mossquillgames

[mossquillgames]

04-05 - Emperor - First and Second Erlitou Missions

I think this is the last time you stay on the same map for successive missions...

youtube 04 and 05

This is a transitional tutorial. It starts with a lot of information and even a suggested map of how to plan the city which you’ll see me completely ignore, haha. I definitely tried it their way the very first time I played this map and found it difficult to manage actually. I should try it again sometime now I know things better but I find that it’s hard to build a good Elite Housing block on that hill. I have better luck using it for farms.

Things are pretty straightforward with these missions. I start out planning the space, they are right about the fishing, LOL. I otherwise I focus on making on making sure I can fit my common and elite housing on the main area and fit other things like farms and industry around that. Then it’s just a matter of getting everything up and running.

Since this map only gives me two sources of food, I know I’ll need to import food for the elites. They also need hemp, pottery, and silk. Modest siheyuan’s don not count as elite housing really. If you place an elite house and someone moves in it will become a modest siheyuan no matter what, in order for it to count toward the mission goals or for military matters, it has to evolve into a lavish siheyuan. No one is going to take a noble seriously until they have silk, at least.

Once you have nobles though...you’re gonna end up at war, haha.

we’ve made it so far as a civilization we now have armed conflict! I then have to set up the industries of war, and of course, the bureaucracy of war.

and that brings us through most of the early gameplay stuff. As time progresses there will be technological and cultural developments that build on all of this but this concludes the basic set up of the game.

[mossquillgames]

03 - Caesar -Tarraco

ok so the first thing you're going to notice is that I avoid the nice big farmland and go build on the awkward farmland and there's a reason for that…

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the earthquake. the earthquake is going to hit and fracture that section as well as destroy buildings built over there, which yes was a surprise the first time I played as a teenager. But not anymore so we build on the awkward spot first.

Otherwise, this map is relatively straightforward. Once the earthquake is over, then it's just a matter of getting everything up and running for real. I have a bit of trouble with unemployment making everyone unhappy as I waited to get the post-earthquake farms going but it sorts out quickly. And then it’s just...waiting. With Caesar the big time issue is the Peace rating because there’s no way to hurry it.Later, I’ll struggle more with prosperity and culture sometimes but in the on this one it’s just...waiting for the peace.

Sometimes when playing for myself I turn the speed up on some of the 'just waiting' periods but I don't want to do that with streams/these videos. So sometimes there are very chill periods where I'm just waiting for a rating to go up or another goal to be reached. It depends on what you want out of these whether or not that's boring, I think. I want to do very relaxing and possibly boring games actually as a possible sleep/relaxation aid. No idea if I achieve that, haha, but that's the overall vibe I'm going for.

[mossquillgames]

04 - Pharaoh - Men-nefer

I give in to the overdoing it thing slightly by making a bigger city than necessary. It's not the end of the world but I have an unemployment problem and am lucky to have enough food. It is meant to be a capital after all, right? haha.

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Oh monuments. The thing that's going to take so.much.time. is going to be monuments. that's arguably very realistic though I do turn blessings on when I remember to make things go faster for entertainment purposes because there's a nice calm and boring game to fall asleep to and there's pyramids. Mastabas aren't too bad though and this is only a small one for this map.

[mossquillgames]

Crusader Kings Twitch Streams 10/23-10/24

oh boy. haha.

so I have three for these two days, which shall henceforth be referred to as one, two, and three. (up for 7 days? twitch claims 14 but this seems to be a lie...)....two is....no. just...I very nearly deleted it. It has major issues. but if you want to skip the part with the wrong scene active and watch me flail around as king I suppose you can have the link to two. But it’s not...it’s bad ok.

featuring accidental kingship, my usual way of playing, embarrassing technical issues, and as par for the course: dramatic events.

ok technical difficulties notes on One and Two: steam does this thing where updates often screw up the display on my laptop for some reason. it happens with at least one other game where before the update all is well and afterward some part of the screen is cut off even though I didn’t change anything and the settings are the same. so it did that with CKII and I didn’t notice right away with stream One and couldn’t do anything about it really because troubleshooting took restarting as CKII doesn’t let you change anything without restarting the game. And then I forgot for stream Two and similar issue. So you’ll notice that the bottom is sort of cut off on those two. I am aware and it sucks but I fixed it for Three and it should be fine going forward unless there’s an update...

