsensical steam capsule. honestly I don't think people need to inovate to make a good game, even now lots of the best games out really are just copying mechanics from old 1:1 and not even doing anything that different, they are however fully fleshing the mechanics out and not half assing it.
Here are your new Pharaoh battles.
Yea, you got it right. It's mostly issue of things trying to get "streamlined" to the extreme. Devs being afraid shitless of "what if players won't like this mechanic. what if this will be unbalanced. what if blablabla"
And it's further reinforced by their supposed community with "yes, that thing was never good in the first place, good riddance" not realizing that they are the reason why games gone to shit
>new Pharaoh battles.
The biggest red flag for me. Their "new and improved" animations already look like some mid-budget browser game, but that screen is something that I probably would've been excited to see in OGame. Back in 2005.
Man, how am I supposed to send a company of archers to prevent river demons from eating my deliverymen, if there is no actual company of archers you can place?
it can hardly be worse than the old military system
It worked fine in caesar. Every game after caesar was for some reason was janky as frick with unresponsive units and certain maps had obviously not been playtested on higher difficulties. But it looks like they got rid of it entirely which misses the one cool thing it did right, fighting ontop of the city you built. You won't have anymore memerable moments where your army is destroyed and you have to send gladiators, police, or any sort of miltia to stop the invaders.
I never had a problem with the military. What exactly was wrong with it other than moronic AI?
Why do I expect it to pop open a window telling me I can can buy gems to reset my cooldowns?
New battle system looks pretty shit tbh. Defo gives off a half baked vibe.
It was 1999, a bunch of sprites moving to another bunch of sprites and humping eachother until one group humps the other out of existence is fine for a city builder. Shame its even worse in 2023 tho with this mobile inspired shit.
The irony of the city behind showing all those nice walls and towers... That are practically speaking now a waste of money.
I saw the dev interviews where they cum themselves over how they added some new "authentic" slow tempot emo arabic flute sounding crap. You buy, you get what you deserve, but my old copy works fine.
>Irrigation does not have to touch farms.
What use does this have?
>1 reed gather can support 4 papyrus makers
Is there a full list of these ratios somewhere?
pretty sure the way farm fertility is determined is based on the average of all the tiles it takes up plus it helps for when you have some weirder set ups that a ditch can't technically get to.
As for question 2 well I'm not OP and I'm not sure if there is an official list or not.
>What use does this have?
I hope you were actually irrigating your farms instead of just placing them down like a moron. Meadow farms go from around 2% fertility to 50 %. Same thing flood plains which is important if you have a bad flood since fertility determines end yield by speeding up their growth. 10 irrigated farms will always outproduce 12 non-irrigated farms, so if your irrigation ditches take up space needed for a few farms it's always worth the cost. Also you can use the water pump building on the floodplain like in the pic.
I would irrigate my land farms but I never irrigated my floodplain farms.
The thought never even occurred to me.
I liked to build a dedicated industry area next to Kingdom road's beginning/end just for the traders.
You are supposed to use stalling and hit-and-run tactics. Or you trap them.
Hyksos chariots are such bullshit, did the devs playtest their game or do they expect players to cheese. 3 chariots vs 16 and they win without a sweat.
Don't play on hard. It's bugged and unwinnable.
It's only bugged on the tutorial missions
I like Caesar 3 but is housing blocks the only way to build my cities? I feel myself insanely limited by this
You can make any shape you want and make it work if you have good knowledge of the game mechanics. Alternatively just use infinite walkers if you really dislike blocks.
Maybe on normal. But a full chariot regiment plus the rest of the army on hard or very hard? You need to get lucky with breaking their morale or just build towers because hit and run tactics do not work with the fricking awful military controls.
C3 is literally an object placement game. It's not a city builder, it's a logical puzzle to be solved. Even Impressions people admitted they've fricked up bunch of shit with coding walkers in 3, but then decided to build the game around what they've already have. So you end up with scenarios that require from you to autistically place things in the right spot, without knowing what that right spot is.
Can that be said about the other games in the series?
Not really. You can regularly do whatever the frick you want in Pharoah. I think only stuff related to river tiles (of which there a finite number) is 100% "must place this here".
>Not even my horde of policemen can stop the nubian kang army
art imitates life
Who is ready for bobble heads and lack of sprite rotation?
I think i'll just replay the original instead, thanks.
