EMPEROR: Rise of the Middle Kingdom (demo version) from Impressions Games/Sierra Studios Review by Bev Truter Emperor is the latest release in the city-building series of games from Impressions Games and Sierra Studios. If you enjoyed playing Caesar 3, or Pharaoh and its add-on Cleopatra, then you'd most likely fall in love with Emperor - well, I did, anyway. A Pentium 3 is the minimum suggested in the specifications to run Emperor, and I can vouch that is correct, having played the demo on a P2 which ran Emperor at about 30% speed even though I had selected 100% in the Options menu. In Pharaoh and Caesar 3 100% speed proved far too fast - all my little citizens buzzed about as though they were in fast-forward mode - and I recall slowing life down to a more leisurely pace at 70%. However, Emperor on a P2 was just a tad too leisurely, so will wait until I've purchased a P4 or similar before acquiring the full version of Emperor. Emperor is set in China, and covers the period from about 2000 BC up to 1600 BC in the demo version, through the Xia dynasty and the beginning of the Shang dynasty. The demo version offers the first 6 tutorial missions of the first campaign, set in the Xia dynasty, and these missions take you step by step through food production, evolving housing for your citizens, and creating industries like ceramics, jade- carving, woodcutting and silk-making. The final 2 missions in the Xia dynasty deal with setting up elite housing and creating a band of soldiers to defend your prosperous city from attack by your sneaky neighbours in a nearby city. You can skip the 6 tutorial missions and move straight on to the first 3 'proper' missions of the following campaign in the Shang dynasty, but for sheer fun I strongly recommend playing all 6 tutorial missions as well. In the Shang missions you have to trade a variety of goods with at least 4 trading partners, and finish the 9th mission by building a monument - a blue-roofed wooden temple, in this case. There was also a multi-player game to try out on the demo, but this involved going online to play, and alas, I'm no longer online. Don't know if I'd want to go online for playing Emperor anyway - the single- player missions (just you v the computer) were so enjoyable. So, what's new and improved about Emperor? Well, for starters the people in Emperor have "25% improved animation!", according to the blurb in the read-me file accompanying Emperor. The impact of this improvement completely lost on me, naturally, struggling along with a P2. However, one of the improvements I really, really like in Emperor is the way employees are recruited. In both Caesar 3 and Pharaoh your housing blocks had to be situated fairly close to your industries, as job vacancies were filled by a roaming official walking around town and seeking people to fill the vacant positions. This meant that houses had to be built near to industries, which in turn meant these houses would have difficulty in evolving as your citizens are a picky lot, and dislike living close to any industries, be it mining, pottery, weaving or whatever. But in Emperor you can build industries, farms, hunting tents, mulberry fields, warehouses, whatever, positively miles away from your blocks of housing and jobs are automatically filled if your population is large enough. Another plus factor is that farms don't burn down or collapse, so no inspectors' towers are required near your farming areas. Also, the inspectors' towers take over the dual roles of engineers' posts and fire stations found in Pharaoh, so the whole infrastructure supporting your city is greatly simplified. Another simplification is the market place. In Pharaoh you had to build plenty of small bazaars to supply food, pottery, etc to your people, but for Emperor only one market place is necessary to support a population of 2000 easily. I assume that in the full version larger populations are necessary, but still, 2 or 3 market places are vastly preferable to 75 bazaars. You begin each mission in Emperor by building simple road loops containing just 10 or 12 huts to start with, situating your 'nasty' buildings like the food mill and market square way out of town, knowing that within a few months your houses will evolve up to spacious cottages housing 42 people per cottage. Or even elegant cottages holding 52 people, if you provide a more varied diet for them. Your citizens like gardens around their houses, and also prefer their city to be walled (there's a choice of 4 different styles) with a very handy gate that automatically pops into the wall whenever the wall crosses a road. This gate serves as a roadblock, keeping your wandering inspectors, herbalists and water carriers roaming inside your housing loops where they are needed, and preventing them from ambling off along roads that have no housing. A very handy feature of these gates is that they can be 'opened' to allow eg, market employees through, thus enabling you to situate a market place outside your city wall and still provide access for your peddlers (distributing food, hemp, ceramics and silk from the market) to the houses within your city. 'Elite' housing works differently as well. Instead of designating a building site, and then waiting while the initial crude hut evolves through umpteen stages into the desired abode, you can put in a marker for 'elite' houses if you have sufficient food, silk and ceramics to support an elite section of housing. Only 5 people can live in the first stage of elite housing (a modest house), but it rapidly evolves into a luxurious house holding 10 people. The beauty of this is that your elite houses can never devolve downwards further than the modest stage, so you never suffer the awful gnawing worry of seeing your beautiful houses spiralling rapidly downwards towards crude huts; or even worse, if you run things REALLY badly in Caesar 3, your people up and leave, with only the original site marker left to show where they once lived. On the religious side of things, you have to build ancestral shrines to keep your people happy, and make offerings to the Heroes every now and then, to keep your ancestral heroes on side. If a Hero is especially pleased with you, he or she will come into your town with a clanging of cymbals and assorted fanfare that nearly had me falling off the chair the first time I heard it, and roam around the city performing various tasks for you. For example, Nu Wah can bless clay pits and inspectors' towers on request, increasing production and diligence. On the military side of things, the War Hero will help your troops by gathering them to his banner and attacking the enemy alongside your soldiers. Call me a wimp, but I've never been too keen on the warfare element in these city-building games, and in Emperor there's a marvellous alternative to fighting - bribe your way out of trouble! Yes please, that suits me just fine. The bribing alternative probably isn't effective in later games in the full version of Emperor, but it's nice to know I can buy my way out of trouble in a few missions when I'm frantically busy setting up trade routes and doing what a ruler's got to do, and haven't got time to spare to set up smelters, weaponry and soldiers. The people and industries in Emperor are beautifully animated, the workers in the silkworm sheds and in the copper ore smelters being my favourites. Buildings are richly detailed, citizens let you know in no uncertain terms what they think of the city if you right-click on them, and with the simplified infrastructure it's much easier to manage your cities and take the time to look at how everything is working. So Emperor gets both thumbs firmly up from me, and roll on next year when I upgrade to something better than ye olde Pentium 2. - o -