Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile

Overall score:

I have long been fascinated by the cultures of the ancient world. It is partly their tantalising remoteness, the incredible span of time that separates me from them. But it is also the similarities and differences in culture. The very first urban culture on the planet left it’s set of laws down – it includes laws against thievery, murder, and so on, but apparently the same culture had no inhibitions about having sex in the street, and had no waste disposal method, leaving the streets filled with rubbish. Every time you find something similar, you find another thing bizarre and different. The ancient Greeks thought nothing of exercising nude. The Romans regarded blood sports as perfectly acceptable and, indeed, the very height of civilised behaviour. The ancient Egyptians had an obsession with the afterlife that, in the modern day, would be considered morbid in the extreme.

Evidently the guys at Impressions also found the ancient world fascinating, as they made the Caesar games, 3 of them, Pharaoh and Zeus. All of them were city building games – that is, you constructed a city from the ground up, much like Sim City. Now another company has sprung up, Tilted Mill, and it seems to contain many ex-Impressions staff. Children of the Nile is their first game, and a very impressive one it is. Based in Ancient Egypt, you are tasked to build various cities along the Nile Delta, taking care of your people, their homes and dealing with the flood of the Nile.

Whereas the old games were in isometric 2D viewpoint, CoTN is a fully spinny - rotatey 3D engine. You can zoom right in, look inside the porches of your people’s buildings, angle the screen to look across your entire city at once (though there is fog, and the game gets very choppy if you do). This does a lot for the feel of the game. It makes the city feel a lot more personal, makes it more accessible than the old ‘in the clouds’ view did. It does, however, come with a trade-off – the buildings textures are not as detailed as they were in Pharaoh. They look much more real, solid and have a more realistic colouring, but the murals just don’t look quite as impressive. It’s a trade-off I think paid off very well, but not all agree with me (shocking, I know). The camera is but the first of the games innovations, of which there is many.

As with all city- building games, CoTN is based upon a complex series of relationships, and knowing those relationships and building the requirements for them is the key to success. There are 3 resources in CoTN: Bricks, Food and Prestige. Bricks are used to build government buildings and homes (which, basically, means everything except shops, farmers, and nobles houses). Food is used to feed your people and to pay wages to government workers, as well as for trade with other cities and expeditions. And prestige is used to attract educated elite workers (scribes, priests, overseers and military commanders), as well as opening up expeditions and trade sites.

Acquiring these resources is deceptively simple. To get bricks, you simply build brick maker’s houses, and bricklayers to transport the bricks to their destination. To get food, just build noble townhouses, and farmers for them to command. Each noble family has an estate, being a number of farmers they command, and they take the majority of the food from those farms. You tax half of what they take from the farms, and they use the rest. Prestige is gained by building statues, monuments and, of course, tombs. Of course, nothing is quite as simple as it looks.

The brick makers need to be placed in such a way that they can get to the resources they need (clay, some types of plants). They also need to be able to visit healthcare facilities (otherwise they get ornery or die). They want to get their food, so a bakery needs to be close, and they want goods, so the common shops need to be close. The hospital needs to be run by a priest, who wants all the same things as the brick maker as well as luxury shops. Because the priest has no wife, he needs everything to be closer as he has to shop himself. And so it goes, with everyone needing stuff, and those that supply the stuff wanting other stuff.

The more nimble-eyed among the readership will have noted the mention of ‘wife’ in the above paragraph. If you didn’t, read it again you slacker. This is because CoTN has the amazing innovation of families. A full family – father, mother, 1 or more children, occupies each house. Each of these will do tasks, depending on their station and job. So a pottery will have the wife doing shopping and creating the pottery, as well as selling it, while her husband and children gather the raw materials for the pottery (clay, some plants, which they will have to travel to find). A family of entertainers will all entertain, so they often have trouble finding the time to go shopping, resulting in constant complaints. A scribe will have his wife do all the shopping, while his children go and get educated by a priest, as the scribe himself is out in the fields counting the crops (in order to ensure the nobles don’t lie over how much taxes they owe). Soldiers and priests have no families, and so need all their shops and essentials nearby as they need to do their shopping themselves in a small timeframe. All of this has a number of effects. Firstly, it instantly adds personality to the city. It’s one thing to have a row of shops with the same shopkeeper models. It’s quite another thing when you see the shopkeeper’s children heading out, while chatting, to get some clay. It makes the shops and marketplaces look far more real – wives are shopping for goods, rather than the shopkeeper walking around to all the homes. It really is a huge improvement to the genre, and is easily one of the best parts of the game. Impressively, the game even keeps track of age. Eventually fathers and mothers will grow old and die, to be replaced by one of their sons and another family’s daughter. Children will mature and move into new houses that are built by you, or will (if educated) become priests, scribes, or other roles within the community. Late in a game, you can click on a family and when you look at its family history, see all the jobs that family and its ancestors have held.

