Pharaoh + Cleopatra
First of all, please understand that I have no nostalgic attachment to this game. I did not play it as a kid, I did not even know about it until last month when i did a search on steam for any Egypt themed games (because I love Egypt.)
This game is fantastic. It’s so fun to be able to build an ancient city from scratch, and see it go from a few slums to a bustling paradise. I easily spend multiple hours playing this game without realising it.
There are many levels to play, each with different city goals. My favourite part is adding plazas, garden, and different statues to my city to make it look really stunning. The graphics are loving crafted and look beautiful. I also like that there are only minimal military gameplay in this, that was always my least favourite part of any society- building game like Civ or Age of Empires. Just leave me and my city in peace!!
– Real player with 196.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best City Builder Historical Games.
This is of course a cult classic.
Compared to Caesar 3:
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too toxic colors, liked Caesar 3 much more
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buildings also less beautiful in my opinion
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significantly refined mechanics allowing clearer gameplay (water walker, bazaar lady capacity and many more)
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more difficulty (mainly in more space constraints)
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great monuments
And now how to make it playable:
0. Check out the HD patch guide in the hub and use it.
1. Use WinXPSP2 compability, Reduced color to 16 bit, Disable fullscreen optimizations, Run as admin, Program DPI, High DPI override. Not sure that everything is needed though.
– Real player with 147.9 hrs in game
Caesar™ 3
The “Don’t Escape Trilogy” is a collection of three short first-person point-and-click adventures with static screens (no camera movement, no scrolling). The games share a creepy atmosphere and a few gameplay mechanics, but are otherwise unrelated. In the first game, you play a werewolf trying to lock himself away before a full-moon night, so that he won’t kill anyone when he turns. In the second game, you’re trying to barricade a house and protect yourself from a zombie horde. In the third game, you’re the only surviving crew member on a spaceship and need to stop “something” from getting out.
– Real player with 5.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best City Builder Rome Games.
Even though the entire trilogy is available for free on Armor Games, I chose to purchase this game series on Steam because that’s how amazing ScriptWelder really is. The Deep Sleep and Don’t Escape series were some of the first PC games I ever played, and I have ScriptWelder to thank for making my early experiences so magical. I have followed each and every game you have published on AG, hunted down every achievement, set of choices, and walkthrough I could find… simply, because every single second I spent in any of your games was one of either awe, wonder, fear, or curiosity.
– Real player with 5.1 hrs in game
Mob Rule Classic
I’ve played this on my new setup (AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, Radeon RX 6800) and I’ve had zero issues. No crashes, no graphical glitches or anything, so this release works on a modern system. I write this, because Fable: The Lost Chapters didn’t function well with a modern multicore CPU, but required a single CPU affinity to work without stuttering.
Now, the game was initially in stretched full-screen mode, but just go into your Radeon, Intel or Nvidia drivers and make it centered. There will be black bars in the side, since it was designed for 4:3 monitors back in 1999, but now the graphic isn’t stretched and looks like it should.
– Real player with 41.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best City Builder Crime Games.
Hi System 3, thank you so much!
I bought this game in support of your company and your great work all these years and especially the development of the Constructor series!
I wholeheartedly recommend this game as it is a classic that doesn’t really take itself too seriously and was unique at the time. However, these points need to be ironed out:
1.) The mouse scroll is too fast and it flickers too much
2.) There needs to be improved AI, where a lot of the repetitive motions such as stopping the enemy from picketing the fences should be dealt with automatically
– Real player with 30.1 hrs in game
Tropico Reloaded
One of the greatest political simulators of all time. The only thing the remakes do better is adding vehicles, tropicans have a real hard time walking the length of larger islands. Still runs excellent on modern machines.
Why is Tropico one of the greatest simulators of all time?
1. Clear factions that know what they want - people follow factions to varying degrees, factions have measurements of how you are doing based on their own criteria. Communists like housing and income equality, capitalists like industry, religious people like cathedrals and a robust clergy etc. In theory you can make all the factions happy, but if you actually manage do that, turn up your difficulty.
– Real player with 149.8 hrs in game
The original Tropico is still good, but not quite as good as the later ones. Tropico 2, on the other hand, is still the only game that lets you run a pirate island and is very much worth playing.
Tropico 1 is still quite enjoyable, but if you’ve played 3 and onwards you’ll miss the cars as it takes Tropicans forever to get anywhere on foot. This tends to cause food supply problems on large islands even with plenty of farms and wharves and markets. There’s also the same problem that’s been present in every game until Tropico 4’s Modern Times expansion of any housing with decent quality taking enormous amounts of real estate for the tiny number of people it houses. On the bright side, the excessively goofy style of the later games is absent here.
– Real player with 78.8 hrs in game
Zeus + Poseidon
One of my favorite childhood games to play, though I’m not quite certain it works as intended, be it because of steam or windows 10. The game launches in fullscreen by default and messes up my screen resolution when doing so. It does feature an in-game windowed mode that fixes this…but this renders the user interface on the right (through which the game is played) mostly unreadable, and it also squishes the text to make it difficult to read.
Additionally, I am uncertain the gods are properly rendered. I remember them when I played the game on disk them appearing instantly; it can take them over a minute to appear now and their animations for anything (be it attack, curse, or blessing) are equally as slowed.
– Real player with 179.9 hrs in game
Oh boy, oh boy…
It finally happened. One of my top 5 games of all time recently got released on Steam. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent playing the main Zeus & Poseidon campaigns, let alone the custom-made ones.