BUT ON TO THE GAME!

they’re my islands.

I start out in Orkney because mostly reasons but also in general I don’t wanna be King, I don’t want to do combat, and I am comfortable in Orkney. It’s a Duchy and Duke is quite enough for me.

Additionally in the first part of One you can see my basic strategy: attract talent and redheads. The redheads is just a personal goal. I try to end up with a family and court with as many redheads as possible because...I....don’t have a reason actually, I just do. If you aren’t going to take advantage of most of the game you need an arbitrary other goal, I guess.

I also am a vicious matrimonial marriage arranger. It’s how I get myself into so many dramatic messes with inheriting lands in all the wrong places. But the reason I do it is that it’s a very effective way to get your dynasty all over the place. Sons are great for inheriting your lands, but you want your daughters and female relations out there basically usurping everyone else’s. Or I do anyway.

all his children are belong to us.

I do try a little harder than usual to make more advantageous marriages in terms of net prestige for my family, but I sort of accidentally stumbled into some early good fortune in who I got to come to court and it snowballed....

Of course this sort of marriage was never used as much as the game lets me get away with but shhhh.

For stream one, I play through the first two of my rules. You will notice that in the beginning of the game I have a naming scheme for the kids--first generation is all A names, second is all B names. This falls apart of course pretty quickly because my kids name their own kids and don’t follow the plan, but it helps me keep track of who’s who a bit better.

there’s kings consort and then there’s kings regnant...

My second ruler of the night was this guy and his wife ended up Queen somehow (I wasn’t paying close enough attention her family) so he became King, but only in the consort sense and that’s fine. In terms of ruling he was still just a Duke and I was cool with that. It was indeed good to be the King in that context. Nice hat, get to be called king, but the Duchy is all I have to worry about.

Though that will get...more complicated as things go on due to this marriage....

They had only daughters which was excellent because it meant that due to the succession laws, his eldest daughter got to inherit upon his death.

so ends stream One.

Stream Two....*buries face in hands*

ok so in addition to the display issue not being sorted, there’s an additional technical thing that happens AND I lose control of the game haha. Only mostly in terms of what I personally am trying to do but I end up King of Norway which is absolutely not what I enjoy. And end up reverting to a previous save in Three to make it stop.

so the big technical issue with two is that when I set up the hot keys for the twitch software I really wasn’t sure what to use. I wanted things I could remember more than anything and that....I run afoul of in two because of my naming scheme with the kids.

I go to rename the son she has almost immediately and....it cuts to my brb screen. And I don’t realize until someone tells me so you miss her ENTIRE horrific death from childbirth with the next kid.

To sum up what happens off screen, after this kid, she has the opportunity to take a lover and since her husband is in another court I decided she would go for it and she does and gets pregnant. Pretty quickly it’s a difficult pregnancy and she has the opportunity to retreat from public life early. There were two options for that, ‘go into hiding’ style like with most pregnancies, but early, or she could leave the castle entirely. Thinking this meant sort of a country house retreat or something I decided to go for it. Traveling did not help. She became ill, spent money she didn’t have on a healer, gave birth, and...kept bleeding.

I have never played a ruler who died in childbirth before, or well, afterward.

On the one hand, novelty! On the other...long regencies for kids suck.