>bobble heads
What?
prerendered spritework is lost technology
in the future, there is only 2D spine animation akin you see in mobile games.
jesus frickin christ
never frickin mind then
Shouldn't a remake look better than the thing it's remaking? Reminds me of the Advanced Wars remake that is coming out soon.
that's actually hardly a case usually.
No, remakes now don't usually mean "looks better than the original". Remake now means "rebuilt for modern hardware as a mobile game, because the old game doesn't work for morons right off the bat".
But it does work, though.
if you want to play it stretched, sure. most modern monitors can't force 4:3
window mode doesn't work usually
so you need hd patch, that's too hard for regular steam user
>most modern monitors can't force 4:3
imagine paying for garbage that can't even pillarbox
well, I had my old dell which was able to do it, but I decided to upgrade since 2209wa started show it's age and had random stripes going and it was a bit of surprise that newer is incapable of such basic function.
I'm talking about forcing monitor to go to 4:3 via button menu, sometimes for some games he does 4:3 fine automatically, but for Pharaoh or Civ3 - I can't force it no matter what I tried.
>but for Pharaoh
my fricking god theres a widescreen patch all you have to do is replace the .exe file
It doesnt work properly on some screens
I know, it mostly works fine.
however sometimes it fricks up UI. Like 2k resolution it works fine tho small. 720p it fricked up family name selection for me for example.
and again check chain of replies. I'm aware of HD patch
Why not just enable GPU scaling and set it to maintain aspect ratio?
you mean this? never worked for me in 100% cases. Some games are able to do so, for others I need workarounds.
Civ3 is biggest issue. that game hates everything
Yes, that's what I meant. Weird that it causes such issues for you, for me it's one of those "why is this not on by default" settings.
Going off-topic, but I'm assuming you already tried image related for Civ3?
keepres doesn't do much in my case for some reason
windowed works but it's very awkward to play like that, especially since you can't move it from top left border of screen
thanks for trying, anon, I appreciate it, but seems like on my PC only way to do it is just get VM running or something
shit sucks
AW at least has to deal with remaking a 2D game in 3D, this is just making the existing graphics higher detail
bros... how can we go about reverse engineering this release to incorporate old graphics, music, cutscences, etc while still using the updated bugfixes, etc?
why anyone would want to deal with new release? `Augusts exists, better just do that but for Pharaoh
I just want a game like Zeus. I loved having Gods battle. Plus the old game was janky as frick.
>New early mission
>Oh no there is a Hydra, this is a powerful monster! You must build Achilles shrine to defeat him
>Meanwhile, Hercules, who you built in a previous mission is like
>NAH SENPAI IMMA AUTO ATTACK THAT FRICKING HYDRA FRICK
>Marches across the map for like 5 mins
>Starts whacking the Hydra
>Always kills it
>Game still demands you build the shrine
Also I loved building like fricking Ares temple (and IRL Ares is a fricking cuck of a God and the Greeks didn't like him) but the guy gets a fricking DRAGON that marches around your city so when Zeus gets a fricking paddy on and starts zapping your city for some reason, Ares and his dragon go and b***h slap him.
>how do we hid that sprites are not rotatable
>quickly, remove option to rotate map
>no camera angles
>no military
>no minimap
Stop nitpicking and support the devs dear player
>for other ones too
oh god no
I can already see their improved version of Emperor.
Emperor is the one that doesn't need any improvements. It already has things like global pool and selective roadblocks, and if you have issues with graphics in that game then you just have shit taste.
Then again, they're French so I could see them improving it by making the game more racist
>Then again, they're French so I could see them improving it by making the game more racist
They're liberal frenchies, if you actually payed any attention to the devs they are hardcore liberals. There is more than one reason why Lethis didn't have war in it and it's not just because the devs where incopitent. Even in the dev blogs for Lethis 2 they talk about how they are "anti war" and how despite there being a war in Lethis, and 2 going to have the war be previlant, including building war structures, there isn't going to be any combat because they don't like it.
DotEmu as well are hardcore liberals. They patched Windjammers 2 to remove the lips on Black folk but not to add any multiplayer features, so the game died in a week lmao
>filename
Anon I'm pretty sure that's an actual shill. It says he had 0.2 hours on record when he wrote that review.
>It's only 22 bucks
>Support the devs
>Trash broken game worse than the 23 year old version
I know some absolute window lickers will read that shit and then go buy it -_- shills are fricking cancer.
