POSEIDON (Expansion for Zeus)

                 Review by Bev Truter on PC

I've always been a great fan of the Sierra Games/Impressions
series of city-building or 'god' games; and Poseidon is no
exception.  Although billed as the expansion for Zeus, it is
different in quite a few ways - different gods, heroes,
sanctuaries; also the opportunity to build a range of
different-sized pyramids. Geographically speaking, where Zeus
covers Greece and the Greek islands, Poseidon covers the mythical
island continent of Atlantis, at the height of its powers, and you
interact with Phoenicians, Greeks, Oceanids and Mayans.

Basically, in all these city-building games, your aim is to
...ummm...well.. build cities. You begin each 'episode' of an
adventure with a blank map - just trees, fields, rocks, plateaus,
perhaps marble to quarry or a mineral or two to mine, and it's
entirely up to you where and what you choose to build. Starting
with a road loop, you add markers for houses, put in a few
essential buildings like wells (your people need water,
naturally), inspectors' towers (they patrol the streets and
prevent damage through fire or poor maintenance) and farms for
wheat (or fishing docks, or hunters' lodges, or urchin quays).
With a granary to store all the food produced and a market in the
agora to distribute food to your people, you are well on the way
to managing the beginnings of a thriving community. Zeus has an
excellent series of about 18 tutorial games, but being an
expansion, Poseidon has not.

People will start pouring in to build their homes on these marked
sites, and when you add a bibliotheke and provide fleece for them
to buy at the agora, they will rapidly upgrade their basic huts to
tenements. Add some more science venues like a laboratory and
observatory, plonk down a hospital to prevent plague breaking out,
and voila! Your citizens will improve their dwellings even
further. Food and most other goodies you produce can be sold to
other cities at piers (must be built on the sea's edge) or trading
posts, and you can similarly buy goods from the same piers and
trading posts. You can put in tax offices after building a palace
for added revenue, build sanctuaries to various gods to lure them
into your city, where they can be of great help in troubled times;
and even bring heroes (such as Bellerophon and Atalanta) into your
city by building a hero's hall fitting for each particular hero.

Warfare doesn't play as big a part in Poseidon as in Zeus either -
in at least one of the 9-episode adventures you can't attack or
attempt to conquer any enemy cities, as you are bound by a pact
only to use defence as a military strategy. Suits me! As in Zeus,
all attacks on your city can easily be deflected by the 'bribe'
option - when asked if you intend choosing Fight, Surrender or
Bribe, just choose the latter, cough up the cash, and the
impending attack fizzles out. Or if you're pushed for time and are
busy with more important matters, choose the 'auto- defend' option
(well before an attack is launched) and your military advisor will
handle things for you, in a somewhat ponderous fashion.  Oh yes,
and instead of horse-soldiers or cavalry, you now have chariots
(need timber to produce, and one horse per chariot) so your troops
can evolve from archers, through spearmen, up to charioteers.

Another 'newie' in Poseidon is the mysterious mineral orichalc. It
is mined like copper ore and converted into pink bars in a
refinery, where it can then be sold for a profit, used as a
powerful explosive in towers and frigates (Atlanteans apparently
prefer frigates to triremes), or converted into brilliant red
decorative carvings which are needed to adorn some of the
monuments you have to build. Also new in Poseidon are cattle
ranches which produce meat, and your hunters can hunt either deer
or wild boar - the deer aren't as dangerous as boar, but I
couldn't help experiencing a niggling feeling of guilt when
watching my hunters stalking them - the deer are so much *cuter*
than boar.  Another type of marble is also available for quarrying
- black marble, as well as the white variety.

Most of the other products you can use, consume or trade are the
same as for Zeus, but now you can also grow oranges to export or
feed your people. Both common housing and elite housing work the
same as in Zeus, but Atlanteans prefer green roofs (common
housing) and purple (!) roofs (elite housing) to the more sedate
Greek taste for rusty brown roofs on all dwellings.

Zeus had Culture in the form of theatres (for the staging of
comedies and tragedies), podiums (for roaming philosophers to
spread their knowledge to your awe-struck citizens) and gymnasiums
(healthy mind in a healthy body sort of idea). Poseidon has
replaced all this cultural activity with Science - in place of
theatres and podiums there are laboratories and observatories; and
bibliothekes (essential for your people to improve their houses)
replace the basic gymnasiums of Zeus. In Zeus you could build one
stadium per city, where competitors from far and wide came to pit
their skills against your finest athletes, actors and
philosophers. But in Poseidon you have the opportunity of building
a large museum, which delights your citizens, gives you higher
standing with friends and foes alike, and is essential to make
your elite section evolve into estates (the highest level of
housing).

In Poseidon there's also the opportunity to construct enormous
hippodromes for horse-racing; the bigger the better. These attract
crowds of spectators from your own city as well as abroad, and
earn you a tidy sum of drachmas per month. These hippodromes
sprawl over vast areas of land, with their size being measured in
'stades', i.e., 1 stade = 1 section of hippodrome. In one mission
you have to build a hippodrome 40 stades long to achieve one of
the game's goals - crikey, what a battle fitting it into my
available scenery, a whole heap of juggling and deleting of roads
and buildings had to be undertaken first of all.  But once
finished, and when the trainer working there has collected
sufficient horses to race (from a horse ranch, see under
'military'), the game is indeed afoot! The races are very
appealing to watch and I particularly loved the little post-race
dung-gatherer - a poor bloke carefully scraping the track clean
with a long-handled broom and pan....lovely touch, that.

Of all the Sierra city-building games Zeus was my favourite; but
after playing Poseidon for several weeks I think this one
currently tops my list of favourites. As with Zeus, Poseidon
consists of 6 Adventures, each adventure broken up into several
missions or episodes, like chapters of a book. Like Zeus it is
relatively easy to win each mission, and (unlike Pharaoh et al)
most missions only take 3 or 4 years to complete; maybe 9 - 11
years if you hit a really tricky episode. I recall one horror
mission in Pharaoh that had me tearing my hair out over 53
years....uuurrgghhh! That's about 2 weeks' worth of game-playing.
In Poseidon it's more like 3-4 hours per episode, which makes for
less stress and strain and far more fun!

There's also a lovely jokey thread running through Poseidon - just
read the introduction to each episode carefully. You get the
feeling these Atlanteans are a very superior bunch, quite baffled
by a faintly hostile reception that meets all their do-good
efforts to 'civilize' other cultures and countries. For example,
the Atlanteans consider the Egyptians a pretty Nile-dependent,
cultureless lot, and intend to show the Egyptians a thing or two
by impressing them with pyramids. Each episode ends on an
increasingly querulous note, as each culture in turn rejects the
Atlanteans' well-intentioned 'improvements'. Oh well, you can't
win 'em all.

Poseidon is a real pleasure to play, with its relaxed game-
playing style, user-friendly 'help' system (activated by clicking
on the question-mark displayed for each building) and the choice
to trade, barter, bribe or even steal your way out of financial
and military trouble. Buttering up your enemies and allies alike
with regular gifts is a great way to avoid negative reactions,
although you can't stall off an attack by a really determined
enemy through being Mr (or Mrs) Nice.  As can be expected from the
game's title, the god Poseidon plays an important role in many of
the episodes, and his sanctuary is splendid to behold. Just
remember to leave *lots* of spare space somewhere if you intend
building a sanctuary to him. Ditto for the hippodrome.  All in
all, Sierra's most addictive game yet.







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