Things pick back up during her eldest son’s stint as a child Duke. The reason these suck is that the regent has to agree to any decision like all my marriage arrangements and the regent invariably has different goals than I do. they can sometimes be boring to, though this one wasn’t too bad.

while I do my stint as a frustrated teenager who’s regent won’t let him arrange any fun marriages, I also realize I inherited the middle of a Breton kingdom. Thanks grandma. Anyway, this bit of Brittany now being in Norway and controlled by Orkney will absolutely become an issue...

but before that, crusade! The last guy I played during a crusade just never set anyone and the pope got all bent out of shape about it for sommmmme reason so I decided to see if I could get away with sort of pretending to send some troops. This mostly worked though mostly because I basically just sent them, accidentally, so they did see some battle and then I couldn’t find them and...idk. There’s a reason I don’t do military in anything ever.

crusade!!!!!.....s are confusing. we won?

anyway so after that eventually I grew up, got married, and started making all those marriages I couldn’t whilst a minor and then...

this guy want the middle of his kingdom back. and gets it. and I then start a campaign to try to get it back through marriage and/or assassination except THEN...

I am suddenly KING OF NORWAY and take several moments to figure out wtf. And he died in the middle of some war and I don’t do combat. So then you get to watch me chase the Saami all over the peninsula trying to be king.

I hate being king.

I did give it a go but ugh.

finally we can throw Two away and pretend it never happened!

Because for Three I go back to my save when Beate inherits the Duchy and hasn’t yet died do to childbirth and try to learn from my mistakes...

first thing I do is sort out the display issue so three no longer has part of the bottom of everything cut off!....but I make the hotkey mistake AGAIN. so there is an interlude where I’m playing away and it’s the brb cat screen. and I don’t even remember what specifically happened because it was less dramatic.

Duchess Beate take two. She lives a long live and arranges SO MANY marriages.

Also mostly just due to the random events of the game, I keep my middle of Brittany holding this time. But it’s ok because I have other lands in weird places that get taken away haha.

I do better at crusading without crusading, I think I still did like one battle or something but then went home and the Pope wasn’t mad.

one thing that gets set up though is the further connection with the Keivan Rus, which seemed like a good idea at the time but may make me King of THAT later which....noooooooo.

Under her son it’s more of the same though I do realize the folly of my entanglements and start focusing more on red hair. I also end up having to arrange more marriages within the dynasty because the family is getting unwieldy. One presumably should do that carefully but I do it what’s convenient.

At one point someone takes the Loon place away from my family and I start a campaign to get it back via marriage and assassination because that’s what I do. I mostly only care in this case cuz...Loon!

anyway, this run goes much better in terms of me not ending up King (yet) and I swear I’ll be better about the hotkeys if I stream it again.

[mossquillgames]

Game Overview: Crusader Kings II

ok so this one I obviously did not play as a teenager, haha. It is a historical based game though so it was interesting to me and was introduced to me via a friend as a game that while it had potential combat, that was optional. woo optional combat.

Crusader Kings II is a medieval dynastic simulation game with a focus (which is easily ignored) on the sorts of weird military alliances that came with the actual crusades, and includes occasional calls by religious leaders for holy wars against different faiths as well as plenty of normal territorial wars. The reason the combat is easily ignored is that there’s a lot else going on with marriages, inheritance, unexpected deaths, assassinations, the plague, etc etc etc. Lots goes into the simulation part of this. You begin as the ruler of some sort of territory, you can pick what level from count to king, and play through their life and then when they die you play as their heir so on until you either have something happen so that your family has no more title to land or your dynasty dies out for you hit the end date for the game (14-something). The goal of the game is largely self defined.

there’s plenty of DLC content as well as a lot of mods.

[mossquillgames]

Pharaoh Twitch Stream 10/20/22

(south) Dahshur, followed briefly by setting up the next mission in....Dahshur again! But to the North.

(twitch for 7 days? 14? I...can’t tell....)

Things went pretty smoothly in the south. The pyramid didn’t take to long thanks to some construction blessings, the big hold up was that I wanted to import the granite once I stopped importing plain stone so it took a little bit to get the amount of granite necessary. The waiting really wasn’t necessary, I was making enough money and had workers and space for the granite before but I just...idk didn’t want to, haha. The granite wasn’t used in the pyramid building just the mortuary arrangements so the pyramid was done and looking weird for a bit while imported that granite.