Fricking kek. Even fricking lethis had rotatable camera. How did they make a WORSE game???
Stared at those building animations for hours as kid as I waited for stuff to get done, wondering if they'll ever get more pixels... I can wait a few more decades, I guess.
My autistic breaking point was the potter animation. In the original, you can see the guy leaning into the motion of pulling the paddle out of the kiln with his whole body. Meanwhile the remake has the same guy sit on the ground completely static, while his arms just swing back and forth on the wireframe.
For me it's the terrain. The buildings themselves look nice, but it's like they're not fully connecting to the ground. Roads look like trenches.
Honestly it's almost as if the terrain, the buildings and the people were done by three different teams. They're fine on their own but none of them fit together properly.
I have this thing where I can't play any games in this setting because I get really horny
Here are gameplay settings for Pharaoh. I really don't remember if the original had aging but this version does. You can select it to "fixed" making it so that "40% of the population is always ready to work. And as I'm sure you can see you can change the recruitment system to global. Did walkers also have their own unique ranges as well? I don't remember this either.
UI has changed a lot since the demo and while it does lack personality I do find it a lot better to find and read things. Here is also what happens when you click on walkers. Not to sure how I feel about this. I do kind of like how they went with the theme, on the other hand I do kind of wish they would have just given us full detailed portraits, these feel so impersonal.
UI for housing. Visually for the game I'd say it's def up to you. For the most part the static structures, sprites and foliage look good. Animations range from whatever to clearly puppet rigged and awkward looking. Some nice finner details like the water waves and ripples and birds flying by. The music is absolutely fantastic, however all the voice lines are just upscalled versions of the original so they sound very... well like that. a bit disapointing.
THe ugly pillars are gone. Everything is now down via a heat map or buildings going from one color slowly changing to red.
over seeing screen no longer takes you to "the palace". Now it's just basic, clean looking charts.
Every building has shotcuts to take you either to the overseer screen, overlay screen, or just to the ingame help section. They do not skimp on the info. I can't say I read much of the encyclopedia the original game had, but New Era does still have one and it gives pretty good 6th grade overviews and descriptions of all the houses, people, prominate figures eccetera.
Also as stated
there is no mini map or way to rotate camera which is REALLY FRICKING AWKWARD AND WEIRD. Pressing F gives you "flat mode" which looks like this. Rather disapointing considering rotate is a pretty basic feature and even Lethis had it. idk why but now my snips are way to big so here is a small clip.
You got it backwards, Lethis is a clone of this.
I really don't know what to make of it at this point. Some things are way better but it lacks personality.
I really like that the steampunk setting wasn't all in your face like how it ususally it. It felt a lot more natural and fitting of the era. Lethis is supposed to take place at the start of the industrial revolution so having everything go full on steampunk wouldn't make sense and is also gay. The second problem is the progression. Like you said early buildings had a lot of personality to them but then max level only had 1 model. It mades sense because it's turning in to a compact apartment, which if you do look at cities even from the victorian times they are based off copy and pased row housing for lower class inner city. It logically makes since but they could have at lest added different animations, colors or minor variants to each one to make it stand out a bit more.
yeah I feel like they are kind of all over with the egpytion theme. Either go all out or dont.
does game still has narration and intro of dynasty and stuff?
cause man, this is downgrade in every aspect
but modern steam audience will get what it deserve.
some watered down shit since that's what they like the most
Meanwhile you gotta love GOG's reaction to this game:
They've released it, and people just keep pointing out in the comments that GOG has Pharaoh in their catalog since day 1, so why bother with a shitty remake, when you can get the superior game, running easily on modern game, and for pocket change, too.
Wtf I love GOG now
What's even better is the consensus between all those people with their opinions, not just rating.
best part of it all, that they mostly LIKE the visual change, as atrocious as it is.
And still can't get over how bad things are.
Color me surprised
oh i know that lethis was a shitty pharaoh knockoff, what i mean is that the remake looks like they took lethis and barely changed a thing. the UI is almost identical, even the poorly localised money counter is in the exact same place.
Oh. Flat mode. When I first saw mentions of it I don't know why I got an idea it would be a top down view mode...
>Now it's just basic, clean looking charts.