The pinnacle of city builders that started with Sierra and ended with Impressions Games: The Caesar series, Pharaoh (& Cleopatra), Zeus (& Poseidon), Emperor - Rise of the Middle Kingdom, and even Children of the Nile (even though I never quite got into it). Pharaoh is also available in Steam now, so make sure you check it out, too!
– Real player with 94.5 hrs in game
SimCity™ 4 Deluxe Edition
Ever thought you could make a better city? Pah, I could be a better Mayor; well now you can! SimCity 4 is just that and offers this opportunity and lets you sit in the chair titled “mayor”. I’ve definitely clocked up more hours in the days I installed this on ME and XP.
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition is another one of those games that has been created by EA… EA? Not again you say - except this time.. EA has really created a game and has polished it up to its standards. SC4 is one of the older prequels to ‘Societies’ and the 2013 SimCity relaunch; released after Sim City 3000, it showed off superb graphic capabilities at the time and invented new ways to enjoy building a simulated city, where you play as the city’s major, managing the: finances, housing stock, roads, ports, resident satisfaction, transit, and employment.
– Real player with 567.8 hrs in game
Ah, SimCity 4, the best, in my opinion, of all of the SimCity games. The graphics are dated, being that this was released around fifteen years ago, but don’t let that deter you. Play times depend on how much you enjoy city building games. I myself have spent 2-4 hours today playing it.
The U-Drive-It mode is pretty cool, as it lets you drive through your transportation system with a variety of vehicles, but can get annoying over time with the other cars.
The regions are a nice addition, as you can have cities depend on each other, plus some of the regions come in the shape of several real-life cities, albeit with no structures. In the same vein, importing and exporting cities & regions are useful. If you have a sprawling metropolis and want to share it with the world, you can! Have a police state with stations on every corner? You now can show it to your friends and family!
– Real player with 325.6 hrs in game
CaesarIA
Not a bad concept for a city builder.
I’m enjoying it so far.
I will say tho.
The buildings need an area of effect highlight when positioning them.
Buildings can have a positive or negative effect on housing development.
Some have a blanket effect, others the effect is over multiple rings, or in the case like the Markets they need to be within range of functioning storeage buildings to be active themselves.
This isnt a bad thing but as the Market description implies, it both boosts and reduces housing while needing to be within range of buildings that reduce housing development. Neither effect is displayed so theres no ideal way of knowing if the storage is within range of the markets while being out of range of the housing.
– Real player with 11.5 hrs in game
I downloaded this because it’s getting harder and harder to find a good City Builder now a days. they are all becoming apps with pay to win, and they either focus all on economy, or all on combat and pvp. sometimes you just want to play alone, and not have to fork out money to make the play smooth. Warcraft, Starcraft, Age of empires, Ceasar, and a few others were great for this, it’s a dying breed of game it feels like for me.
anywho, I saw this ans was super excited. I played it immediatly. about 6 hours into my play time I ran into a few road blocks. some things weren’t working properly, and they littlerally haulted game progression. (example, being able to appease Ceaser’s requests was broken) among a few other things like crashes, and games not saving.
– Real player with 8.3 hrs in game
Cultures - Northland
A classic game, one of the first videogames I played on PC. My friends dismissed it as a “cardboard-cutout” silly RTS, but despite all that, I still love the game.I’ve recently had the pleasant surprise to find it listed on steam, as I misplaced the original CD, and bought it at a slight discount to see if it still runs (windows 10 64bit). Gotta say, I had to fiddle with the resolution and graphics settings a bit, but I got it to work, and it was worth it.
A few ways in which this game differs from other strategy games: left click is only for selection; placing buildings,setting work areas, taking various actions and whatnot require right-clicking. All subjects have their various needs (if played on easy or normal difficulty) that need to be satisfied. Vikings require signposts to be placed around to go to faraway places. This need can be bypassed by scouts(who place the signposts) and military units.
– Real player with 39.1 hrs in game
Childhood game, therefore my review might be subjective.
Very good, old school RTS game with colorful graphics, simple rules, many campaigns and no need for DLC’s. There could be more main missions as well as side missions apart from those at Skirmish mode.
Let’s not forget that the game production is dated as of year 2000, the 2015 is the release date on steam, not the actual production time. As of year 2000, the game can be easily compared to old The settlers or old Anno titles.
Although few aspects of the game could be more extended, such as main heroes. Great example here can be Spellforce series or even Warlords Battlecry where the main hero can use spells, have certain attributes as well as the inventory.
– Real player with 34.9 hrs in game
Age of Empires: Definitive Edition
Excellent remake of a classic
– Real player with 118.8 hrs in game
I’m too old for this
– Real player with 96.4 hrs in game
Knights and Merchants
Great Nostalgia, as I played the original game ~2000 when I was a kid. If you already played this game, you can’t do much wrong buying it again, it contains both campaigns (The Shattered Kingdom [TSK] & The Peasants Rebellion [TPR]) which should take ~50hrs of raw speedrunning if you still know the concept of the game.
There is a problem though: This is NOT the original game from 2000! It’s a remake with a hell of new bugs and changes (esp. if you played TSK and didn’t own the Gold Edition)
Some things I noticed:
– Real player with 148.3 hrs in game
If The Settlers and Dark Souls had a love child, it would be Knights and Merchants.
I never got to play this when it was originally released in 1998, and I regret it, but the mistake has now been rectified!
K&M is an old school RTS/city economy builder hybrid. The concept is simple, the graphics a little dated, but still good enough, the sounds are simple and your minions make cute little comments when ordered to do something. The UI is easy to understand and on the surface, it seems a simple game.
– Real player with 140.4 hrs in game