The only real thing of note, at all, I suppose was that since I didn’t need high ratings or even that much population, I had high employment issues once I realized I wasn’t going to need pottery and started selling it. Before that I had been stockpiling so the houses weren’t getting any but when I started selling it, the market traders had access to it (and beer) which made my houses evolve unnecessarily. This created some unemployment issues which I ignored since the housing wouldn't maintain. In most other cities I wouldn’t be this meh about that situation but it just...wasn’t necessary to fuss with it.

I am a bit dubious about how I set up North Dahshur, we shall see next time if it was all mistakessssssss.

[mossquillgames]

Emperor 03

this get a wee bit more interesting in this one! like the introduction of city walls which don’t turn up in other games.

The walls help with desirability a lot and make for nice neat planning. and they’re pretty. I do think they were a little annoying the first time I encountered them because they can limit how you expand and where you put things but I am not very used to them and actually really love them.

they also come with gates. Gates can be set to control some kinds of walkers but essentially keep goods and services confined to where you need them. So in a way it’s the gates more than the walls that really make the nice little neighborhoods.

In addition to the walls and gates, this map introduces pottery which as always requires clay from clay pits and kilns.

and then there’s the first interaction with the ancestral heroes. Instead of throwing the festivals, one pays homage to them. And instead of them then blessing your city with goods or protection or whatever, they...actually turn up.

as in this mission, sometimes one of the requires will be paying respect to the ancestors enough that they will walk in your city for a certain number of months. This requires surplus resources, especially of a valuable nature, to offer to the ancestors. The heroes themselves can be useful, especially when a map requires exotic animals but we’ll get to that later...

[mossquillgames]

Pharaoh 02 Perwadjyt

introducing the most iconic part of Ancient Egypt!...(at least til we get to pyramids)...the Flooding of the Nile!

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.

Additionally this map introduces pottery and means of raising desirability like gardens and statues.

[mossquillgames]

bonelight’s Standard Farm Spring 01 Plan

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so there’s not a lot of good commentary to do yet on bonelight’s farm because things are just getting going but I thought I’d layout the general sort of way Spring is going to go...

so for the Farm, what bonelight has done is make one 6x6 square farm plot to grow crops in while clearing the rest of the farm of rocks and sticks and trees and bushes. I’ll be mostly focusing on growing the crops for the first Community Center Bundle (which isn’t a thing yet) so there’s one green bean plant and a grow some potatoes, kale, and cauliflower, but the main focus is on parsnips because I’ll need 5 gold star parsnips ideally. It may not happen! It’ll be ok. But crops are mostly for money and bundles.

for the Social aspect, bonelight is going to try to make friends with everyone but is going to be focusing on developing close relationships with the eligible ladies in the valley. beyond that, it’ll depend on if I develop any kind of following or not, haha, I plan to let the audience participate in some decisions especially on the romantic front if there a community happens. If not I shall make my own choice though that won’t be in the first year!

for mining, I tend to want to go hard on mining fast just because of the tool upgrades and crafting...as well as the gem collection. this doesn’t actually translate to doing so in terms of what other more serious gamers might do because I will always be also focusing on everything else too.I don’t have a set goal beyond get that ore! You will notice I put a chest by the elevator. I keep my sword in there and at first also some stuff like monster drops or other things I don’t need on the farm just yet. I switch out my tools for the sword before going in to save on backpack space.

foraging is big for me in the beginning too because it’s free food/money!

I probably will not do much fishing this spring. I don’t think I did any on mosslight’s twitch farm actually, not til summer. I don’t personally find it worth it since I don’t enjoy fishing and especially not the first rod which I won’t use--I’ll shamelessly start on the training rod until I can get the fiberglass rod. I did my time on the first one back on my first play-through on desktop years ago.

so Spring is all about clearing out the farm, growing some crops for food and bundles, getting as much ore as possible, and making friends!

[mossquillgames]

Caesar Twitch Stream 10/15

and I try again and....oh...oh the amphitheater of doom....

on twitch for 14 days here if you want to watch about 2 hours of things going ok only to then suddenly...not and have me panic and try to recover...

ok so I set this one up differently trying to cram more housing in the area closer to the main food supply and I tried a sort of box set up? ehhhhh not a huge fan in the end but it did work more or less!