And that's my biggest problem with it. It feels like I'm looking at spreadsheets and charts, and not a UI for an Egyptian city builder. I know it sounds hypocritical at a glance, since the original game also had literal charts, but it was all touched up with a lot of soul. The advisor screen had the drawn background, all the buttons were done in the same artstyle, even the fonts were looking carved in stone. This version just has an open window done in the flat design (Ganker would kms themselves), with 2 colors and some generic modern font. That's it. Is it more readable? Maybe. Is it boring and soulless to look at? Yes.
who started this trend of $2 ui graphics, ubisoft? apple?
Indie devs circa '15 or so.
By then, there have been exactly two types of UI in indie games: pixel art mess or just clean, sterile boxes.
And boxes are even easier to make than (poor) pixel art, so go fricking figure. Everyone just adopted from there on and now if you have an indie game, you are going to get those caustic, ultra-clean and super-stark menues and UIs in 9 out of 10 cases, including games that have otherwise artistic or at least "artistic" display, further making this shit glarring.
And since indies were doing this shit, why bother when you are a AAA studio and waste time and money, if you can just say "hey, everyone else is doing that, including the poor artistic souls, the indie devs"
i dont think this is how it works
i dont think AAA ever gets influenced by low budget
heres assassins creed brotherhood, 2010
heres farcry 3, 2012
anno 2070, 2011
>i dont think this is how it works
>i dont think AAA ever gets influenced by low budget
Not my fault you don't think. Especially since you provide a completely unrelated image, given the subject is about stark contrast and clear-cut lettering. Neither of which are presented. If the lettering was in maximum black and there was strong contrast, with thin, clear lines - you would have a case
not my fault you interpreted the subject wrong.
It was about cheapening of UI graphics overall not "lettering", who the frick cares about which font they use and how contrasty it is when the whole thing looks objectively worse than the original due to the lack of graphical elements.
Your whole experience of graphic design, as a modern corporate drone, seems to be this window
you see anon, for the end user of an entertainment product this UI
is nicer to look at than this
and its not because of the fonts of the distance between elements
in the escapism form of entertainments such as videogames the thing that values more is the atmosphere, cohesion between all the elements of the product that make you forget about your boring desk job and dive in to a different reality for a moment
the "stark contrast and clear-cut lettering" wont due
In 2013 Apple abandoned skeuomorphism in an iOS update and forced everyone else to
yep, i knew it
thank you apple
the only apple device i used was an ipod 4g and it had the UI on the left, then more and more apps started demanding a new OC and it was not possible to upgrade an ipod so it essentially got bricked by apple. Just another way they frick their customers and people gladly accept it with an overly excited open mouth
also the newer ones dont have 3.5 jack and charging devices inside the box, all this plus the cheap ui seems like they desperately trying to save money wherever possible to survive and everyone else blindly copying this taking it for progress
We're seriously regressing as a society.
Holy shit, what did the do to Bast and other gods OG Bast is like "Worship me or I'll burn your fricking housing districts". New one looks like an amateur furry art.
Please understand, all the good artists were taken and they were left with freelancing furry commission "artists." That's why she went from
>Worship me mortal, lest I strike down your household with famine
to
>A cat is fine too
The original portraits for the goods made them look both intimidating, and maybe just me, but also looked like giant statues you'd see in a grand Temple. All of the gods profiles are from a low angle making them seem larger than life and like they are looking down at you.
Another thing as well, the new music is amazing, but I think they are missing a lot of tracks. Maybe it's just me and I only played for an hour but it seems like they only did a few tracks to remaster and threw away the rest.
oh man this looks like a literal lethis clone
my interest just dropped to zero
Weird how they went so cartoony for the animations, and then put zero charm into the walker info screens like this.
This game has really schizophrenic art direction and you can tell two completely different teams worked on different elements.
Three. As in - literally three different groups handling the visual part of the game - the third one was the UI people, who worked in complete disjoinment with everyone, applying them just in the coding room to have some UI in the game and moving on.
do they at least still speak?
yes but it's that upscalled audio..
Definition of soulless remake. They could brought up graphical detail to emperor standard but that would've taken actual effort. UI looks like a fricking WIP.
Has anyone tried the new Pharaoh remake? How is it?
Bugged.
Even if we ignore all the "hurrr soulless mobile graphics durrr!" bullshit, the game is simply NOT in ready-to-ship state. You know things are fricked when you cleared mission objectives... and nothing happens, because the script didn't load. Or construction of a monument stops for no reason at all and you have to demolish all the guilds to get things restarted.
