If you're tired of modern flops like Skylines 2 and would like to get into old school city builders, Zeus is the best for this. There's a lot of quality of life and streamlining in this one compared to Caesar and Pharaoh - you no longer have to place housing near workplaces; there's no longer a dozen needs to satisfy; you can now place neat roadblocks which limit where your walkers can go, allowing you to shape up districts nicely. Some may call it casual, but to me it's fun and ensures I can actually complete adventures before it gets too boring and tedious.

The main feature of Zeus is its mythological flavor, which the setting of Ancient Greece perfectly lends itself to. It takes the monument building found in Pharaoh and makes it 10 times more exciting by adding actual gods that walk around your city and confer powerful bonuses. There are also heroes and monsters, and all of them can be your enemy or ally. The world map/diplomacy has also been improved, allowing you to raid your neighbours for resources, conquer them for tribute, ask favors and, of course, trade with them. Some scenarios let you found colonies, which places a new city on the map after you build it up.

It is not without flaws, however. Most are due to its old age - you will need to find and install the widescreen resolution fix (1280x720 works best in my experience) and an animation fix for the widescreen fix... yeah. That aside, there are some old bugs that were never fixed as well as some flaws from the game design perspective. For example, invading monsters can be either crippling if they block a critical resource deposit, or trivial if they're placed somewhere you'd never think to build anyway. Same goes for gods - their attacks can be super annoying, their bonuses can get repetitive, like there's 3 of them who add more food to your granaries, while some are too worthless to consider. World map can be trivialized by repeatedly raiding your weak rival to death, solving the economy while improving the relationship with every other rival in the process.

If you don't like the existing scenarios, you can make your own - with city maps, events, winning conditions, the whole thing. However, I never had the patience for this, and it feels difficult to get it right. For example, setting up tribute cities pay is a great balancing act - too little and it doesn't change how you play at all, too much and it trivializes your economy. And have too many cities paying tribute - and you get spammed with messages at the beginning of each year.

Zeus would be the perfect game to remake, improving on game design and adding some modern features like blueprints, however the problem is I'm not at all confident in the ability of modern gamemakers to do that. Pharaoh New Era was somehow remade to be worse than the original, and Citadelium, while nominally inspired by some of Zeus' features, made me cringe when I saw my Roman trade advisor being a black woman named Fabia...

So even with all its flaws, to me Zeus continues to be the best city-builder humankind ever created, being just the right mix of complexity, immersiveness and fun.

beste spiel aus den 90 / 2000 Backflash