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The Nile calls once again as the Queen of Kings takes center
stage in Pharaoh Official Expansion: Cleopatra, with four new
campaigns for Pharaoh. Offering a completely new story line,
starting with the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, this expansion
pack includes the mysterious and exotic time of Cleopatra VII.
Review
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Most expansion packs simply add a few new items and missions and
assume that fans of the original game will be content to just
play more of the same. With Cleopatra, developer BreakAway Games
hasn't taken such an easy route. Cleopatra adds more of just
about everything, from imports to monuments, and makes
Impressions' Pharaoh a more complex and interesting game, without
disrupting the fine balance of the original. The minor problems
in Pharaoh haven't been addressed, and one new problem has been
added, but it's safe to say that anyone who loved or even liked
the original will be entirely content with this weighty addition.
As in Pharaoh, Cleopatra's missions are basically variations on
a single theme. You must build the infrastructure of a city by
ensuring that your residents have food, water, and the luxuries
they want. You must provide the food by fishing, hunting, and
farming, and then distribute the food to your residents through
markets. You must build workshops to make pottery, linen,
papyrus, , and other important goods, as well as find and
supply the needed raw materials. When certain raw materials -
goods or foodstuffs - are not available, you must import them
from other cities. And you must create goods for export in order
to maintain a positive cash flow, especially when your import
costs are high.
You win a mission by achieving set ratings in certain
categories, such as prosperity - the quality of life in your city
and your overall wealth; kingdom - how well your city is regarded
by others; culture - the a of civilized niceties available
to your people; and also by successfully constructing monuments.
Cleopatra makes the whole process a bit more complex by adding
two new industries, lamp making and paint making. Lamps are made
from pottery and oil, of which the latter can only be imported,
while paint making requires henna, which can be farmed. The new
industries are essential to the construction of some of the new
monuments, the best of which are the tombs. To build royal tombs,
you need paint to decorate the walls, and lamps to light the
caves where the artisans work. You also need to stock these tombs
with luxury items, which makes monument building even more
involving.
The campaigns in Cleopatra follow the basic formula of Pharaoh,
but add a few interesting twists and challenges. The first
campaign requires that you build the Valley of the Kings by
constructing the royal tombs in the cliffs and, as the campaign
goes on, that you keep them safe from grave robbers. Cleopatra
starts off at approximately the same difficulty at which Pharaoh
left off, and quickly gets much harder. Some missions now have
time limits, which can make them much more difficult for players
who're used to slowly building an infrastructure before tackling
the larger mission objectives. While such constraints certainly
can be frustrating, they help to break up the occasional monotony
that occurs once you've found a city-building pattern that works.
The second new campaign in Cleopatra deals with the arrival of
new enemies, while the third deals with the reign of Ramses II,
and the fourth with that of Cleopatra herself. The first campaign
basically acts as a primer to the new elements, while the others
require that you use everything at your disposal to stop the
near-constant invasion of enemies. The element of
Cleopatra is tougher than in the original, and you'll even have
to complete some missions that simply require you to survive an
onslaught for a given time.
Most of the new challenges in Cleopatra are welcome and serve
not only to extend the game, but also to enhance it. Among these
challenges are the plagues - problems of epic proportions - that
occur when the gods are displeased with you. Rivers of blood,
swarms of locusts and frogs, and hailstorms all add to your need
to keep any and all of your patron deities as pleased as possible
at all times.
Cleopatra does include a few unwelcome additions, like creatures
that will attack your populace. The scorpions in the first two
missions will undoubtedly make you frustrated as they wander your
streets and kill your people. You can theoretically take them out
with personnel, as you are advised to do in the game's
help file, which would be fine if you could actually recruit
personnel in these missions. Also, there is a strange
bug that occurs when building tombs - if you dispatch any of the
luxury goods to the tomb before it's completed, all production on
the tomb will stop. However, not only will this affect your
current game, it will also affect any saved games you have in
that mission, requiring you to start over completely.
What's more problematic is the fact that one of Pharaoh's more
frustrating elements has still not been addressed. Quite simply,
your workers are still as dumb as dirt, and they wander the
streets as if they were windup toys bouncing around your city.
You'll have food and water distributors wandering completely
unpopulated areas, while residents are moving out because they're
starving and thirsty. You can help reduce this problem through
strategic placement of markets and the use of roadblocks, but it
would have been nice if these key elements had some sort of
artificial intelligence that would have sent them where they were
needed, within a limited range.
But this problem is endemic to Pharaoh (and the Caesar games
before it), and Cleopatra can't be entirely faulted for not
addressing it, especially when the additions in this expansion
are so numerous and so much fun. Cleopatra is both more difficult
and more complex than Pharaoh, but it also makes the game seem
new and fresh. And you can't ask much more than that from an
expansion pack.
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