Thankfully, most of the bugs has semi-logical triggers to clear their effects, but shit's really annoying
Also:
Global employment sucks out any challenge out of Pharaoh. Emperor at least was written with this feature already accounted for. Pharaoh wasn't and their remake does frick-all to adjust.
Speaking of which:
The game is for the most part 1:1 recreation of original. As in: same maps, same missions, same objectives, same bullshit. You are buying for a full price game that offers nothing of practical or actual value, while probably already owning 2d3-1 copies of Pharaoh already
Don't forget the game doesn't even have a senario editor either.
>Buying for a full price
>What is gog
>What is bit torrent
You guys aren't actually paying full price for this cash grab are you??
Why waste the bandwidth pirating it when the original is on GoG as well? The original is only 490 MB.
The original is a dick to get working.
>Hacked exe for resolution > 1024x768
>Will not play nice with minimizing at all
The gays who made new Pharaoh could have saved a shiteload of money by just releasing old Pharaoh with some QoL changes. Ofc now im playing new Pharaoh I remember why I never completed the old one. It's the same shite every mission...
>Houses... again
>Water... again
>Food... again etc etc
>Taxes trade blah
Its so samey. If anyone has completed Pharaoh do you ever start off with a little city? Or is it start from scratch every fricking mission?
>do you ever start off with a little city?
Plenty of times, you would know if you ever played the game.
>The original is a dick to get working.
Only if you are BOTH moronic and too lazy to google "pharaoh 4k patch". Or just use the GOG version, that has that pre-added for morons like you.
Also
>plays city builder
>complains its about building cities
Maybe this genre is just not for you?
>Or just use the GOG version, that has that pre-added for morons like you.
Different anon, but does it? I use it but I'm still launching the exe made by Crudelios' resizer.
GoG version doesn't have anything built in, you need to use a hacked exe. I used the resizer one that other anon mentioned.
Also for us Linux chads minimizing is still broke as frick even after that fix.
>The point
>(You)
Your reading comprehension literally doesn't exist
Like half the options in the menu are about removing original challenges.
Remove labor walkers. Remove wild animals. Remove population aging, Remove walker range difference, and more.
The entire game is like this. A remaster is supposed to bring an old game up to modern expectations But rather then improve or enhance they just removed it all.
The minimap, the combat, parts of the music, mission creator, map rotation, all gone. Even the UI design got emptied.
I know the Monkey Island and Command & Conquer remasters have a button that lets you switch between the old style and remastered look. That is literally impossible here because of the huge list of things that got removed.
How do you take 3 years to remake a game from 1999, claim it's an improvement and how "this is what the original studio would've done today", and then make it worse in nearly every aspect that matters?
>Even if we ignore all the "hurrr soulless mobile graphics durrr!"
But why would we ignore that?
>Call the game trash and point it's barely working
>Dumb homosexuals somehow keep insisting you praise it, because you have OTHER issues than mobile game graphics
I get it, you didn't actually try it (especially weird, since gog-games had it like 10 minutes after premiere) and just looked at the screens from it, but come the frick on now, anon. This game has FAR worse problems than shitty graphics
At what point did I suggest you were praising it, you flaming autismo? You can point out the flaws with the games mechanics or the UX, without somehow being obliged to also omit the fact that the animations look like cheap mobage. One doesn't cancel the other.
>I get it, you didn't actually try it
Yeah? I watched other people play it, saw how the UI looks and how well it handles, read a couple of people complaining that the devs ignored all the feedback from 2 years ago, and booted up the original instead.
cause as long devs claim that, show pretty images and ignore the criticism - game will sell enough to keep their studio going.
Today's "good enough" is curse of games in general, and when it comes to remakes especially.
I don't think that anon praises it, or I can't read for shit today. Anyway I'm other anon, and they had demo year ago. received mostly same criticism. Especially UI.
Devs did nothing by looks of it. Just some petty self-important interviews about artstyke.
Either way visuals will be a sticking point cause they are in your face different. So people will talk regarding them, and that provides easy way to just lump all new art as haters and never read anything regarding gameplay criticism.
Yeah the removal of military should've alerted everybody to this bullshit. It completely breaks maps like Iken or Rowarty. But I don't see the problem with options to enable/disable certain features seems like an autistic thing to get mad about. I don't give a frick how people play their games unless they're trying to brag about how good they are.
how hard/expencive do you think to replicate this graphics from 2009 today? Not talking about making the game full 3d, it would be a 2d game with assets that are made using 3d
Anyone running either game on Linux? I cannot get PANE to launch from Lutris, it just gives a black screen and plays the music.