I managed to get close to the target of 5000 people with no food supply issues. I was merely starting to try to get the culture rating to go up when I placed the fatal amphitheater.

the mistake is because when I have played this map before, all my bridges were connected by roads on the different islands, but in this case, the bridge was merely to allow immigration, not walkers. That meant there was no road in front of it to make sure people could come and go if I started trying to build things in front of it. Since I am not used to this, I didn’t check and didn’t realize what had happened until...well...

so if you take out a bridge or block it everything past it is ‘cut off’ and the game depopulates all your houses. Which is a little weird in that in a real situation you’d have more time before everyone died to fix the problem but the game is the game.

and since EVERYTHING was past that point....everyone in my city died! or disappeared if you prefer because that’s more accurate to how the game does it. And then I had to figure out what went wrong, delete the amphitheater, and then wait for everyone to move back in.

I actually tried to revert to an autosave except...Caesar doesn’t have those haha and I never remember to save while streaming which...yeah. Since that failed I had just wait while the population went up only of course the city started collapsing and ugh.

BUT I got almost back up to the point where it all fell apart before the end and may beat the map next time...I hope...ugh ick hate this map.

It’s not actually that hard really, I don’t think, but it’s the one I was stuck on perpetually as a teen so I have baggage.

[mossquillgames]

My Games

streams on twitch, archive on youtube

Caesar III

Pharaoh

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom

Stardew Valley

[mossquillgames]

mossquill’s Standard layout farm on Twitch

a 10/11 stream is here for as long as twitch keeps it

so mossquill is in fall of year two and I thought I’d explain a bit what’s going on...

mossquill’s farm has always been kinda going to be my sort of go to base farm on my new tablet, and I am sort of just streaming it because...because.

anyway so I am here doing basically my standard thing with my farms because yeah I have that hahaha in this case that means that in the above stream I have just finished the bundles. I plan to go slower on other streams maybe but for my sort of comfort farm I want that iridium maker soon please grandpa.

the iridium maker is important because I don’t combat any more than I have to and thus never actually do anything in the caves in the desert...

in general this is how I do my Standard farms. they aren’t all exactly the same and some things may get shifted around a little but the part below the house is fields, the parts on either side of the greenhouse almost to the pond are animal pastures and buildings.

I give my animals a lot of space because I like them. I keep less to a building then makes sense because I can’t keep track of them if there’s too many and I can get weird about petting them all the same amount. I don’t always but it’s a thing, so, for this kind of farm where there’s space, I have two barns and two coops. The barns each have a white cow, a brown cow, a sheep, a goat, and a pig.

I don’t have a clever naming system in this game because I felt weird streaming the names I usually pick since those tend to be fandom clusters and I do nottttt want to open that can of worms with the wider internet. I do intend to maybe do something less random with subsequent farms but idk.

my fruit trees are down by the pond. I have my usual tap tree set up a little different on this farm, I always do the whole surround them with paths thing but I have them all along the bottom here instead of in multiple rows. this frees up some space for other things eventually. maybe.

I also have my whole green house thing in progress with trees along the side, the crops I grow inside are the cactus in a border around the whole space, and then coffee ancient fruit, starfruit, and spice berries in the middle. That’s not done yet at this point but I’m working on it!

Also for my personal comfort farm I always marry Sebastian. We’re not there yet but things are going well...

for my other farms I will explore other dating and marriage options but this farm is ultimately just gonna be my personal happy place so we’re sticking with Sebastian. He mends fences just fine. And is cute with frogs.

[mossquillgames]

Emperor 02

and here is the next tutorial mission for Bampo! it’s...still particularly unexciting but we do introduce how farming works.

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farms! I am absolutely not gonna go off on a tangent about the domestication of millet, which, you are probably grateful for. but anyway, Farms in Emperor involve not just a building but also field squares that have to be placed around the farm. You can also build them more or less anywhere on most maps but the grassy places have better fertility so you’ll see me avoid the less green places as we go on.

in addition to millet for food, there’s hemp for textiles. The hemp is what is actually going to make the houses evolve in this case, though different housing in Emperor requires more variety of food. Bland food, for example, is food from only one source. A granary has to have the required number of sources for the food quality when the market buyer goes there for the houses to have access to the right variety of food.

to have hemp access, in addition to growing and storing the hemp, there needs to be a hemp shop on the market square.

that’s basically it for this map, there’s the gardens which help with desirability but this is another quick mission.

