Pharaoh Thoughts

I had played Pharaoh almost a decade ago, but have recently taken it up again, and as is typical of posts on this blog, these are more recent thoughts:


The Good

1. Lots of different types of cities are possible (Which I appreciate a lot more after playing Children of the Nile). Industrial slums, industrial rich areas, mixed income, luxury estate based cities, etc. are possible to build. (I've tended to drift towards building up housing to high level non-estates and getting rich from trade, but have experimented with other types as well.)

2. After playing through the campaign, monument building is quite a fun part of it. Getting the city designed to the point where it can support monument building makes a nice goal, and monument building usually takes a good amount of time that allows a fully functioning city to run for some time, while also including an end point.

3. Housing blocks are generally fun to design.


The Bad

1. Aging is a somewhat annoying mechanic. In game, immigrants have a different age distribution that a settled population has, with the result that immigrants have a larger fraction of workers. This creates a problem where, as a city ages, the amount of workers can shrink significantly, with the result that a city can go from low unemployment, or approximately correct employment, to severe worker shortages. This can make city planning much more difficult over the longer term, since too high unemployment lowers mood, while worker shortages hurt a lot of services and industry. I do know how to work around this, but it is annoying.

2. Due to the fixed prices, where raw materials are often significantly cheaper than finished products, it can be hard to design varied city economies, compared to the other diversity cities can have. Usually city trade and industry boils down to either exporting a finished commodity that a city an produce from raw materials, inporting a raw material and exporting a product, or importing a raw material for a product to be consumed. No export of raw materials usually makes sense.