I can get the original running and get 1440p resolution, unfortunately it shits itself when I alt+tab.
>don't alt tab
Im too used to it now, need alt+tab functionality
Change workspaces instead of alttabbing?
That was a great suggestion! Never thought of that. Just tried it though and unfortunately upon switching back it looks like Pharaoh automatically minimized itself 🙁 I still get the infinite screen flashing thing when I try to maximize it again.
Replying to my own post here. Got PANE working on Lutris by disabling DXVK in the configure options for the game. So if anyone else is a Linuxgay like me and you have bought/obtained the GoG version, install it with Lutris, everything default. Then disable DXVK.
Im guessing this game uses OpenGL or something? I saw a few posts online about that. Idk I thought DXVK was the key thing that made games work on Linux (it usually is) but in this case disabling it made it run.
how do I stop sucking at this game? my citizens keep becoming poor and then rich again in an endless loop, it's infuriating how the homosexual merchants or whatever don't make the rounds around the neighborhoods that need those services. How do I work around this?
more intersections more ways for them to frick up
use road blockers
ok I'll try with the looping desing instead of building my shit in a line. I guess that would make roadblocks easier to use for me since now I can just enclose those loops and the ecruiters will go to where they are supposed to go.
Do you have enough merchants? They only ever stock up on so much stuff at once, if you're making blocks too big, you need more than one bazaar.
If you do have enough, then you probably fricked up the intersections and they're just wandering around doing frick knows what. You should avoid intersections as much as you can, because every time a walker has to go through one, he has a 50% chance of fricking up. More loops, less grids
WE
Was there ever a mission in pharaoh where you are in the 25th dynasty, the one that was actually a bunch of black nubians? I tried to check and the closet I can come up with is Pi-Yer and Migdol in the Cleopatra expansion which are separated by hundreds of years and completely skip over the 25th dynasty. I think they may have skipped it because the nubians were a bunch of old kingdom mega LARPers that built pyramids again even though they were several thousand years out of style.
Caesar 3 got both the Julius and Augustus mods (Julius doesn't touch the original gameplay while Augustus improves upon it)
So maybe we'll get a similar mod for Pharaoh too one day.
I know some people were asking about a Pharaoh fork back when Augustus became well known. But all the people who were even considering working on it changed their mind once the remake was announced, because surely it wouldn't be a downgrade, right?
Maybe they will change their mind now, but I would know, since the entire discussion about Julius/Augustus moved to some random SEA e-celeb's dicksword for some ungodly reason
The HD Pharaoh is made with unity so it might actually be easier to mod. Literally all the devs did was just trace all the sprites so making new ones should be easy.
>since the entire discussion about Julius/Augustus moved
That's because there is but a handful of people that find C3 good, and half of them don't see how removing even the semblance of difficulty off the game via modding is a good thing to do.
I'm still baffled anyone tried to "fix" C3. Why would you even want to touch that mess?
You're confusing the two forks of that project. The original autistic binge that was Julius doesn't fix shit, it even explicitly recreates the bugs C3 had, despite being a complete open source rewrite.
>Why would you even want to touch that mess?
If that's the game they played as a kid, that's enough. I will always have nostalgia glasses for Pharaoh/AoE1, because those were the games of my childhood. Even if Pharaoh 2: Reimagined comes out, gets everything right about the old one and adds actual improvements while sucking my dick under the table, I will keep going back to the original.
>If that's the game they played as a kid, that's enough
I played that game as a teen and I still fail to find a reason to not just return to it (tried it in my 30s and it was fricking abysmal, especially when compared with just about every Impressions' city builder prior and after C3).
I genuinely don't understand nostalgia toward C3. It was a deeply flawed game with terrible gameplay idea of an object placement game as a puzzle to solve, rather than doing what rest of the city does - managing a city. And both of those fan project are all about doubling down on all the flaws of that game, but then throwing at you "solutions" like global manpower or programmable roadblocks, turning the whole thing into a joke.
The shitty Pharaoh remake has the same problem - the second you turn on the global manpower, the game becomes a joke. You can keep all the other settings vanilla, and this one all by itself will trivialize whatever challenge there is, including things like "how do I properly build my city around a tiny oasis that can support 3 wells max"
*fail to find a reason to return
>The shitty Pharaoh remake has the same problem - the second you turn on the global manpower, the game becomes a joke.