[mossquillgames]

Caesar III 02 - Capua

here I very definitely absolutely totallllly intentionally demonstrate a few pitfalls and consequences in this game...

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so part 1 is basically just me doing a tempting but silly thing: over-planning too early. I’ve played this map enough before that I have an idea where I want my neighborhoods to be and get over ambitious about that from the beginning--as per usual, haha.

This means that parts of my city catch fire because there’s no workers there yet, I don’t have enough food for too long...it’s just not a good idea. One wants to because it’s tidier that way but it’s smarter to do things a bit at a time--the way real cities usually grew up. Rarely is a whole city planned from the start, they usually begin as smaller settlements, even if the beginning is well planned.

anyway, despite how ambitious I am about planning this city, that doesn’t mean I actually have figured out the best way to handle things in Caesar. As a teen I used to do a long row of two deep houses and everything around that, I have changed to a more square approach with two rows of houses and gardens in the middle. This works well for some maps and situations and not for others, haha. Tends to give me more unemployment options than underemployment like back in my high school attempts.

all that said this is a gentle map, lots of farmland and resources and space, no major obstacles...and the thing that drew it out was the peace rating. That will be a theme with this game if I am doing well. That’s essentially just running out the clock because that rating cannot be rushed really. When the hold up is the other requirements that means I’m struggling more, as you will soon see...

after this map we get into the real game so to speak!

[mossquillgames]

Caesar Twitch Stream 10/8

available here for 14 days

The First (of No Doubt Many) Failures hahaha...(but it makes for far more interesting commentary?)

ok so this is a map I got stuck on enough as a teenager that in one of my attempts to play caesar since I did actually ask the internet of today for advice.I never really tried implementing it because I got busy or bored and wandered off but the trick with this map supposedly is essentially to live with the natives. As a teen I tried to stay as far away from them as possible and while I got much closer for this run through, it clearly wasn’t enough.

This map has a lot of farm land but it’s inconveniently on a higher elevation and the natives live near the only access. Building mission posts can pacify the natives, but only as long as the Roman emissary walker continues to pass buy their houses. This makes it challenging to make the most of the farm land because you can’t build the bulk of your city near the farm land but not on it. The farms need access to labor (houses), but houses need goods and services that take up more space. Additionally, with nearly on the farmland in a place with only one way yo access it, getting the food to the people gets challenging as each farm only has one delivery person. This limits the productivity of any give farm if the delivery person takes too long to go and come from the farm and granary--even if one ignores the threat of the natives. The natives will destroy any buildings built on their land if they aren’t regularly visited by the missionary.

The way I have set things up in this stream, the natives are not a problem. But building essentially in among their houses could be because if the missionary wanders around on the roads I build for my people, he might neglect to go by the native houses enough and they might start doing fun things like destroying aqueducts which has a tendency to b pretty dire. Any loss of water access devolves housing fast and leads to a massive population decrease which means there’s not enough labor to run anything. It can sometimes be recovered from, but it can also be fatal.

I tried to build on either side of them, but the way I did this didn’t work if indeed it can at all. I never could get the farming turn around time low enough to support a population that could achieve the map goals (mostly culture though prosperity and population too).

I figured it out pretty early on in this stream actually but you can see my attempts to fix the problem since no one likes failure especially not with an audience, however small and silent mine currently is.

I tried putting more housing wherever I could to get the population up, as well as upgrading my housing though I do know from experience that trying to upgrade your housing to get enough labor for anything is a fools errand: better housing means more people but they’re needed to maintain the better housing. In this case you can see me struggle to keep everyone in pottery and then furniture.

The food was still at the root of that problem because you can see repeatedly like in the picture above that my markets just don’t have enough food to keep all my little neighborhoods fully evolved all the time.

