Great Empires Collection 2

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $129.90

Features:

• and other civilizations.
• Meet new gods, heroes, and monsters like Hera, the Chimera, and Bellerophon (who caught Pegasus).
• Create your own adventures in ancient Greece or Atlantis, with Poseidons powerful Adventure Editor.Caesar III:
• Create, rule, and defend a Roman city of your design
• Expand Rome's legendary network of roads, open trade routes

Accessories:

PC Gamer (1-year)

Customer Reviews:

The Manuals are on the CDs [Posted on 2004-02-22]
They finally got it right with Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom. But, these games, the precursors, are still great fun if you're into city building. They just require a bit more micromanagement. This facet annoys me a little, but I'm so drawn to the Egyptian and Greek and Roman themes that I keep going back and trying to overlook that.

Unlike erroneous reports previous, this collection DOES include manuals in PDF format on the CDs. In fact, once you install the games, there are shortcuts installed in your start menu to take you right to the manuals. No software company is stupid enough to rerelease a game, even a budget title, without some sort of manual.

So, do not fear! All the instructions are here. Set yourself up for a long night of city building!

Hundreds of hours of gaming enjoyment [Posted on 2004-05-05]
The City Building Series starts, oddly, with Caesar 3. Caesar and Caesar 2 are sufficiently different that knowing how to play either of those games will not give you a clue as to how to play Caesar 3, Pharaoh, Zeus, or Emperor. The same holds true in reverse.

The best way to view these games, IMHO, is this:

Caesar 3 is the progenitor of the City Building Series proper. It featured the introduction of basic concepts such as labor walkers, warehouses, foreign trade, sea trade, and so on.

Notably, when compared to the rest of the series, it lacked roadblocks. Given that roadblocks were put in the subsequent games due primarily to fan demand, their absence in C3 is easily understood and forgiven (particularly since you can, with only a minor amount of effort, make city gates confer the exact same benefit to your city as roadblocks provide to the other games). And since it's still possible to build functioning housing blocks without either gates or roadblocks, the lack of them isn't a problem, and is more of a challenge to your designing skills.

Pharoah and Cleopatra took the basic C3 engine and added a vatload of complexity. It was still the same basic engine, but with many more features: Monument construction, seasonal farming, industries requiring more than one type of raw material, and riverborne combat with boats, to name just a few. The numbers were also adjusted to make the game more challenging than C3: each level of housing holds less people than housing of comparable level in C3. Thus, keeping your industries filled with employees became much more of a challenge.

Pharaoh (and Cleopatra) is considered by many die-hard fans of the entire series to be the most challenging of the 4 games.

With Zeus, the game engine was given a major revamp. Gone were the labor walkers, who needed to pass by occupied housing in order to acquire employees for a given industry. Instead, any industry on the map would find employees as long as it was connected via road to any occupied housing.

Also gone were the forts. If your city was invaded, your citizens poured out of their houses to defend the town from invasion -- with a concommitant effect on your industry. (When all your employees are out fighting the bad guys, there aren't many left to make olive oil.)

Elite housing was made in a new way. In C3 and Pharaoh, if you wanted elite, high-tax housing, you had to grow it from small tents and shacks. In Zeus, you were given elite housing plots, which you could simply plop down anywhere you wanted (assuming they would fit, and you could support them, and the desirability of the area was sufficient).

Zeus also introduced the episodic format of the series (something that I, personally, consider a bit of a step backwards). Instead of starting at the dawn of time and going through the game city by city until the final mission, you are given a series of episodes. Each episode may have you developing multiple cities, and returning to one or more of them at various points of the game. You might start off building Athens for a few missions, then switch to building a colony city (which will provide goods to Athens when you're done), and then switch back to Athens (which will be exactly as you left it).

There were many other adjustments made to the basic City Building game engine that made it almost (but not quite) a new game. However, you could still see the skeleton of the C3 game engine underneath the hood.

game man 212 [Posted on 2004-08-24]
first, this is the first review i have ever wrote.next, This game is great and i have only got the trial versions! i'm going to get it soon. last, I think it's a exelent choice for any gamer!!!

Great games - must have  [Posted on 2005-07-06]
You'll get to play five games in beautifully detailed graphics and animation; it's challenging and very addictive. Expect to spend lots of hours on the computer against your will.
My favorite is Caesar; I often end up playing it till the wee hours of the nite.
Check the Sierra site for patches.

excellent deal... historical city building... [Posted on 2005-09-06]
"Caesar III" is a best-selling, top-rated historical city building game that established the genre seven years ago. It lets you run a city in ancient Rome. It was so popular that "Zeus"/"Poseidon" for cities in ancient Greece and "Pharaoh"/"Cleopatra" for cities in ancient Egypt soon followed.

This collection is an excellent deal to get the three Caesar III, Zeus, Pharaoh games and the two Poseidon, Cleopatra expansions. Each culture has a different theme treatment for landscapes, buildings, characters, goods, interactions with other cities etc.

Game play ranges from easy to difficult depending on what scenarios and difficulty levels you choose to play. Game help is available in the player menus. Even better help is available free from online fan sites offering strategy guides, walkthroughs, and faqs.

If you like these games, check out also the modern game treatment ("Sims2"-like zooming 3D landscapes and characters) now available for ancient Egypt in "Children of the Nile" (reviewed separately) and ancient Rome in "Caesar IV" (due Fall 2006).

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