Can't you already technically do that in the OG by prioritizing workers? Or is this something else?
I remember when I used to have issues with workers being too far from their work or something, I just set worker priority and it seems to just force the workers into the workforce anyway.
No, worker priorities only affected which industry gets workers first, not worker access.
Worker access and worker priority are two unrelated things.
In OG, I couldn't build an utterly separate quarry complex and all the infra for building, say, a pyramid complex, because I needed workers. And I could get those workers either by having it connected with my housing quarter or by setting up a tiny industrial ghetto. Both had its own disadvantages and made it a constant juggle to get shit done, even if on paper, you had 10% unemployment, accounting for few dozens of workers.
If you play with global manpower, it's all a non-consideration, since the basis for the issue doesn't exist. And when you apply prioritization, you can set up your entire fricking city from the ground up before even unpausing, and then get everything in top order in 2-3 months. Because your worker allocation will be where you need it to get the ball rolling and then it's just a steamroller.
Both Zeus and especially Emperor, despite having global manpower, had challenges that came from OTHER things than "balance your industrial quarter with housing". Pharaoh did not, since it inherited most of C3 object placement gameplay. And the second you cut the main challenge to object placement - nearest housing and quality of living in it - the game turns into a joke.
I don't really see what your talking about with the workers in industrial areas. You just put a 2x2 house down where you want your industry and that links it up to the global labour pool. It's literally busywork having to set up 2x2 plus physician, policemen, firehouse, architect, sometimes apothecary. The only time it isn't is when workers are at a premium and you can't just waste about 30 workers on keeping a hut alive so you have to get a little creative with your industry placement. But you could definitely build a separate quarry and even cut it off from the main road network and just use getting warehouses to transport stuff since they don't need roads. Honestly you could probably balance pharaoh for global employment by bumping up the ratings needed to pass a mission because it feels like there is pretty much no difference between having a global labour pool and doing it Emperor style.
>No, there is no difference between automatic employment and employment walkers
Nta, but ask me how I know you never went past Archaic period campaign in Pharaoh.
Maybe ask yourself, I'm on Cleopatra.
When a building needs labor, it will send out a walker to search for it.
That walker will follow the road, taking a random direction every time it reaches a split. It will do this for a certain distance before returning.
If the walker passes by a house within two tiles of the road, it will begin to draw labor from the global population. Most industry buildings can be fully staffed by having its walker pass by two or three housing tiles.
The puzzle aspect is in that houses don't like being too close to industry, as the negative appeal will stop them from evolving.
That is why you will sometimes see players put a single housing block in the middle of their industrial zone, while keeping their fancier housing block further away. That one house is providing all the labor for the entire zone.
While this is the easiest solution, it comes with its own problems. Having tents drags down your prosperity, and having the house fall sick or catch fire can cause you entire industry to shut down.
Labor access is a core part of the gameplay:
Your towers need access to your training building. So how do you connect two walls on opposite sides of the city?
You needs stone for your monument, but the only good mining spots are far away from any water, how do you get them access to labor?
There's lots of good farm land on this side, but not a lot of building space. How do I get good labor access without using tent labor? And so on.
The game is built around these puzzle-like strategies.
Now, with a single button in the menu, the labor walker mechanic gets disabled. All buildings everywhere instantly get labor access. Any challenge it provides is gone. As is the desirability challenge. And everything else related to it.
What's the point of animals in Emperor?
Mission objectives, bonus end-mission score, and free gifts. Once you have 1 animal you will never run out of it and when you gift one to a city they will send a different one back to you in a few months. You can get all 9 really easily.
Is the new pharaoh worth it for someone who has never played the series before?
Is Nebuchadnezzar any better?
Pharaoh is one of the best walker city builders so give it a try.
The new pharaoh seems to be a buggy half-baked mess. Neb also seemed very half-baked last time I saw it.
>Is the new pharaoh worth it for someone who has never played the series before?
Not really, because it's overpriced 1:0.95 copy of the original, while also suffering from plethora of bugs and removing bunch of important UI features, making the game tedious despite simplicity. You are unironically better off playing the original.
>Is Nebuchadnezzar any better?
