[u]What is Empire Architect?[/u]
Empire Architect is a city building game set in the Roman Empire.
In the rest of the review, I will attempt to not go into comparisons with other games, but in advance it should be stated that this game is very similar to Caesar III, but it has quite a different scope.
[u]What is it like?[/u]
Empire Architect offers two ways to play, either a campaign with maps with predefined goals or a sandbox game on a random map.
Whichever way you choose, you are trusted with building settlements in the Roman Empire. You do this by building houses for your people, providing them with entertainment, health and religion and making goods.
Goods are needed on one hand for keeping your citizens happy (the better their home, the more goods they require) on the other for trading - the latter will be the town's main source of income. There are several different types of goods like pottery, furniture or clothes. Each product requires some raw material and at least one step of processing (e.g. pottery from clay), but there are some that require two steps in two separate buildings to process (e.g. furniture is made in a furniture factory from lumber, which, in turn, is made at a lumber mill from wood, gathered at a lumber yard). This means the player needs to set up an infrastructure for making enough materials to make enough finished goods for the populace and trade (and, in the case of certain resources, for building buildings).
While goods are nice, the true soul of a city is its people, and this is where Empire Architect differs most from its inspiration. Instead of building cities of tens of thousands of nameless people, you build towns of a couple hundred, maybe a thousand inhabitants, but each of them are named and have their own routines. This means that each of them has a schedule of going to work, going home to rest and going to the market to pick up food and goods. Each citizen also has their own happiness level as well, made up of their satisfaction with their dwelling, their choice of food, choice of goods and access to water, religion, entertainment and health services and the desirability of their surroundings.
Citizens can also be educated in schools so that they can fulfill jobs that require an educated employee.
In an interesting minor twist of the usual formula, buildings have more than one type of employee, e.g. production buildings have workers that actually make the product and a cart pusher who is responsible for delivering their product to a storage building and, unless the building makes some raw material itself, getting raw materials for the production. While it doesn't make much difference gameplay-wise (aside from being able to set different salaries for the different roles), it is a nice touch.
Speaking of buildings, another interesting difference (and one with slightly more impact) from standard city builders is that building don't just appear by themselves, they need to be built by builders, sent out from architect's offices. The bigger the building, the longer it takes to build, and when the player builds many buildings at once (e.g. a new housing block or a new production centre), if there are not enough builders, it will be quite some time before everything is finished.
Helping the player in running the city is a host of informative reports and graphs, accessible from one central menu.
There is a military aspect in the game as well, but like in most games of this kind it is perfunctory at best, with legionnaires and bowmen available for training and a "click somewhere and hope your guys will prevail" style of combat, so it's obvious this part of the game was not where the developer's focus was.
There is no multiplayer, but on custom games, the player can choose to have one or more AI rivals on the same map.
[u]Pros and cons[/u]
++Overall, the game is nice and well designed, the different parts of citizen management, production, etc. fitting well together to make the game entertaining.
++Thanks to the campaign also serving a as a tutorial, the game is quite accessible. Different difficulty levels also mean that the player can choose how forgiving or challenging they want the game to be.
-That said, in some parts, there is a distinct lack of information, for example when the player is struck with a blessing or curse from one of the deities, it doesn't say what actually happened. Also, the tutorial doesn't always explain elements which do come up in the given mission (such as how to fulfill imperial orders).
+For a game where having stellar graphics was obviously not the focus during development, buildings are decorated quite nicely, they show a definite attention to detail.
-However, the graphics might be too minimalist even for some city building fans.
+The music is nice and Roman-like...
-...but gets repetitive fast.
++Having a smaller number of actual individual citizens means the player really feels like they're caring for actual people who depend on them for having a nice place to live.
-On the other hand, since here the player doesn't build cities for many thousands, it doesn't feel like we build an actual city, let alone a metropolis.
++Managing all the production chains and all the requirements of the populace makes a nice kind of challenge.
-Still, I feel like there's a bit of a missed opportunity here; for example, while citizens go to have a rest and buy goods, they don't actually visit entertainment buildings or temples like they do, for example, in the Tropico games.
