Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile

The city builders from Impressions didn’t change much over the years. In games like Caesar and Pharaoh, you plopped down some buildings, tried to stay in the black, and watched your little people move in. Buildings had a zone of effect, or “walkers,” that showed their range of influence; the general idea was to get as many people into the middle and upper classes as quickly as possible. It would be easy to dismiss Tilted Mill as a bunch of former Impressions people doing the same old thing. In fact, Children of the Nile is a daring attempt to rethink the entire city-building genre.
How daring? Well, there’s no money for one thing. Some of the most important buildings are free, anyway. Your citizens don’t show up as employment figures; they have real jobs, and have to spend real time doing them. The more efficient they are at doing their work—plus shopping, worshipping, feasting and mourning—the better your city will run. And there is no way you can keep them all happy all the time.
Like Pharaoh, Children of the Nile is set in ancient Egypt and casts you as king of the land. Your primary concern is accumulating enough prestige to exert your influence over other lands and sites on the world map. This prestige also limits how many educated workers you can have at one time. Prestige goes up with exploration, conquest, and other tools of propaganda. A key part of your prestige is having a suitable resting place when you die. In other words, you need a tomb fit for a god.
Unlike other city builders, the clods are just as important as the gods. This empire is built of food and bricks, not gold and wine. Bread is the coin of the realm, so the more of it you produce, the better off your people will be. It can also be used to keep off-screen mines and trading relationships going. To produce more food, you need more nobles who can manage more farms. Noble estates and their supporting shops cost nothing to build. So, what’s to stop you from just building a bunch of them? Upward mobility. If a farmer sees an empty stall, he’ll quit the fields and become a merchant. If this happens too much, you run out of farmers and the luxury economy you have built will come crashing down. Expansion needs to be planned out so you don’t run out of potential planters.
Everything depends on your population getting where they need to go, and doing what they need to do, so unit pathfinding is a primary concern. For the most part, Tilted Mill succeeds in making your people focus on minimizing travel time, especially if laden with heavy construction materials. They aren’t stuck to roads, and will take shortcuts if necessary. Some subjects whine incessantly about lack of goods, even though an overstocked sandal maker is right across the street, and laborers will sometimes pause for years waiting for a barge to haul a limestone block across the river. In one memorable session, the laborers tried to pull the rock across the Nile; they could get in, but they couldn’t get out.
Path problems are not prevalent, though, so the loin-clothed idiots are not a major impediment to enjoyment. The pace of the game, on the other hand, can be off-putting. City builders are “ant farm” games and, to some extent, depend on your willingness to just sit back and watch things happen. There are few games where things happen as slowly as they do in Children of the Nile. If you expand too quickly, your farmers move into shops and you won’t have the food that your foreign policy needs. If you expand too slowly, you will be staring at a lot of little harvesters for a long time, and you won’t get to see all the cool stuff, like pyramids and cult temples.
You can take advantage of the downtime to watch your people at work. Entertainers dance with their monkeys, soldiers exercise on the training fields, and giant monuments are sculpted before your eyes. Never has a city seemed so alive, its citizens so lifelike. Children of the Nile also rewards planning. If you need that basalt, how can you get there without moving too far from the other resource centers? If you build a large pyramid, how much food will that cost in the long run? Are there enough unemployed villagers to expand now? If you have two educated citizens, do you make a priest and a scribe or get working on that giant tomb? With no “right” answers, the game might seem a little easy. It takes a lot to fail, but success can take a long time if you don’t have a plan.
You don’t need detailed information on the complaints of your citizens to make your city livable. Still, it would be nice to be able to see who is not getting food, or which god is most missed by your devout underlings. No individual complaint is a big deal, but if problems start stacking up, you can expect an angry mob outside the palace. An easier way to diagnose their problems would be most welcome.
Once you break yourself of the mindset that trade is about money and that taxes are for a treasury, you find this new way of playing much more satisfying. When your Pharaoh dies, has his organs ripped out, and is stuffed in a cedar box, he can rest easy knowing that he has presided over the kind of kingdom gamers have been waiting for.

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #171