#mg-pharaoh

this map introduces farming. The Nile has a flood plain, which in game is a strictly defined area with longer grass. This is the only place you can build farms at this point and farms are merely fields and labor is provided from labor camps. Farms thus do not require access to the housing.

and then, the Nile floods and the floodplain is underwater! Food cannot be produced by farms on floodplains when the fields are underwater.When the Nile recedes, the fields automatically get farmers again. Osiris is the god who can effect the flooding of the Nile. Land that isn’t sufficiently flooded will be less fertile in the next farming season. Nilometer predictions are given to warn about potential poor floods and the resulting less productive farming season.

while at first on this map, there’s no way for farms to have road access and keep the town walkers from wandering to the fields, eventually the fabulous roadblock becomes available! Roadblocks only stop walkers with no set destination, like a market worker carrying food around to distribute. They don’t stop walkers with a specific destination like a delivery person talking food to a granary. This means I can now keep the goods and services near the housing where they actually belong.

this map is all about gold, in a way, though it’s mostly about getting used to game play. Still, I start off with three gold mines because managing money on this map when you’re building more than intended because you can’t stick to the goals....well, anyway, gold mines. Gold isn’t stored in a warehouse/storage yard like other goods. It goes to your treasury for which you need a palace so that’s there too. I then made a beginning housing area with water access.

Like with Caesar, the way things work is that any building that needs employees has to have access to the labor pool via road. So those mines will send out a guy to walk along a road a certain distance from his home building. If he walks by a house in that time, the building will have employees and work. If he doesn’t pass a house, the building has no labor and doesn’t work until he does. This is the same for most buildings. Now with service buildings like the water carriers, the building will send out a service worker once it has labor who will meander the streets providing access to the service for as many steps as he goes. Houses a water carrier passes by have access to clean drinking water.

Houses improve with the more access to services they have and in turn will hold more people. Different levels of housing have different requirements that have to be met to evolve. The first kind of house, a crude hut, has no access to anything. The first thing it needs is water, then food, then religious facilities, each time it evolves into the next, bigger and fancier house.

Food on this map is entirely hunting, farming doesn’t get introduced until next time. The hunting camps send out hunters to kill game and this is stored in granaries.

So to recap a bit, the hunting lodge will sent out a guy to see if there’s housing with people near by, when he passes a house, the hunting lodge has hunters.The hunters go out and kill ostriches for food and take the meat back to the lodge and a cart will take it to the granary for storage.

Now to get it to the people in the houses, I build bazaars which are the market places that get the housing access food and goods. The bazar, like other buildings sends out a walker to see if there’s people nearby, once it has labor access it sends a market woman to get goods from storage places like the granary, she walks to the nearest source of what she needs (in this case food) and take it back the bazaar and then walks around for awhile giving the houses access to what she has for sale.

Another major concern though is maintenance of buildings.Buildings can catch fire or collapse if they’re not maintained and thus you also need firemen and architects. These walkers don’t provide any services or make anything evolve or contribute to trade, but they’re vital to keeping everything standing.

And finally on this map there’s also religion and entertainment. After basic needs like food and water are met, the people want to see to spiritual affairs. Pharaoh has five gods, though they’re not all available on all maps. For this map the only option is Bast so all temples are to her. Shrines take no workers but don’t count toward providing religious access. They do raise the desirability of a location by making it look nicer and do garner some points with the gods.

Entertainment at this point is only jugglers. Pharaoh’s entertainment buildings all have to be places on intersections in roads rather than beside them. this is because they’re essentially stages out in the open rather than a building that one enters. This can make planning for them difficult as they get bigger and more complicated. But booths for jugglers are small.

The end of Abu was mostly just a matter of waiting. The challenge in that map is getting sufficient population while also being able to get all the goods they need to them. But there’s actually plenty of space and resources so it wasn’t hard this go around.

Saqqara though introduced the first pyramid and the basic frustration from here on out: it takes a really long time to build those. The mastabas may seem like they take awhile, especially if there’s multiples, but it’s nothing on pyramids. It doesn’t matter how well you plan. The physical reality the game is simulating is that they took a long time to build. But because the game also is a game, there is a beautiful feature where you can get help from the gods so it doesn’t actually take so long you give up and stop playing. I have actually played several maps without that (because I didn’t know it existed...) in the past but given the entertainment aspect of streaming, I’m happy to have that one and you can see that I get several blessings that mean I don’t have to spend as much time or resources on building this monument.

The pyramid may be the biggest and most obvious new thing on this map but there’s also the farms. Up til this map all farms have been built on the Nile flood plain but these are just build on non-flooding fertile land. They don’t have to be irrigated, technically, but it increases their production and frankly makes the planning more interesting. These farms need direct access to the labor pool (near to housing) rather than being run from work camps.

One of the issues my present housing strategy creates comes out a lot on this map which is I can end up with high unemployment--a bizarre novelty for me haha since previous ways of playing always never had enough workers...

Oh! and now I have the blog I can mention The Festival Square!

why do I have this thing out away from the city no connected to anything? surely it’s not supposed to be out there alone doing nothing? Yeahhh, so the festival square is a pain for planning and when I was a teenager I was convinced that festivals disrupted traffic in the city in a way that messed up how the walker system works (which people going to the festival rather than walking by squares I needed them to). I haven’t tested this again because that actually doesn’t seem all that likely, but the thing is a pain and I’m used to sticking it off somewhere I won’t be building. As you can see, it doesn’t hurt anything. If you have it connected to your city when the festivals happen a lot of walkers will go mill around the square.

I do love gold mines, they help so much with finances. Especially when you need to import a lot of stuff and especially especially when that includes burial goods for the pyramid.