Also big no. Nab is just too fricking short, and too simple in what it is doing, while suffering from C3 problem of being at its core an object placement game, rather than a city builder. If it was a free game, sure, but someone decided to make a passion project first and then sell it, and it shows. Just not enough content, and literally half of the game is tutorial.
If you never played any of the Impressions city builders, then your best bet is either original Pharaoh or Emperor, literally toss a coin to make your pick.
i like emperor rotmk but i want to try pharaoh should i get the old version or the remaster?
Old version is cheaper and looks better, you can't really go wrong with it.
Old version.
If you can't stand the resolution, there is literal bazillion of fan mods and patches to deal with it. And despite being amateur work, they still look better than 3 years of production by professionals that went into remake.
Old, apply hires patch and be done with it. New is fricking soulless with clash of clan art direction.
Whats the point of personal salary?
its a glitch to make infinite money set it to highest and then invest it in to the city
But doesn't it come from the city's treasury?
...perhaps
anyway its how we all used to play when we were kids, not understanding how anything works until the consequences arrive
the real point of it is to send gifts to the pharaoh boosting your rating
It's to bribe the emperor/pharaoh (depending on the game) to bolster your empire/kingdom rating pronto. Helps with missions you want/must to finish quick.
In original C1 and C2, that fund was important, because it was the only money carried between missions, and entire difficulty of C1 and C2 came from the fact you had less and less starting money, so you wanted to milk every single city as long as feasible to get a nice starting budget for next map. It became completely obsolete from C3 onward and is mostly used to send gifts to the ruler. You can still donate it to the city coffers, but it's useless.
tl;dr artifact mechanics
fricking love zeus
hope they don't get their grubby hands on this masterpiece
>Your city's actors lost the Pythian Games
Shameful display.
I could never get into Zeus, despite loving all the other games.
The weird warped perspective of the buildings never worked for me.
same here, the aesthetics is off putting
>Pharaoh :avoid building crossroads on roads because walkers are dumb as hell and will not actually go where they should.
>ALSO Pharaoh : every entertainment road build forces you to make a crossroad.
thats why Pharaoh was never my fav city build from the old ones
just use roadblocks
There are two ways to go about it:
>#1: Slap a tiny t-junction with a venue into your housing block, roadblock one end of it and just accept that some of your walkers will make a detour and sometimes not complete a full loop, hopefully rarely enough to not destabilize your housing block
>#2: Put a venue outside of your housing block where the only path to it requires entertainers to walk through the housing block to reach it, providing entertainment to the houses they pass by on the way while the block itself remains junction free
Pic related is an example of the latter
wiat what? you're telling me the fricking walkers coming from the school also count towards entertainment?
Yeah, they're functionally identical to the walkers produced by staffed venues, the only difference being that they have a set destination rather than walking randomly.
How fricking new to this game are you?
Along with: why did you skip the fricking tutorial?
The game didn't say that entertainers walking to their post provide their service still.
>I am blind and stupid, yet I play a strategy video game
A service walker is a service walker, doesn't matter what and how generated them, you daft c**t
Except they specifically state that the entertainer needs to walk to the pavilion in order to work so it's perfectly logical to assume that untill they get there that they aren't providing anything.
except literally if you want to get imaginative the game punishes you for it and every single guide and event the tutorial tells you to just make blocky loops instead of being free to build whever the frick you want.
You can also make your block a figure 8 and place the entertainment in the middle.
Just do the good old outer ring housing, you dense frick. If 15 yo me could figure it out, why can't you?
>2023
>L-block is still being posted
That shit was proven to be busted before Zeus came out.
>he got filtered by walkers
Holy frick, nine year old me could manage it and even then I didn't abuse roadblocks or do inner housing ring shit. Just separate your industry from your residential and you'll be fine.
>Pharaoh :avoid building crossroads on roads
that is bullshit and just the cheese people started using over time, ive always just built more service buildings in the areas where there is a problem
As much as I love the series, this is also why I can only play so much of it. The game is so hard set on having to make loops it becomes boring because even 1 junction can completely tear down your entire housing block. I remember making a really cool looking housing section in Zeus and getting so angry it kept burning down because the walkers where to moronic.
>As much as I love the series, this is also why I can only play so much of it. The game is out for 25 years, yet I am still getting filtered hard by the fact I can't plan my cities for shit and thus it is too much to play for long, as I simply can't. My moronation is so severe, I can't even plan ahead and blame the game on my lack of imagination or inability to draw on paper first, place buildings later
ftfy