Though having little neighborhoods is an issue too because that’s more service workers per smaller population cluster so you are investing more labor in smaller numbers of fancy houses.

When I do this map again next week I will try to address these problems.

The sad thing is that I did about as well as I used to do as a teen overall, if somewhat faster, despite not building my city on the land further from the food. One reason for that is that while that is further way, the larger city you can build on the sort of ‘main area’ means you don’t run into the same issues quite as fast. Though you absolutely do run into them....

[mossquillgames]

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom Overview

this is the final of the three ancient city builders I played back in the day. Emperor came out on 2002 and I diffidently did get it until after 2003 so this one I played in college. It’s my favorite and the one I’ve played the most.

This one is the most visually different and also has a number of changes in gameplay. I also really enjoyed the cultural/history since ancient China wasn’t covered as well in school.

In terms of gameplay, a there are some major differences. The graphics are also a little different. The requirement for buildings to gain access to the labor pool by having walkers pass houses is removed and there’s even more control over resource storage. Another major difference is the city walls and two types of housing. In the previous games, there was ultimately pressure from ratings to have more homogeneous housing than really makes sense for how stratified society was. With Emperor even when your ‘poor’ housing is at it’s fanciest, your nobles have their own housing with it’s own levels. There are separate requirements for them and you aren’t required to supply everyone with the same goods and services.

It’s also exciting to move through the different metal technologies. I think that there’s more of this moving through the ages in Pharaoh that I just never got through, but the Roman empire is on a much smaller time scale than Egypt or China.

The city planning is further influenced by feng shui, one doesn’t have to understand the principles at all, merely accept that you want more of your buildings to be placed in spaces where they’re green than yellow. This doesn’t make much difference really as it’s easy to do this enough that the feng shui is acceptable, I have never ever had be a problem. But it does influence some decisions I make because getting a good grade in placing buildings is both reasonable to want and possible to achieve in this game.

I have actually won this game more than once!...only on very easy and maybe easy though so eventually I’ll bump up the difficulty and it may be more of an issue.

[mossquillgames]

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom 01

I skipped the ‘just build some houses and roads” tutorials for Caesar and Pharaoh but with Emperor it’s a little bit more complicated because you revisit the same map for three tutorials in a row. As such I’m just starting at the beginning and this first go at Bampo is....very not exciting. That said, Emperor is the most different of the three of these I’ll be playing so let’s get into that...

youtube here

One big difference in Emperor is for the market works. In Caesar and Pharaoh, the market is a single building that buys and supplies food and various goods. In Emperor it’s an area upon which shops for specific things can be placed. It’s also where entertainment is centered.

It has two entrances/exits but I only make use of one, placing it at the end of a row of houses like above. The reason for that is that I found using both was trickier to plan around correctly. I may try to revisit that some time now I have played more, but for now I’ll be sticking to these sort of corridors of housing.

Another big difference, arguably the biggest difference, is that in Emperor labor isn’t accessed by every building sending out a walker to see if there’s houses nearby. Housing is ultimately walled off though that comes up later on. This makes city design very different. And to me, more fun. In some ways it’s more realistic, and in others less so, but in terms of the game itself, it’s a feature I quite like. If you’re not familiar with Caesar and/or Pharaoh this will not make much sense nor matter in the slightest.

As usual, the first three things people want are water, food, and religion though they also need building maintenance. Above you can see a well from which water is carried along the road giving the houses clean water, an inspector’s tower that keeps buildings from catching fire or collapsing, and an ancestral shrine. Eventually there’s multiple religions to juggle but not for centuries yet.

Housing evolves and holds more people depending on what goods and services are available to it. Buildings that provide these, like the well, the shrine, or the shops in the market square, all have send out walkers that have to follow the road past the houses for them to have access.

here’s a food shop and granary with some meat in it. Once the food shop keeper goes to collect the meat, the houses have food. One interesting thing though is that if you click the market square it will tell you what food is being served, both in terms of the overall quality and even specific dishes. A neat little detail.

a quick little mission!