There is a day and night cycle to the game, which is combined with the seasons. Each ‘day’ is a season, either Flood (when the Nile rises up and deposits fertile silt), Planting (when your farmers go out and grow crops on the fertile silt) or Harvest (when the farmers gather the crops they planted). It is a very impressive sight to look over your farmer homes around 7am on Planting or Harvest and see hundreds of people heading out to the Nile, with the rising suns rays casting a dull red light over it all. With the day and night cycle, combined with the family aspect of the game, you really do feel like you are commanding a living, breathing community, where everyone has a job and everything fits together properly.

As a game of CoTN progresses, you’ll build the essentials of your city: brick production, farmers, nobles, priests, scribes, and so on. But sooner or later it’s time to think bigger. That’s when you go to the World Level. This is another screen, from where you can send trading expeditions, set up quarries to import raw materials, conduct military attacks (which is very much just click and wait for the victory or defeat message) and explore the lands outside Egypt. This never really manages to give you the feel of being part of a nation, sadly, but it does an acceptable job of letting you conduct inter-city trade. And, of course, once your city is up and running it is time to think of the most important part of your city; your tomb. As even royal family members age and die, your pharaoh and his family will need tombs. You can choose to either use Mastabas (small, squat brick built things, used mainly by the nobility and royal family members), or the actual pyramids themselves. You’ll want a fair few, maybe a few dozen, mastabas lying around eventually, one for every noble family and some for the princes, as well as a handful of pyramids. The mastabas don’t take very long to build, but even the smallest pyramids will take you a good long while to get built. The biggest will take literally hours – the Great Pyramid is so big its footprint can’t be viewed properly unless you zoom right out. A lot of it depends on where you are getting the stone from; if it is being quarried within your city itself, you’ll need labourers to quarry it, other labourers to drag it to the pyramid, stone carvers to shape the pyramid sides, and overseers to direct all this work. If it is being imported, you’ll need barge landings to land the stone, and labourers to drag it to the build site. Make no mistake, pyramids are serious business.

I think CoTN is a great game. It is slow, to be sure, and you’ll need almost infinite patience to build the biggest pyramids, but it’s definitely worth it. The people feel, for the first time, like actual people, with families, social climbing and proper needs. The games relationships are simple and yet deep. For example, one thing that catches many people out is graduates. This is the term used to describe people who are sufficiently educated to become Educated Elite but who are still classed as children. When you first build a city, you have a few graduates, but only a few. It is very easy to build hospitals, temples, assign priests to tend them, recruit scribes to go and count fields, and suddenly find you no longer have any graduates left to fill suddenly vital positions in your city. I’ve had portions of cities in near revolt because I had no graduates to become priests to serve to their needs. So you need to plan ahead, to set up a school and a priest to teach there early on, to ensure that you have a healthy pool of graduates to draw from. Another one is the danger of social climbing; when you build a shop, it will draw a shopkeeper from your farmer population, and a family will rise up the ranks to run the shop. This sounds fine, unless you don’t have any villagers (the lowest level of people) to fill the farmer positions vacated. You could conceivably starve your city by making it top heavy, leaving too few farmers left to support your population.

I think it is challenges like that, ones that seem simple but in practice take a lot of effort to spot and deal with, that make CoTN so good. Everything is simple enough that anyone can understand it, but it takes real effort to make a big city work properly with no hiccups.

If you have any interest in city building games, I urge you to look at CoTN. It is a major leap forward for the genre, and one that is taking it in very interesting and exciting directions. There is the usual demo to try out, and while the tutorials are, as usual, annoying as hell, the game itself is one that rewards careful thinking, patience and a willingness to simply watch and see what the real cause of problems are.

Entsuropi is British, and doesn’t do much of anything.

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Written by Charlie82 on February 20th, 2006