Pharaoh (and Cleopatra) 01 - Thinis
ok so a theme with me is that since I have played the tutorial maps before I am way over ambitious with them, haha. But here’s an introduction to Pharaoh. I’ll do more specific explanation of buildings and game play with the next map as more things are introduced but here’s a quick first map. on youtube here.
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.
There’s also the festival square which I place off discontented to anything. That’s a trick really, they’re annoying to plan around and I am used to doing that. They function without workers or anything so I don’t bother to connect them. If I stick with streaming long enough I’ll probably try to play by using them but for now I’m carrying on with me usual exploit of the game not making me place them properly. I don’t get to it on this map but festival squares allow you to throw parties in honor of a god which make people happier and more importantly make the gods happier.
